Alice Wang at UCCA Dune

Artist: Alice Wang

Exhibition title: The Touching Touched

Curated by: Neil Zhang

Venue: UCCA Dune, Beijing, China

Date: October 29, 2023 – February 18, 2024

Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist, UCCA Dune and Capsule Shanghai

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 cosmic and subatomic scales at the intersection of the real and the imaginary.

Beidaihe, CHINA — From October 29, 2023, to February 18, 2024, UCCA Dune presents “Alice Wang: The Touching Touched.” This is the most comprehensive institutional solo show of Alice Wang – presenting a survey of her sculptures, films, and photographs from 2013 to 2023, and a series of new sculptures commissioned by UCCA. 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. This exhibition is curated by UCCA curator Neil Zhang.

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 cm³) 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. The films are not just recordings of the artist’s experiences, but reflect on notions of the self, nature, and the cosmos in the vast expanse of spacetime.

With sculptures, films, and photographs, Alice Wang combines scientific, technological, and mythical perspectives to explore nature in cosmic and subatomic scales where the real and the imaginary meet. “Alice Wang: The Touching Touched” invites the audience to challenge our conventional perception of how matter exists in the universe and ponder the implications of our collective future.

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.

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.

About UCCA Dune

UCCA Dune is an art museum buried under a sand dune by the Bohai Sea in Beidaihe, 300 kilometers east of Beijing. Designed by OPEN Architecture, its galleries unfold over a series of cell-like spaces that evoke caves. Some are naturally lit from above, while others open out onto the beach. As a branch of UCCA, China’s leading independent institution of contemporary art, it presents rotating exhibitions in dialogue with its particular site and space. UCCA Dune is built and supported by UCCA strategic partner Aranya, and located within the Aranya Gold Coast Community.

Alice Wang, The Touching Touched, 2023-2024, exhibition view, UCCA Dune, Beijing

Alice Wang, Untitled (detail), 2021, prism, Crookes radiometer, handmade white gold tiles, air plants, fluorescent pink isometric grid, wet plate collodion photographs on mirror, glass microspheres, 121.9 × 243.8 × 121.9 cm. Courtesy Capsule Shanghai

Alice Wang, Untitled (detail), 2021, waveform fossils found in Eastern Europe from the Jurassic Period, stainless steel, 74 × 43 × 84 cm, 107 × 58 × 97 cm, 80 × 54 × 86 cm. Courtesy Capsule Shanghai

Alice Wang, Untitled, 2023, porcelain, dimensions ranging from 6.3 × 6.3 × 6.3 cm to 35.4 × 35.4 × 35.4 cm. Commissioned by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Courtesy the Artist

Alice Wang, Pyramids and Parabolas II (video still), 2021, HD video and 16 mm transferred to HD video, 18’45”. Courtesy Capsule Shanghai

Alice Wang, Untitled, 2015–2016, left to right: undisclosed object, digital print, undisclosed object, print on aluminum, undisclosed object, shelf: 12.7 × 91.4 × 20.3 cm; digital print: 12.7 × 20.3 cm; print on aluminum: 10.2 × 7.6 cm. Courtesy Capsule Shanghai

Alice Wang, Untitled (detail), 2017, mimosa pudica, dimensions variable. Commissioned by UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Courtesy Capsule Shanghai

Alice Wang, Pyramids and Parabolas I (video still), 2019, 16 mm scanned to HD video, 6’42”. Courtesy Capsule Shanghai