In 1992, Wang Bing graduated in photography from the Luxum Arts University in Shenyang. For his photography work, he watched at length workers of the Tie Xi facility. In 1995, he studied at the Beijing Film Academy, then worked for some time on television before starting a career as an independent film director in 1998. West of the Tracks is Wang Bing's first documentary, filmed in 2002, for which he received numerous awards and grants.

In his films, Wang Bing depicts, with rare beauty and uncompromising gravity, people who are often excluded from the recent economic transformation in China.
Wang Bing gives his films a beautiful and tragic cinematic intensity in which he seeks to transform the temporality of his characters' lives into allegory. He puts forward a deep reflection on history, paradoxes and sufferings caused by the inexorable progress of modern China, pushing to the extreme a cinema of observation and reality.

In 2009, Galerie Chantal Crousel presented his first solo exhibition in Paris, with the projection of the two documentary films: Fengming and Man with No Name. Since then, Wang Bing has produced many documentaries such as Three Sisters (2012), TA'ANG (2016), Coal Money (2016), as well as Mrs Fang (2017), 15 Hours (2017), both exhibited during Documenta14 in Athens and Kassel in 2017 and Beauty lives in Freedom (2018).

Wang Bing was a visiting artist-professor at Fresnoy — contemporary arts national studio (France), between 2018 and 2019.

In 2017, he was awarded the Golden Leopard, highest award of the Concorso Internazionale of the Locarno Festival for the film Mrs Fang. That same year, he was also the recipient of the EYE Art & Film Prize in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), honouring his entire filmography.

Wang Bing notable solo exhibitions include Cercle Cité, Luxembourg (2024); LE BAL, Paris (2021); Kunsthalle Zürich (2018-2019); CCA Wattis Institute, San Francisco (2016); Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (2014). In 2018, the Museo Reina Sofía and Filmoteca Española, Madrid have shown his work for a major survey exhibition.

Group exhibitions include the Museum of Applied Arts (MAK), Vienna (2023) ; Centre de la photographie de Genève, Geneva (2022) ; Marta Herford gGmbH (2021); Textile Museum, Washington D.C. (2020); Bowdoin College Museum of Art (2019); Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen (2017); Brunswick Centre Culturel de Strombeek, Brussels (2017); Jeonju International Film Festival (2015); Shanghai Biennale (2014); Milano Filmmaker Film Festival (2010).

His works have joined the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; M+, Hong Kong; Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; EMST — National of Contemporary Art, Athens; CNAP, Paris.