Alice Wang: The Touching Touched

From October 29, 2023, to February 18, 2024, UCCA Dune presents Alice Wang: The Touching Touched, the most comprehensive institutional solo exhibition of Alice Wang to date. The exhibition is a survey of Wang’s sculptures, films, and photographs from 2013 to 2023, and includes a series of new sculptures commissioned by UCCA. Through three-dimensional, moving image, and photographic forms, the exhibition combines scientific, technological, and mythical perspectives to explore nature in the cosmic and subatomic scales. This exhibition is curated by UCCA curator Neil Zhang.

Wang investigates the uncanny dimensions of the natural world through her bodily senses, visiting faraway places such as the Arctic, the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical Telescope in Guizhou, the Mesoamerican pyramids, and other geological, technological, and archaeological sites. Through the mediums of sculpture, film, and photography, Wang reconfigures our understanding of reality using materials such as meteorites, atomic and subatomic elements, fossils, sensitive plants, moss, heat, water vapor, wind, and other metamorphic substances.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the juxtaposition of Wang’s earliest sculpture Whew (2013) with her latest UCCA commission Untitled (2023) in the main exhibition hall. While Untitled reveals the quantum realm to our human senses, Whew explores kineticism and change, both playing with elemental matter through the sculptural form. Whew, an onomatopoeia, is a large (180 cm^3) clear levitating minimalist cube filled with helium. Over time and given its atmospheric context, the sculpture will float around, shrink and expand, and eventually fall to the ground, changing its original shape and state.

Untitled, on the other hand, consists of twinned porcelain sculptures that are identical in shape yet opposite in texture—one is coated in high gloss black glaze and the other is in a white crackle glaze finish—generating different optical effects. The twinned sculptures are modeled after hydrogen electrons in quantum entanglement—they cease to be distinct objects but function as one system that simultaneously inhabits two states. In Wang’s own words, “The physical boundary of the work is not limited to its visible expression.”

In addition to an examination of Wang’s sculpture and photography practice, the exhibition also features three experimental films Wang has made since 2017. The infinite film series Pyramids and Parabolas explores our relationship to the natural world by examining how we communicate with the unknown universe through geometric structures. In Pyramids and Parabolas II, we see the artist building a radio telescope in Joshua Tree, then an aerial view of a mountain landscape in Guizhou, China, and then in Svalbard, just 500 miles south of the North Pole, where the embodied camera is on a snowmobile chasing the pink blue hue of the first sunrise of the year.

A catalogue for the exhibition will be published by Sming Sming Books, featuring the 20+ works on view at UCCA Dune, as well as plates of other sculptures, photographs, and notes and ephemera the artist has produced and collected over the last ten years. The catalogue will also include essays by UCCA curator Neil Zhang, and curator and writer Zach Korol Gold.

About the artist
Alice Wang (b. 1983 Xi’an, China) received a B.Sc. in Computer Science and International Relations from the University of Toronto, BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and MFA from New York University. She was a fellow at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, a Villa Aurora fellow in Berlin, and a grant recipient from the Canada Council for the Arts. Wang has presented solo exhibitions at Capsule Shanghai, Human Resources (Los Angeles), 18th Street Arts Center; participated in group exhibitions, screenings, and performances at the K11 Art Foundation (Hong Kong), Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition, Armory Center for the Arts, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Taikang Space, Para Site, and the Hammer Museum. She will participate in the 14th Shanghai Biennale at the Power Station of Art this fall, and present a solo exhibition at the Vincent Price Art Museum in the spring of 2024. Next winter, she will participate in the International Program residency at the ISCP in Brooklyn.

Support and sponsorship
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Exclusive environmental-friendly wall solutions support is provided by Dulux. UCCA also thanks the members of its Foundation Council, International Circle, and Young Associates, as well as Lead Partner Aranya, Lead Art Book Partner DIOR, Presenting Partners Bloomberg, Voyage Group, and Yinyi Biotech, and Supporting Partners Barco, Dulux, Genelec, and Stey.