It is probably fair to say that for many of us, art provides a kind of relief. We spend time in exhibitions pondering social and economic injustices—thinking we’ve done our part. Maybe this is even true for artists themselves, but certainly not for Christine Wang in this exhibition. Here, she presents a number of uniformly sized paintings that, in their combinations of image and text, can come across as pro-porn, anti-Trump, or shopping-positive statements—or as the exact opposites.

Wang unsettles our certainties and markers of identity. She agrees with some of the statements on a T-shirt, featured in Untitled (Merry Christmas) (all works 2017), that expressly declares its owner to be politically incorrect, as evident in an accompanying personal statement by the artist and in the painting itself, which is rendered in a seductive, almost Klein blue. Wang openly admits to loving rape porn in a painting bluntly titled Rape Porn, while observing the atrocities of violence against women and its societal foundations in the aforementioned statement. Her words also attack a very limited notion of freedom reduced to consumerist choice, but with Chocolate Cake, she presents an image seemingly celebrating this very idea. All the paintings reveal an irreconcilable conflict between libido and reason, desire and social conditioning, not only within the artist but probably in most of us, too.

Wang would surely agree with philosopher Richard Rorty that empathic political action is necessary, and at the same time she seems to insist on personal preferences that often clash with her, or our, so-called convictions. It is this conflict that her paintings are about, making them something like a contemporary version of René Magritte’s famous 1929 painting The Treachery of Images: These are not political paintings.

— Astrid Mania