Alice Wang: Liminal Landscapes

Join us at e-flux Screening Room on Thursday, February 6 at 7pm for Liminal Landscapes, a screening of three films by Alice Wang.
This program presents three works that span over a decade of Wang’s practice: The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (2012), Oracle (2017), and Pyramids and Parabolas III (2024). Rooted in structuralist, essayistic, and documentary traditions, Wang conceives the act of filming as a mode of inquiry into the intersection between physical and psychological landscapes. Her site-specific filmmaking often focuses on remote and uncanny terrains—volcanic fields, Arctic glaciers, and self-contained ecosystems—inviting viewers to reflect on the alien within the familiar. Through structural and poetic narration, her films produce a sense of dislocation evoking the solitude and wonder of navigating the unknown.
Parallel to Wang’s film practice, the artist also makes sculptures and photographs that center the body as a sentient agent situated within a non-geocentric and quantum universe. Using metamorphic substances such as fossils, meteorites, electrons, plants, and heat, she engages the mediums of sculpture and photography as critical frameworks to examine metaphysical questions about the nature of reality. Employing a post-minimalist process for object-making, Wang’s sculptural works combine geometric abstraction with material, form, scale, color, and texture, striking a balance between mathematical thinking and sensual physicality. To short-circuit cognitive operations and reclaim the intelligence of the body, she takes a structuralist approach to photography and film by calling attention to the perceptual qualities of images.
Following the screening, Wang will be in conversation with artist Matthew Day Jackson and e-flux Film Curator Lukas Brasiskis to discuss how medium-specificity operates in her work as both a conceptual schema and in the exploration of materials and forms.
Films
Pyramids and Parabolas III (2024, 17 minutes)
A structuralist meditation on alienation and exploration, Pyramids and Parabolas III draws from six years of solo expeditions to landscapes that mirror extraterrestrial terrains. Filmed across Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, Iceland, and the Arctic, the work layers poetic narration with vivid imagery of deserts, ice fields, and volcanic formations. Wang uses the camera to investigate both the physical and psychological solitude of navigating these spaces, connecting the elemental patterns of the Earth to the vast, unknowable geometry of the universe. The work also ties these reflections to Wang’s personal history, recounting her grandfather’s life as a Chinese spy and linking themes of secrecy and survival to the metaphorical isolation of astronauts and explorers.
Oracle (2017, 10 minutes)
Filmed at Biosphere 2, a self-contained ecological experiment, Oracle explores humanity’s fragile coexistence with the lived environment in an era defined by the climate crisis. Collaboratively filmed with artist Ben Tong, the work transforms the synthetic space of Biosphere 2 into a site of philosophical reflection. By emphasizing invisible forces like UV rays, bacteria, and CO2, the artists dismantle the illusion of human control over nature. The film aligns its meditative tone with the slow, insidious progress of environmental degradation, asking viewers to reconsider the banal and everyday signs of ecological collapse and our emotional and aesthetic connection to the mediated world.
The Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness (2012, 35 minutes)
This thematically layered film examines Wang’s family history through three interconnected vignettes. The work revisits her grandfather’s covert role as a Chinese spy during WWII and the generational trauma his double life inflicted on his family during China’s Cultural Revolution. Filmed in locations such as the Cultural Revolution set at Zhenbeibao Western Film Studio and Qingdao, where her grandfather grew up, the film juxtaposes historical reenactments, personal memories, and abstract imagery. Through handheld shots and fragmented compositions, Wang interrogates how memory and history are shaped, focusing on the tension between what is remembered and what dissolves into the unconscious. The film’s spiraling structure mirrors Walter Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, evoking the ruins of progress while tracing the resilience of personal and collective histories.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Accessibility
– Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
– For elevator access, please RSVP to [email protected]. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
– e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the Screening Room and this bathroom.

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

e-flux Screening Room, 172 Classon Avenue, Brooklyn, United States