Life's work returns to roots

Walking into the Guangdong Museum of Art in Guangzhou, Guangdong province, one immediately notices intense, vivid colors in the works of Venezuelan artist Oswaldo Vigas. The elongated, distorted figures on the canvases are human, yet not quite — they appear as life forms imagined from plants, stones and ancient totems. This is one of China's first large-scale exhibitions of Vigas, a towering figure in Latin American modern art.

Vigas' retrospective exhibition Reality Is What I Imagine showcases a selection of monumental works spanning the artist's seven-decade career, offering a comprehensive view into his life's work — an ongoing process of questioning and reimagining the world through the living heritage of his homeland.

The exhibition is jointly curated by Gabriela Rangel, a Venezuelan curator based in the United States, and Jiang Jun, a curator from China. Together, they have created a platform for cross-Pacific dialogue, contributing to the ongoing narrative of the contemporary Global South. The show will run through Nov 22.

Vigas was born in Valencia, Venezuela, in 1923, and studied medicine in his early years. At 26, he joined the artist collective Free Art Workshop in Caracas. In 1953, he went to Paris to study art.

During this period, he encountered the most avant-garde artistic language of European modernism. He connected with eminent modernist figures such as Pablo Picasso, Wifredo Lam, Victor Vasarely, Jesus Rafael Soto, and Alejandro Otero.

Vigas passed away in Caracas in 2014.

Throughout his life, he devoted himself to addressing a single question: when the standards of modern art are mainly derived from major cities in Western culture, such as Paris and New York, how can an artist from Latin America express modern art while remaining true to his own traditions?

In Jiang's view, the exhibition's Chinese curator, Chinese artists who went to Paris to study art in the 20th century face this very question. And when those Chinese artists returned home, they were challenged by the same topic: after learning from the West, how do you come to understand your own tradition anew?

"Vigas' creative path merged international language with the indigenous spirit of South America. He moved fluidly between the Western art system and local culture, drawing on multiple sources while remaining true to himself," says Jiang.

The artist did not merely occasionally borrow a few motifs from ancient art; instead, he made "returning to his homeland sources" a lifelong method.

Wang Shaoqiang, director of the Guangdong Museum of Art, says: "He neither blindly followed the universal narrative of European modernism, nor clung to a nostalgic, provincial imagination. Rather, he carved out a completely new creative form between the two."

The exhibition traces the artist's stylistic evolution in chronological order across four periods. From 1942 to 1952, while Vigas was in Caracas studying medicine, he experienced a stylistic awakening. He delved deeply into pre-Columbian myths and imagery, creating the iconic Brujas (witches) series that would run throughout his entire artistic life — figures that exist between human, beast, plant, and mineral forms, embodying a traditional worldview and ancestral wisdom.