Artist-in-Residence, Kala Art Institute, 2025

ARTIST STATEMENT

Melissa Wang works across painting, sculpture, and installation, building a visual language rooted in abstraction to trace the entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds. Her practice emerged alongside academic research in science fiction and professional experience within global technology corporations such as Google and Meta, where she observed how digital infrastructures mirror imperial systems of power. These encounters continue to inform her inquiry into autonomy, intelligence, and alchemy—terms she loosens from their contemporary frameworks to reveal older, more expansive meanings.

Guided by an ecofeminist sensibility, Wang draws from Lynn Margulis’s Gaia theory and Silvia Federici’s writings on communal land as autonomous space. She turns toward mycelial networks and deep-sea symbioses as models of reciprocity that unsettle anthropocentric hierarchies. Her sculptural installations often suggest living systems in flux—forms that appear to breathe, root, or drift—foregrounding interdependence as both structure and subject.

Dreams serve as both catalyst and compass. In a recurring vision, Wang stands with her muse on a floating island overlooking a vast valley, urged to create spiritual works. The dream echoes a formative conversation with her aunt, an abstract painter of more than six decades, who described abstraction as unfolding across three planes: beauty, spirit, and the universal. These strata continue to guide Wang’s compositions.

Recent paintings and sculptures invoke clouds as thresholds—sites of transformation and dwelling places for spirits. Fusing Chinese cosmology with Western symbolic vocabularies, Wang proposes a cosmology of relation, where humanity, Earth, and the stars participate in a shared continuum. Through abstraction, she gestures toward ancient philosophies as living guides for navigating present-day upheavals.

ARTIST BIO

Melissa Wang received her B.A. in Literature/Writing from the University of California, San Diego and her M.A. in English from the University of California, Davis. She worked in healthcare and academia before segueing to tech. In 2020, she began a professional art practice, exhibiting with Collar Works at Opalka Gallery in Albany, NY; Torrance Art Museum in Los Angeles, CA; the de Young Museum in San Francisco, CA; and Root Division (solo exhibition) in SF, CA. Her work can be found in private and public collections, including Brown University in Providence, RI and Meta in Menlo Park, CA. She has received an Individual Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council and residencies from Root Division in SF, CA and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, CA. Currently, she lives with her family in East Bay, CA and is pursuing her MFA (2025-27) at the California College of Arts.