Wang is known for his extreme use of
cinema verité. All of his films are documentaries features
direct cinema techniques (without any narrator's
voice-over or conventional structure), usually with lengthy running times, and following sensitive Chinese societal themes. His first documentary,
Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks (2002), a 9-hour epic about late 20th century industrial China, is considered his first major success, the film went on to win the Grand Prix at the
Marseille Festival of Documentary Film and was shown at the
Punto de Vista International Documentary Film Festival. Wang followed with
Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (2007), a 3-hour documentary about
Chinese Communist Revolution aftermath, the film had its world premiere at the
2007 Cannes Film Festival, His following documentaries
Three Sisters (2012), ''
'Til Madness Do Us Part (2013) and Bitter Money'' (2016) also had world premieres at the
Venice Film Festival. French philosopher
Georges Didi-Huberman dedicated a long epilogue to Wang Bing in his 2012 book,
Peuples exposés, peuples figurants. He reflects on the social fate of images thoroughly analyzing Wang's 2010
Man with No Name, writing that the director, as a humble portrait artist of a single rural worker, manages to represent the whole of China's people (as well as people from all over the World) "not through his past, nor his ideas, nor his name, nor his place in society, but through the simple gestures with which he works at his solitary life", as opposed to the common epic portraits of national identity based on military prowess, war heroes and manifest destinies. in 2013His 2017's
Mrs. Fang had its world premiere at the main competition of the
70th Locarno Film Festival where it won the
Golden Leopard. Wang's
Dead Souls (2018), an 8-hour epic about survivors of the
labor camps in the
Gobi Desert in
Gansu, had its world premiere out of competition of
2018 Cannes Film Festival, and was met with widespread critical acclaim. After a 5-year hiatus, Wang released the
Youth trilogy,
Spring,
Hard Times,
Homecoming (2023–2024). The documentaries had its world premiere at the main competition of the
2023 Cannes Film Festival,
77th Locarno Film Festival and
81st Venice International Film Festival, respectively. == Personal life ==