Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: christinetienwang.com
Christine Tien Wang (b. 1985, Washington, D.C.) is a painter and educator based in San Francisco. She earned a BFA from The Cooper Union (2008), studied in the Mural Painting department at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing (2006), and completed an MFA in Painting at UCLA (2013), where she received the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship and the Edna and Yu-Shan Han Award. She is currently Associate Professor of Painting and Drawing at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Wang’s work has been recognized with a number of significant honors: in 2020, Night Gallery’s presentation of her Meme Paintings series at The Armory Show won the Pommery Prize; in 2019 she was a finalist for SFMoMA’s SECA Art Award; and in 2017 she was nominated for the Paulo Cunha e Silva Art Prize. Her paintings are held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Groeninghe Art Collection in Bruges, Belgium, and East West Bank. She completed residencies at Skowhegan, Chashama North, VCUQatar, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning.
Wang makes large-scale, photorealistic acrylic paintings of internet memes — painstakingly reproduced by hand in a process that is deliberately antithetical to the viral, disposable logic of online culture. By the time a canvas is finished, the meme it depicts has often already faded from relevance, and that gap — between the speed of the internet and the slow labor of painting — is central to the work. She heightens saturation and attends to individual pixels, treating the meme as a found object worthy of sustained formal attention. Recurring subjects include feminist internet humor, late-capitalist anxiety, cryptocurrency speculation, viral political imagery, and the emotional vocabulary of Reddit and social media.
Her practice engages directly with power, gender, and identity: the memes she selects often inhabit female-coded emotional registers — depression, burnout, longing — or place those registers in unexpected bodies and contexts. More recent series have extended to photorealistic paintings of viral news figures rendered with halos and iconographic weight, evoking both internet irony and religious painting traditions. Wang has also performed as a self-described “financial exhibitionist,” delivering performative lectures on art-world economics.
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