Zhiqian Wang is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sculptures, paintings, videos, performances, and sound installations. Her current practice examines and expands our conception of material reality via ordinary language, narrative, and cinematic devices. Through physics, literature, and philosophy, she investigates concepts such as games, randomness, causality, knowledge, and rationality.
Despite having a strong interest in theory and abstraction, she believes pure abstraction can neither explain realms beyond rationality nor provide an answer for the purpose of being. Therefore, she works with repetitive actions and materials grounded in reality— objects associated with our ordinary life and the phenomena of natural occurrences, including human interactions. Meanwhile, she rejects the way of seeing conceptual art as an opposition to traditional material, technical, and aesthetic concerns. Instead, she considers it as a network of relationships involving ideas, emotions, materiality, beliefs, and knowledge.
Zhiqian recently had solo shows: “Twins, Twilight, and Apple Tree”, “Moonlight of the Twins”, “Red or White Roses” and “Earth and Jerry”, and a two-person show: "Capital Investigation." Her works have also been shown at The Jewish Museum, Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), Czong Institute for Contemporary Art Museum, Lenfest Center for the Arts, ACT at MIT, and Harvard Medical School among others. She was invited as a guest lecturer in the theoretical computer science department at Harvard University and has collaborated with scholars and researchers in different fields of science. She currently lives and works in New York City.