Alice Wang
Biography

Alice Wang is a Chinese-born American artist based in New York. She received a B.Sc. in Computer Science and International Relations from the University of Toronto, a BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and an MFA from New York University. Wang makes sculptures and films that use form to shift perception. Her work looks at structures that exist beyond the scale of human experience—from cosmic background radiation to subatomic particles—and asks how these conditions are experienced rather than described. Instead of translating these ideas into language, she works through material and form, bringing them into the register of the body. Wang’s research takes her to sites such as the Arctic, Biosphere 2, and Mesoamerican pyramids, where scale and orientation begin to break down. These encounters inform how she works with materials already in states of transformation—fossils, meteorites, plants, and heat. Wang uses sculpture as a way to work through these conditions, where geometry and material behavior remain in tension. The work operates between what can be measured and what can only be sensed. The hexagon entered her work through a realization that it appears across vastly different scales, from planetary formations to molecular structures. It's a stable geometry, but its recurrence cannot be fully explained. Wang’s films begin with the body. The camera moves through space rather than describing it. First-person footage, found images, and memory interfere with each other. She’s interested in the point where perception breaks from understanding.