Wang Jianwei (born in Suining in 1958) is a Chinese visual artist known for new media, performance and installation work, based in Beijing. He grew up in a military family and spent his childhood in army camps during the Cultural Revolution. After finishing secondary school he worked in the countryside and took private painting lessons with a stage designer, and through banned books he came to know Russian literature and painting. After serving in the People's Liberation Army, during which he made no art, he began working at the Chengdu Painting Institute in 1983. That year he painted Dear Mother, a work that revived the academic realism of the Sichuan school and won a Gold Prize at the Sixth National Fine Arts Exhibition in 1984.
Between 1985 and 1987 he studied oil painting at the Zhejiang Academy of Fine Arts, where contact with Western art, the work of Robert Rauschenberg and his teacher Zheng Shengtian steered him towards installation. His Teahouse series, painted in the late 1980s and 1990, depicts elderly people in a local teahouse through a documentary method based on observation. From 1992 he became interested in Deng Julong's grey systems theory, and that year he made Document, his first elaborate conceptual installation. In 2000 he moved away from the documentary format, combining visual art and experimental theatre in Paravent.
His work brings together art, science and philosophy, and his shift from documentary recording to multimedia performance places him among the Chinese artists who explored new forms of the avant-garde.