When an artist purposefully pulls himself out of the rising avant-garde art movement of his contemporaries, you know you’re dealing with a unique voice. Wang Yin decided he would document the evolution of modern Chinese oil painting, and has done so, often to unsettling effect.

There is always something slightly awry—a bit too interesting—with Wang’s paintings. Upon closer inspection, Wang often surprises on the visceral and cerebral levels: nude models whose legs are freakishly elongated, dainty riverbanks (that are actually maps of East Asia) on which a comfort woman from World War II is prostrate.

In the 30 pieces on display at 798’s Iberia Center for Contemporary Art, Wang’s mischievousness repeatedly reveals itself in discreet and remarkable ways.

He is capable of—prefers, actually—subtlety and irony, as in the 36 portraits of Russians executed during Stalin’s regime. Accumulating on the bottom of these picture frames are peeled-off flakes of paint, representing time’s erasure of memory.

Wang is never too far removed from his context. His generation sees art as liberating, subversive and even iconoclastic, which is why in “Spring Grass Grows beside the Pond II,” Wang depicts the artist Xu Beihong, famous for his ink renderings of horses, painting a nude Russian model in a dale so Arcadian you half-expect the Lady of Shalott to float down the stream. In the foreground stands a smiling, fully dressed ethnic minority woman. As with all of Wang’s works, the answer is contained within—just look deeper.

Anthony Tao