DONG Wentong

Dong Wentong was born in October 1979 in Xingyang, Henan Province. He entered the Affiliated High School of Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts (XAFA) in 1996, was admitted directly to the Oil Painting Department of XAFA in 2000, and subsequently completed his master’s and doctoral studies in the same department. He is currently Associate Professor, Master’s Supervisor, and Deputy Director of the Oil Painting Department at XAFA, and lives and works in Xi’an.

In recent years, he has led several major projects, including the 2025 National Art Fund creation project Chinese Aerospace Workers, the 2015 National Art Fund Young Artist Project Collecting Memories of Homecoming, the 2016 Shaanxi Millennium Humanities Art Project Yu Youren, and the 2023 Xi’an Academy of Fine Arts Major Thematic Art Project Rural Chronicles. His works have been selected for national exhibitions over twenty times and are collected by institutions such as the National Art Museum of China and the National Art Fund Administration, as well as by private collectors.

The As If in a Dream series is an ongoing body of work by Professor Dong, developed around the themes of ruins and memory. Tracing old houses and remnants of landscapes as visual cues, the works direct a sustained gaze toward the lingering traces of past lives. The artist regards “hometown” as a spiritual space of continual return and reconstruction, seeking to give tangible form to elusive memories through layered washes of watercolor on paper.

The inherent transparency and fluidity of the watercolor medium allow the imagery to hover between reality and illusion, producing a viewing experience imbued with a subtle sense of theatricality. Through this process, personal experience is transformed into visual tableaux that are at once poetic and charged with a palpable sense of time.