MLitt Fine Art Practice School of Fine Art
Siyuan Wang
Siyuan Wang is a visual artist, soon to complete her MLitt in Fine Art Practice at the Glasgow School of Art (GSA).
Her practice revolves around painting, often using traditional Chinese pigments and watercolour on silk, layered with pastel, ink, and mixed media. These materials allow her to create delicate, dreamlike imagery where beauty and unease coexist. Drawing from personal experiences and childhood memories, her work weaves fairy-tale motifs, Rococo aesthetics, dessert symbolism, and girlish figures into surreal and symbolic narratives.
Through this visual language, she explores the complexities of female identity, emotion, desire, and belonging. Her practice reflects on how patriarchal structures inscribe themselves onto the female body and psyche, while painting becomes a space to question, reclaim, and reimagine subjectivity.
Afternoon Tea
The Afternoon Tea series employs fairy-tale motifs, Rococo elements, and dessert imagery as its visual language to explore how femininity is produced and shaped under the discipline of patriarchy. In these paintings, the girls are rendered without bodies, only heads, placed within suggestive arrangements of afternoon tea confections. Their fragile, sorrowful expressions convey a state of weakness, pain, and ambiguity.
Rooted in childhood memories, personal experiences, and social conditioning, these works reveal the paradox of “sweetness”: it is at once an alluring fantasy and a suffocating restraint. Recurring symbols, such as rabbit ears, delicate desserts, flowing hair, ribbons, and bows, suggest how women are disciplined, consumed, and objectified under the gaze. Afternoon Tea constructs dreamlike yet unsettling images, reflecting the complex struggles of contemporary women in navigating identity, emotion, and subjectivity.
Sweet Trap
The Sweet Trap explores romanticised intimacy and the gendered discipline imposed on women. The girls’ faces appear silent and sorrowful, confined within glass jars. The candy jars symbolise invisible separation, while childhood motifs such as ribbons, sweets, bows, and rabbit ears evoke the softness of romanticised intimacy and gentle discipline. Even when the jars topple and an apparent exit emerges, the girls remain motionless, as if prolonged repression has drained the will to act. This hesitation in freedom reveals the unspoken struggles and exhaustion within the female experience.
Take a Bite
Inside the sliced cake lies the head of a baby with demonic horns. Its crimson eyes glimmer with a sharp light, and its razor-sharp teeth sink deep into the cream cake. Along the cut of the cake, neat rows of teeth emerge. The two devour each other, as if trapped in a bizarre competition or an endless vicious cycle. Two enormous cherries rest on top of the cake, while others roll loosely across the table, their disproportionate sizes heightening the surreal quality of the scene. A burnt-out candle releases thin wisps of smoke, silently signalling the end of the celebration. Soft frosting, made from plush fabric, spills over the edges of the canvas, merging indulgence with destruction and deepening the sense of uncontrollable aftermath. This work depicts intimacy as a grotesque feast, where sweetness veils exhaustion, and desire ultimately collapses into violence and silence.
