“The album leaves incorporate major elements of Chinese material culture — porcelain, bronze, ink, and paper — and remix them into a transformed state. Each material speaks in a new voice and is reborn.”
“At times, the imagined past we carry within us seems more real to the mind than the tangible reality in which our physical bodies reside.”
— Kelly Wang
Kelly Wang’s work explores abstraction alongside themes of Asian American identity, cultural hybridity, and the diasporic experience. Her visual and conceptual practice is rooted in personal narrative, material experimentation, and a deep engagement with traditional Chinese art materials such as paper, ink, and East Asian aesthetic philosophy.
In recent series such as Cloud Dragon, she sets aside the paintbrush in favor of techniques like spraying, pouring, or soaking ink and water into Xuan paper 宣紙 or Cloud Dragon paper 雲龍紙. In a surprising fusion of traditional and contemporary, she continues her process on wooden or aluminum panels, layering transparent resin mixed with mineral pigments and manipulating the flow with chemical solvents, kitchen utensils, or a blowtorch.
Blue in Green follows a similar process to the Cloud Dragon series, substituting mulberry restoration paper for Cloud Dragon paper.
In addition to Cloud Dragon, this exhibition also features works from Wang’s Reverse Monopainting series. The album leaves, with their porcelain-like surfaces, are created from fragments of paper coated in ink, mineral pigments, bronze, and powdered iron. These fragments are applied to a clay board, left to dry, and then removed, leaving behind only a residue of fiber, pigment, metal, and ink. For Wang, this residue serves as a metaphor for the diasporic experience: an attempt to reassemble the scattered threads of a cultural tradition rooted in a distant past.
Works from the Reverse Monopainting series include: Dream Journey to Xiao and Xiang, inspired by the style of Mi Youren 米友仁, a Northern Song dynasty artist; Lotus Land, born from a visit to a private garden in Santa Barbara where landscape and lotus leaves merge in the artist’s memory; and Speak, Memory 2, a series of four panels inspired by the memoirs of Vladimir Nabokov.
Also on view is the debut piece from her newest series, No City 1. Combining industrial stainless-steel fibers with mulberry restoration paper, this body of work explores hidden dimensions, the subconscious, and the elusive. Confronting feelings of dislocation and playing with contradiction, No City imagines a future in which steel — the backbone of modern cities, solid and impenetrable — becomes as diffuse as smoke, while delicate, almost translucent paper gains structural presence.
With The Owl and The Phoenix, a new installation created specifically for this exhibition, Wang brings a deconstructed fragment of her daily life in New York to Paris. She uses collected driftwood, industrial shelving, thread she has spun herself from mulberry paper, and a video projection to construct this hybrid memoryscape.