Artist Grace Li Wang knows how to light up a room
Grace Wang is drawn to color, painting from her studio in Cary, N.C. "It's a spiritual thing," she says.
Grace Li Wang’s exuberance for life and art bowls over everyone she meets.
It turns out that an encounter with Wang is the perfect preparation for approaching her paintings’ bold displays of color. Her pieces serve as windows to a vibrant world — inevitably enhancing the viewer’s perception of the everyday.
“Color is a language,” Wang explains. Originally from Taiwan, she points out that the written Mandarin language, too, is made up of pictures on a page. “With my energized art, I’m telling stories through colors, forms and lines.”
Her colors communicate something else, too, that can’t easily be put into words.
“Bold, dramatic colors really are uplifting,” says Wang, 58. “It’s a spiritual thing.” (View a Flickr gallery of some of her art.)
Wang knew when she was just five and still living in Taiwan that she was meant to create art. In 1964, her parents moved the family from Taipei to Greensboro, N.C., when she was in the fifth grade, so her father could teach at North Carolina A&T. Her art remained a constant through high school, where her yearbook’s superlative deemed her “Most Talented” and her portrait of the principal hung in the library.
Wang’s artful interest led her to the College of Design at NC State University where she finished a bachelor of environmental degree in 1974.
Immediately after graduation, she began an award-winning design career with prestigious brands such as Ericsson, Black & Decker, and Family Health International (FHI).
Wang left large companies to run her own marketing agency from 1991 to 1996. But her passion for painting remained strong and, in 1999, she opened her first art studio, in Durham, before moving it to North Raleigh in 2001 as part of Grace Li Wang Gallery. In 2006, she closed the gallery and moved her studio to Cary.
Over the past decade Wang has expanded the reach of her work internationally. Today she has agents in four Chinese metro areas, as well as in Zurich, Switzerland, and the United States.
Wang closed her gallery in 2004, but she has continued to produce and show her art around the Triangle. She was chosen as the official artist of Lazy Daze 2011, the nationally touted arts festival in Cary that routinely draws over 50,000 visitors each year. (The 35th Annual Lazy Daze takes place this year on Saturday, Aug. 27, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. in Downtown Cary.)
At the festival, T-shirts, posters, advertisements, and other memorabilia will feature her work. She plans to demonstrate her painting techniques at the festival. She’ll have a booth at Lazy Daze where she will display and sell prints and originals, including the original Lazy Daze painting.
Wang would like to see the Triangle become better known as a destination for purchasing art, similarly to Santa Fe, New Mexico. “There is SO much talent here,” attests Wang, who has watched the arts in the Triangle blossom over the 40 years she has lived here. At the same time, she has seen China’s art scene change dramatically, too.
Every year she visits for several weeks at a time, staying with her father who is now 90 and has resettled in Nanjing. Wang’s bold colors are especially well received by Chinese audiences, she says, while American homeowners tend to want her to tone down her paintings for their living areas.
But even a toned-down Wang painting still blasts light and color.
Wang has a website (graceliwang.com) where her work is available for purchase. She also recently published a book of her work called “Radiance in Nature.” (http://graceliwang.com/ordering.html)
