Artist-in-Residence, Kala Art Institute, 2025

ARTIST STATEMENT

Melissa Wang works across painting, sculpture, and installation, using abstraction to trace human and more-than-human encounters. 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 form the basis for Wang’s painterly compositions.

Recent works also invoke clouds as sites of transformation and dwelling places for spirits. Guided by ecofeminism, Wang references natural phenomena that unsettle human-centric hierarchies, like mycelial networks or deep-sea symbioses. Consequently, she is curious about interdependence as process: a constant state of change.

Her practice emerged alongside academic research in science fiction and professional experience within global technology companies such as Google and Meta, where she observed powerful institutions mirroring imperialism. She sees herself as part of a burgeoning movement of Asian diasporic creatives practicing Chinese cosmology as an anti-imperial and anti-colonial practice. Fusing Chinese cosmology with Western symbolism, Wang gestures toward ancient philosophies as living guides for navigating two of her generation’s most pressing issues: climate change and technocracy.

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. For over a decade, she worked as a designer in healthcare, academia, and 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; and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, 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 is pursuing her MFA (2025-27) at the California College of Arts. She lives and works with her family in East Bay, CA.