Is it possible to understand one’s own consciousness, or that of others? New York-based artist and filmmaker Alice Wang probes this question through studies of form and material, excursions into fields including science, history and technology, and solo journeys undertaken to document remote natural vistas and archaeological sites.
Wang was born in Xi’an, China, and holds an MFA in studio art from New York University by way of California Institute of the Arts and the University of Toronto. Having exhibited at the 14th Shanghai Biennale, UCCA Dune Art Museum, the Vincent Price Art Museum, and elsewhere, she is currently presenting a solo exhibition at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) in Brooklyn titled Windstorm on Saturn, Basalt Columns, MDMA, Serotonin. The show pairs Space Analogs, the third instalment of Pyramids and Parabolas (2019–), a film series about the links between geometry and sentience, with a suite of untitled ceramic sculptures resembling segments of hexagonal basalt columns. The latest addition to the series, The Sky is Not Real: Pyramids and Parabolas IV (2026), is on view at the New Museum on the Bowery, where she is participating in the exhibition New Humans: Memories of the Future.
Alice Wang and I met at the New Museum on the Saturday of the exhibition’s opening. Snaking through the crowds, she guided me to some of her darlings in the show, including Constantin Brâncusi’s Le Nouveau-Né [I] (The Newborn [1]) (1920), an industrial-looking, egg-shaped mass of polished bronze created following the First World War, and three of Channa Horwitz’s Sonakinatography compositions made between 1980 and 2004—columns of minuscule squares painted on sheets of Mylar, some resembling IBM punch cards, others woven textiles. As we stood before the works, Wang spoke candidly and astutely about their forms, lines and colours, as well as her affection for 20th-century geometric abstraction, which has served as a lodestar for her research-based practice since the early 2010s.
Her 24-minute HD video, The Sky is Not Real, loops on a monitor on the museum’s fourth floor, its audio playing softly into a gallery packed with maquettes of retro-futuristic cities and flying, tentacled helium drones. In Wang’s work, shots of the night sky—filmed at the Jump-Up Dark Sky Sanctuary in Winton, Queensland, Australia, and 200km away in the town of Ilfracombe—bookended by sequences appropriated from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris, advance impassively while, in voiceover, Wang recites personal memories dredged up from psychoanalysis.
JW: What do you see when you rewatch this film?
AW: When I travelled to Australia, I was exploring the dark sky and the cosmos, but the more I look at the film now, I see the universe as a subconsciousness, and I’m a dispersed subject that moulds into it. There’s an inversion of exteriority and interiority: the film is opening up into my consciousness, but it’s also folding back something exterior. And because I have aphantasia [a condition that prevents individuals from forming mental images], the stars are just dots now. It’s like how Frank Stella said: “What you see is what you see.”
“I see the universe as a subconsciousness, and I’m a dispersed subject that moulds into it”
JW: I tend to feel disoriented after watching your films.
AW: I’m glad to hear your consciousness is affected. When I started making films, I was [getting my BFA] at CalArts. I worked with filmmaker James Benning and fell in love with [filmmaker] Michael Snow. I realised that film has this other branch that we don’t really talk about any more—structuralism—which is very much an experiential medium and less about storytelling or representation.
JW: Hexagons have appeared frequently in your recent practice. Why the interest in this shape?
AW: The hexagon sculptures began with me learning that there’s a windstorm at the North Pole of Saturn that is a hexagonal column so large it can fit up to four Earths. In 2020, I had this Eureka moment: not only is there a hexagonal column on Saturn, but also there are hexagonal columns forming naturally all over the Earth. When magma cools down, or when bees make honeycombs, circles are formed, and when the circles cool down, they become hexagons. We know that hexagons are stable structures, but even so, I’m unable to explain away the appearance of this shape on Saturn.
Space Analogs: Pyramids and Parabolas III [2024] took me six years to make. During that time, I was living in New York. I started raving and taking MDMA because I wanted to literally ingest and integrate the hexagonal form into my body to see its effects on a molecular level (I produced most of the writing for the last third of the film on MDMA). I also travelled to Iceland to touch the hexagonal basalt columns there—I wanted to experience the form through my body. Then when I made the ceramic sculptures, I realised my work is very much grounded in art history.
“I started raving and taking MDMA because I wanted to literally ingest and integrate the hexagonal form into my body to see its effects on a molecular level”
JW: Even though you began in a different field.
AW: I entered the art world through the side door. I never thought I would be an artist, but around 2003, when I was studying computer science and international relations [at the University of Toronto], the artist Allan Sekula came to give a talk. He talked about [his photo essay] Fish Story [1989–95]. I was writing about the Bush invasion of Iraq and going to model UN conferences that I thought were all rhetoric, bureaucracy and language—I didn’t feel involved in international relations at all. Seeing how Sekula travelled on the freight ships, met dock workers, attended strikes, brought coffee and donuts to the workers—all the while writing the companion text to Fish Story, weaving the romantics of [JMW] Turner together with the roots of globalisation, which is grounded in the slave trade—I was able to have an aesthetic experience.
“I entered the art world through the side door”
JW: In Pyramids and Parabolas II (2021), you lead the viewer through a short body scan meditation session. Space Analogs deals with neurotransmitters, hormones, MDMA and altered states of consciousness. I’m curious about the relationship between the body and consciousness in your films.
AW: Growing up in China, I had a neighbour who taught me how to meditate. When I moved to Canada with my parents and began having stomach aches, my dad taught me how to use qi [air] to send positive energy to the area. He was like, “Just follow your breath,” and it worked. Fast forward a bit: after graduating, I went to a 10-day silent meditation retreat called Vipassana. I talk about it in The Sky is Not Real. During group meditation sessions, the first thing they teach is how to be aware of your nose—both from inside the nostrils and from the outer skin. Once you become aware of your nose, you become aware of the air entering and leaving your nose. At first, I was so bored I fell asleep. Then on the fifth day, at the end of a session, the sound of the gong hit my eardrum, and I literally dissolved.
JW: Your experience as an immigrant and your family’s experience of exile are also subjects discussed in The Sky is Not Real. Do you consider yourself an artist whose work deals explicitly with trauma?
AW: I’ve been hesitant to deal with personal stories as a kind of material for art. This is also why I always had parallel practices of sculpture and film, which don’t necessarily overlap until recently. As a sculptor, I’m interested in geometric abstraction, where narrative doesn’t really fit. But film for me is an appropriate medium for that.
The first film I made, The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (2012), explored my mom’s experience of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. With that film, I was interested in the camera that somebody used to take a photo of her holding a basket of cotton [during the Cultural Revolution], a photo that was published in a nationwide newspaper and that made her famous for a minute, as a model Communist girl. The camera that was used to take the photo was a Seagull-brand replica of a German Rolleiflex, so I went, almost like Harun Farocki, to the Rolleiflex offices in Germany and to the Seagull factory in China.
Then, on this family vacation in the northwest of China, I encountered this Cultural Revolution museum owned by a man who was persecuted during the 20th century. I filmed the displays with a handheld camcorder, so the image is shaky. When I interviewed my mom over the phone—it was very difficult to get her to speak on camera—I thought that audio layered with the shaky footage of the Cultural Revolution displays made sense, formally. Because content-wise, what she was saying was so painful, I didn’t want the viewer to be looking at it comfortably.
JW: The voiceover in Space Analogs delves into what you know about your grandfather’s life as a Chinese spy in Hong Kong. What informed your decision to include that piece of family history in the film?
AW: Even after travelling to Iceland, taking MDMA, and having mind-altering experiences, I still felt there was something missing [in the film]. In The Birth of Tragedy (1872), Nietzsche talks about the relationship between the Apollonian—logic, rationality, concepts—and the Dionysian—feeling and bodily sensation. The part in the film where I talk about my grandfather came about because I started thinking about the emotional dimensions of his reality as a spy, and I started to inhabit his reality.
Before finding an intimate connection between my sculpture and film work, I always said that sculpture for me occupies a different temporality than filmmaking. When I’m sculpting, I have to plan all these things and find fabricators, but once everything is in place, I can make a few works every few months. Whereas Space Analogs took six years because it took me that long to find the funding to travel to these places to get the footage.
“Before finding an intimate connection between my sculpture and film work, I always said that sculpture for me occupies a different temporality than filmmaking”
JW: What kinds of challenges arise when you’re filming by yourself?
AW: When I travel, the most frustrating thing is feeling lost. But after cultivating subtle sensations in the body [through meditation, yoga and therapy], I’ve been able to be active even when I’m lost. The brain is lost, but I don’t trust the brain. The brain is always thinking, and it’s the ego. Alan Watts used to say that if you want to learn how to meditate, or to disidentify with the ego, watch a baby. To watch waves of emotion rising and falling in a preverbal human is like having a psychedelic experience. —[O]
