Frank WANG Yefeng in conversation with SARAHCROWN
This month, we delve into the studio practice of Frank Wang Yefeng, whose work impresses us with his ability to translate the impact of technological advancement on society into tangible artworks.
Frank Wang Yefeng in his studio.
1. Can you tell us about your artistic journey? What inspired you to start creating?
I studied sculpture for my BFA at the Fine Arts College of Shanghai University (2002-2007), where a large part of the training focused on traditional fine arts with an aesthetic rooted in Soviet social realism. At the same time, I began independently exploring digital tools such as Photoshop and Maya. It allowed me to break free from the doctrines of formal education and go wild with my imagination. However, my sculptural studies gave me a strong foundation in depth, volume, and spatial relationships, which helped me quickly adapt to virtual 3D programs.
This dual foundation in both physical and digital drew me to explore the interplay between tangible and virtual spaces. During my graduate studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2009-2011), I spent most of my time in the Art and Technology Studies Department as well as the Film, Video, Animation, and New Media Department. It paved the path for the nature of my interdisciplinary practice. Over the past decade, my work has merged 3D animation and video, sculpture, painting, drawing, and text. Time-based work and multi-media installation are now at the core of my practice.
My transnational experience is an important inspiration for my works. It also shaped me into a world traveler and “glomad.” Themes such as in-betweenness, nomadism, and groundlessness are essential to my worldbuilding. These interests initially arise from a persistent feeling of “not belonging anywhere” and the desire to make sense of a nomadic subjectivity. I’m interested in transforming these ambivalent conditions into productive and emancipatory spaces to form unique identities beyond the existing paradigms. It’s a re-imagination of belonging and an attempt to forge new connections with the world and our very existence. I take this nomadic way of thinking as a metaphor for intellectual freedom and boundless exploration.
In my work, you’ll often find whimsical animated characters and otherworldly landscapes inspired by different people, things, and places I encounter. At other times, they also emerge from imagination or research archives. As an “in-betweenner” who constantly navigates spaces where different ideologies, politics, identities, cultures, and histories collide or entangle, the notion of “groundlessness” is always at work. It suspends our known knowledge, and I find it both liberating and compelling.
Avatopology, Multi-channel 3D animations, sculptural objects, neon light, artist zine, Dimensions variable, installation view at NARS Foundation (NY), Curated by Natasha Chuk, 2024, Courtesy of the artist.
2. Your work frequently engages with digital media and virtual environments. What draws you to these mediums, and how do you see them reflecting contemporary human experiences, particularly in an increasingly digital world?
Ironically, as an artist who often works in digitally driven ways, my engagement with new technologies tends to be rather slow and cautious. I pay attention to emerging technological movements, such as NFTs or Artificial Intelligence, and have experimented with them to some extent, but I’ve never rushed to jump on the bandwagon. Instead, I prefer to maintain my own rhythm of creation.
This attitude probably stems from a fundamental skepticism, but not a rejection, of late technologies. The digital world evolves at an incredible pace of accelerationism—far beyond our capacity to fully reflect on and philosophize. This provokes both fascination and suspicion, and the intricate paradox always exists between the potential and problems of new innovations. This has been the dilemma.
Technology’s interface mediates nearly every aspect of our lives nowadays, shaping how we look, act, and relate. Yet I think the real debate is always about the landscape beyond the interface—in that vast, invisible digital “abyss.” It is precisely because of the deep immersion of the technological realities that we need to think critically about the logic, the intentions, the ideologies, the hierarchies, the power structures and rights, and the cultural phenomena embedded within. The unknowability in the “abyss” fuels our boundless imagination, but delving deep in without self-awareness risks losing oneself!
Whenever a powerful and often somewhat mystifying technology, such as Virtual Reality, Metaverse, and now Artificial Intelligence, begins to take over, we are quick to register them as the “magic answer” of our time or even the future. As for now, I still don’t see how these technologies provide solutions to most of the problems we are facing in the world—if not creating more issues. At this point, I’m far more intrigued by scrutinizing and playing with the technologies’ gaps—their failures.
Avatopology (detail), Multi-channel 3D animations, sculptural objects, neon light, artist zine, Dimensions variable, installation view at NARS Foundation (NY), Curated by Natasha Chuk, 2024, Courtesy of the artist.
Florapsaras (Lingering), Installation view, Encounters of ArtBasel Hong Kong 2025, Glass and stainless steel sculpture. Photo by Alessandro Wang
3. Do you have a specific creative process?
Because my practice spans multiple mediums, it is hard to depict a fixed workflow. My role in the studio is fluid, sometimes even ambiguous. I might approach sculpture as a painter, installation as a film director, or video work as a writer.
This fluidity also shapes my nonhierarchical relationship with materials—no medium is inherently superior to another. My studio functions as a milieu—a middle place of materials, ideas, and research—where things find their unique positions and forge new relations. It is a space that believes in trans-materiality and categorical liminality.
In my most recent project (Desert Garden, 2025), I was sponsored and collaborated with the Shanghai Museum of Glass and delved deeply into glass flame-working and pâte de verre techniques. The fragility and fluidity of glass and its natural connectivity to sand make it an essential material in this body of work. The form of the glass flame-working pieces came from my 3D animation and virtual sculptures, while the patterns on the pâte de verre came from my painting fragments. All the components were ultimately integrated into a time-based work and a large-scale multi-media installation. Synthesizing various media, I created an immersive work—a nomadic atmosphere that blends ambiguous landscapes and human/non-human discourses. It probes new relations to the world, and challenges our concepts of past, present, and future, as well as a sense of belonging.
Desert Garden, Installation view, Encounters of ArtBasel Hong Kong 2025, transparent LED screens, glass/stainless steel sculptures, paintings. Photo by Alessandro Wang
4. What emotions or thoughts do you hope your viewers take away from your work?
This question gets to the heart of why artists create. The significance of my work is not to persuade viewers with specific ideologies. Instead, I hope my work evokes a sincere emotional response. It’s something felt rather than explained.
Before creating Desert Garden, I traveled alone for ten days through remote, uninhabited regions in Northwest China (the so-called Gobi no man’s land) to gather footage and materials. That kind of solitude fosters a connection to something greater than the self. It opens up to an unimagined world beyond familiar boundaries. Meanwhile, one is completely disoriented and immersed in mixed affects such as terror and joy, boredom and curiosity, temporality and eternity, etc. Destination is a constant absence. In this “worldless space,” continuous walking becomes the ontological gesture. That raw experience is what I want to share.
I often hope that viewers might find themselves unexpectedly laughing or crying when they confront my work—not because I share a funny or tragic story, but because the work evokes something within them. A powerful artwork, I believe, should confront us with our limitations and push us to question what we think we know.
Desert Garden, Installation view, Encounters of ArtBasel Hong Kong 2025, transparent LED screens, glass/stainless steel sculptures, paintings. Photo by Alessandro Wang
5. The superficiality of consumerism plays a major role in your work. How do you balance critique and fascination with the spectacle of digital culture and consumerism in your art?
The 3D programs I frequently use are inherently tied to consumerist aesthetics and cultural hyper-industrialization. They are typically used to produce digital commodities, and evoke qualities such as computability, rationality, efficiency, and hyperreality. These material traits are hard to remove, so I’m constantly negotiating when working with them: how to avoid falling into cliché while pushing their potential to the edge? It’s like walking on the edge of a cliff.
To subvert these built-in logics, I often look for ways to disrupt the system from within. For instance, in my animation The Levitating Perils, I used algorithms to generate the movements of the digital character’s tentacles—intentionally relinquishing control to the machine. The unpredictability this comes with became a vital part of the process. I bring this same attitude to all materials I work with, whether video, sculpture, painting, or glass.
I feel art-making is, by its very nature, an incredibly inefficient process. That inefficiency is itself a negation to the speed and hyper-efficiency so worshipped by consumer culture.
Pantheon of Octopi, ArtBasel Hong Kong 2024, 4k 3D animation with sound, 4-channel video installation, acrylic print, light installations, paintings, sculpture, 2024, Photo by 21 STUDIO.
6. Looking forward, are there any emerging technologies or cultural shifts that excite you as an artist? How do you see your work evolving in response to the rapid changes in digital media and society?
In recent projects, I’ve started filming extensively with drones, and they’ve opened up many new possibilities. They allow me to see and document from perspectives and places my body alone couldn’t reach. They become a kind of externalized organ. However, I’ve also become increasingly aware of how quickly regulations have pressed down this technology. More and more areas are now designated as no-fly zones, and the bureaucratic hurdles for flight approval keep getting worse.
Again, the issue is not the specific technology per se but how it’s utilized. A drone can shoot beautiful films, or be equipped as a killing machine in Crimea…. Still, I try to remain positive about the continual emergence of new tools. Every new tool not only introduces new ways of seeing and making, but also prompts us to reevaluate our existing techniques. More importantly, it makes us examine the fundamental question of why do we create.
Desert Garden—Externalized Organ 06, Acrylic, colored-pencil, pastel on wood panel, 30 cm x 30 cm, 2025, Courtesy of the artist.
7. How has your practice evolved over the years? Are there things you do differently now compared to when you started?
One of the notable evolvements has been working more collaboratively to create artwork nowadays. In the past, I could often execute my projects single-handedly in the “atelier.” But as the scale and complexity of my work have grown increasingly ambitious, I’ve had to learn to better collaborate with professionals and experts across disciplines. Sometimes, I feel that working as an interdisciplinary artist is a little bit like being a director or producer. It is to mobilize a collaborative network involving much different knowledge that’s impossible for one to possess.
Something never changes, though: keep an open mind and continue creating with a sense of childlike curiosity.
In Frank WANG Yefeng’s New York studio, Photo by a015
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Frank WANG Yefeng (b. 1984, Shanghai) is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and digital nomad situated in-between New York City and Shanghai. Yefeng earned his MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. His projects have been featured in exhibitions internationally, including the BRIC Biennial (SH, CN), the OCAT Biennial (SZ, CN), the WRONG Biennale (USA), City Project of the 14th Shanghai Biennale (SH, CN), The Armory Show (NY, US), CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art (NY, USA), Times Square (NY, USA), Denver Theater District (CO, USA), Gasworks London (LDN, UK), Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art (Jeju, KR), Pylon Lab (DRS, DE), Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing (BJ, CN), Shanghai K11 Museum (SH, CN), Duolun Museum of Modern Art (SH, CN), etc. Yefeng has also been awarded solo exhibitions, residencies, and fellowships at K11 Art Foundation x ArtReview (WH, CN), Smack Mellon (NY, USA), International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) (NY, USA), New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation (NY, USA), Pratt Institute (NY, USA), Asia Art Archive in America (NY, USA), MacDowell (NH, USA), and Vermont Studio Center (VT, USA), among others.