Wang's life has been consumed with the study and practice of Chinese painting since he was 14 and living in Syuzhou, a traditional heaven for Chinese artists. His classical training in calligraphy and painting, at the side of master artist/collectors, was combined with study of the best Chinese art collections, both private and imperial. It was later said that before he was 30 years old, he had already seen more of the most prized Chinese paintings than anyone else in the world.
After Wang immigrated to the U.S. in 1949, he lived in New York, supporting his family and his growing art collection of Sung and Yuan dynasty paintings by working for a wallpaper company, art consulting, selling real estate, and teaching painting. At the same time, he began exploring Western art, taking classes at the Art Students League where was exposed to Abstract Expressionism. By the 1960s, Wang began o move from traditional Chinese landscape painting to far more abstract and colorful compositions, and as time sent on, his work became more and more innovative and self-expressive. Though imbued with the brushwork and sensibility of his classical art training. Wang's art had become thoroughly modern. By the end of his life he had turned to calligraphic expressions, and his were among the most stricking works featured in "China Without Borders," an exhibition of the most notable contemporary Chinese artists mounted in New York in 2001, when he was 94. It was as a collector that Wang gained most of his fame. In 1999, the Metropolitan presented "The artists as collector: Masterpieces of Chinese Painting from the C.C. Wang family collection", which showcased rare works Wang had collected by Yuan painters Zhao Mengfu, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng, as well as Wang's most treasured piece, "riverbank," a landscape painting attributed to the 10th century artist Dong Yuan, Hanging alongside these classical works were C.C. Wang's own creations - abstracts and landscapes - traditional Chinese Painting in an encounter with modernity.
Wang's former student and Chinese art dealer Arnold Chang, and art historianl Jerome Silbergeld, who wrote in his book, Mind Landscapes: the Paintings of C.C. Wang that Wang's values, life and art "represent a 'Grand Synthesis.'" (Reproduced partially with permission from Jane Leung Larson's article, Committee Bridges, Fall 2003).