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.
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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.
UCCA Dune
Beidaihe, China
