Towards the bright side,
Towards the bright side.
Even a single leaf
Will turn toward the direction of sunlight.
- Misuzu Kaneko, Towards the Bright Side
Alice Wang's artwork and Misuzu Kaneko's poetry may seem entirely unrelated at first glance. After all, Kaneko is known for her innocent and childlike charm, while Wang's work seems steeped in the "high concepts" of the cosmos and advanced physics. Yet their works share a common essence-an almost infinitely transparent iridescence, or the poetic miracles of the mundane.
In 2024, Alice Wang's was selected as a finalist for the 10th Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival Discovery Award (co-organized by Xiaohongshu Photography) with her latest solo exhibition. The exhibition title, The Earth is Plummeting Towards the Sun While Just Missing It, has been the artist's mantra. The phrase describes the reality of the gravitational pull of Sun on Earth-a force that drives our planet to orbit our star year after year. For the artist, the phrase also has an apocalyptic undertone and a surreal quality. It is in the flickering between the real and the imaginary where her work resides.
Alice Wang's inspiration takes root in science, as her father is a theoretical physicist. In 2013, she created the sculpture Whew (2013), a minimalist cube made of nylon film, filled with hydrogen and helium. Due to temperature fluctuations between day and night in the exhibition space, the sculpture would shrink and move freely in the space. For the artist, the work represents her favorite form-formlessness. Its destiny to roam freely, in fact, reveals the simplest yet most profound truth that we can learn from science: all things abide by their own laws, and it is through the laws that they become free.
Whew is, to date, the last formally titled sculpture by Alice Wang. Most of her subsequent works are untitled, a choice that also has to do with her "science-freedom principle." "This is why I decided to stop naming my sculptures. They make their own decisions, and they tell me what they want to be," Wang explains. This approach is not unlike the renowned architect Louis Kahn's assertion. When a student asked him about the rules of architectural design, Kahn answered, "You say to brick, 'What do you want, brick?" The point is that an object's inherent essence must be respected. Same applies to a person.
In 2014, Alice Wang made Untitled, a two-minute HD video with sound played on a loop. Here what she tries to explore is gravity.
I had a bunch of performers come, and then we were at this rehearsal space with a mirror. And I wanted to just kind of imagine what the world would look like if we were upside down, and also just how do you actually work with gravity so that it's visible? And so… even though the form itself is a video, for me, it's actually a sculpture, but the sculpture is on a television monitor. So I was thinking about it almost like a fishbowl. The monitor itself is a sculpture object, and what's contained within it is gravity.
Untitled (2014) expands on the scientific quality in Wang's practice, drawing inspiration from her childhood exposure to science.
When I was maybe eight years old, my father… was like, oh, I can make antigravity. I was like, what do you mean? How does that even work? And then he showed me this siphoning process where you can bring water up. I don't even remember this process. I was like, this is crazy. How do you bring something upwards without - and it was so lo-fi. It was literally some tubes and buckets of water. And so that's when I was starting to really kind of see how the world that we live in is really this magical, mysterious place filled with unknown things… What was interesting was that I think in the popular space, science is maybe like truth and fact. But when I was growing up, science was really a storytelling tool. It's really a mythology. You think about the Big Bang. It's a story.
Science as a medium for storytelling-more importantly, science as something manipulatable-imbues Alice Wang's work with a unique aura that is simultaneously rational and poetic. In college, Wang majored in computer science, a field seemingly dramatically different from art, yet her technical interest led her toward photography and outer space.
My love for photography started when I was studying computer science in college and joined the camera club. I learned to take photos with my SLR camera, and developed film and pictures in the dark room. Using found images from NASA's archives of photos taken by rovers and aircrafts in outer space and applying the wet plate collodion process on glass mirrors, the ghostly smears of celestial objects in this photographic series triggers the mind to leap into outer space, while bringing celestial objects closer to us.
In order to bring celestial objects further close to her, in 2017, Wang visited a human settlement in Svalbard archipelago within the Arctic Circle- "There are more polar bears than humans in this community"-where she captured the first sunrise of the year in the photograph Untitled (2018).
I got to the arctic a few days beforehand, and realized that the light from the sun spills over the horizon so during the daytime the arctic snowscape is cradled in a pink-blue hue for 4-5 hours whereas in normal latitudes we only experience it for 15-20 mins during dusk or dawn. I wanted to bottle this arctic light using the camera, to capture this moment in time. The choice of exhibiting this photograph as a vinyl print is to present the image as if it were a projection - the light emanates seamlessly from the wall, arresting the first sunrise of the year in eternity.
We are familiar with Susan Sontag's statement that "to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed," but a further insight comes from Alice Wang's beloved critical realist artist and writer, Allan Sekula: "The only 'objective' truth that photographs offer is the assertion that someone or something-in this case, an automated camera-was somewhere and took a picture. Everything else, everything beyond the imprinting of a trace, is up for grabs." (Allan Sekula, Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary). Therefore, for most people, the advancement of photographic technology means the transformation from Heidegger's "ready-to-hand" to "present-at-hand". The objectivity of the tool becomes increasingly concealed, the technology increasingly mundane, helping people unknowingly appropriate-and also lose-the world. However, Alice Wang's use of photography and photographs differs in this regard. She has no intention to appropriate eternity, and therefore comes closer to it. She borrows from the traditions of conceptual art and land art developed in the 1960s and 70s, particularly Robert Smithson's notion of "site/non-site." The "site" is the actual physical landscape, while the "non-site" could be the photograph or materials taken from the site, referencing it. This exhibition features Untitled (2015-2016), a work made with materials from the site. "I started to work with meteorites, and these shards of iron meteorites were found in the Egyptian desert at the Kamil Crater-but instead of pointing to the site of Egypt, these materials are non-sites pointing to outer space." With almost obsessive dedication, Alice Wang preserves and attempts to interpret the gap between subject and object. It is precisely this "alienation effect" that grants her work the ambiguity; it is simultaneously resolute and uninhibited, both alluding to and transcending the everyday.
This ambiguity is more poignantly reflected in the multi-episodic infinite film series Pyramids and Parabolas. Pyramids and parabolas are both means of human exploration of outer space. Pyramids are the ancient structures, and parabolas refer to the shape of modern radio telescopes. The two geometric shapes symbolize of the possibility for human to access parallel spaces, and mark the boundaries of human exploratory activities. When the artist personally revisits the relics of the said activities, she integrates her own life into the process, merging her own boundaries with the limits of human knowledge, thus bringing what is "beyond the limit" within reach.
Compared to the first two episodes released in 2019 and 2021, Pyramids and Parabolas III (2024), showcased in the exhibition, is the most personalized, almost like a travelogue. Beyond the physical reality depicted in the imagery, the film also reveals the artist's inner truth. This makes the work almost a structuralist film: through the physical reality exposed on 16mm film, the viewer goes beyond the actual landscapes of Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Iceland, and the Arctic, beyond the family history the artist narrates, and gets to glimpse at the ephemeral nature of life, and the infinite potential of the moment.
Alice Wang's works have been said to have a "deceptive simplicity," a phrase that aptly hints at the artistic lineage she follows.
I never really thought of myself as an artist ever until I really was exposed to minimalism, postminimalism, and also, going back to art history and thinking about abstraction in the early 20th century with Malevich and De Stijl. Abstraction became the language that I was drawn to. Having this mathematical mind, rationality and clarity of from just turned me on.
Abstraction, as a kind of rationality, ultimately leads to imagination-the imagination of form, which guides people back to themselves.
Why I always go back to sculpture is that I think, for me, the possibility of form is really the domain of my profession. It's visual art… For me, a very important process of experiencing art is that your body, your physiology, your mind is engaged with the thing… This is where postminimalism comes in. You are kind of dealing with repetition, but also these organic shapes that are maybe quite sensual and there's a sort of haptic quality to it. It's very much engaging with your body. The body is really the site of-this is sort of an overused phrase-knowledge production. In a sense, what I mean by that is, how do we know the world? How do we come to understand the world?
From this, we can recognize Alice Wang's significance in this day and age: we live in an era of knowledge overabundance, of "information stream" overflow. Yet true knowledge often can only be found in free-spirited innocence. At least for the artist, through her practice, she has found her own strength.
Where is the art is an interesting question because, yeah, you can say it's enclosed in the object, but sometimes that's not the case. Minimalism is all about the phenomenological experience of walking around the work itself. 'Where the art is' is unfolding in real time… What's really important for me is the space of imagination. And I think really what's at stake for me is our imagination, the sort of possibility of thinking and imagining. Despite whatever is going on in the world, we still have our minds, and we can still imagine other possibilities. I think that's such an important thing to have. Also, every time you make a work of art, you are proposing what art is. I think that's really exciting. You are using your imagination. You are saying, hey, I decided this is art. Just like Duchamp. I think that's why it's so empowering.
She is empowered with the courage to always venture toward the unknown, for it is the only path to knowledge. At the end of Pyramids and Parabolas III (2024), the artist dives deep into the ocean with music in the background: "It feels unfamiliar initially. Then the body finds its way. Then you are riding the waves. The body knows what to do. To get to the limit, and not fall off. Push the boundaries of the human experience." It delights us to envision that this is her artistic path, as we would be blissed to embrace it as our path of life.
Original text written by Kevin Wang. Translated by Capsule
