MELISSA WANG

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in March 2023.

GM: Your background is predominately in design, working for companies such as Meta and Google. What was your path to this career, and what caused you to transition into freelance design work?

MW: I became a designer because it paid the bills. I actually wanted to be an artist and writer, but couldn’t afford art school. I became a technical writer, which transitioned into a design role at a healthcare company. Eventually, I applied for and was accepted into a PhD program in Literature at UC Davis. However, I was more in love with the idea of being a professor than the realities of being one I got my Master’s and quit, but I had a lot of debt and no capital to start any creative endeavor. All the highest-paying jobs were in tech, so I applied to design roles in the Bay Area, landing at a start-up before switching to Google. In 2017, I joined Facebook (now Meta). I met a lot of smart, humble, and ambitious people, worked with diverse teams from all around the world, and watched tens of thousands of people engage with my content But the dark side of social media is well-documented, and I felt more and more disillusioned with the company. In 2019, my inner voice asked me if I was doing what I wanted to do and there was a resounding NO. Then it asked if I still wanted to be an artist and it said YES. At the end of the year, I quit to become a full-time artist During the pandemic, I began freelance design, mostly working on friend’s websites as everything shifted digitally. I’ve paused freelance work in order to integrate design more intentionally in my art projects, especially installations.

GM: What mediums do you work with in your art practice, and could you talk about your solo exhibition at Root Division, Without The Stars, There Would Be No Us?

MW: I paint with acrylics and sketch with watercolors, markers, and pastels. Recently, I’ve been exploring organic materials like moss, grass, and thistle I also work with inspired and found materials, like in my solo exhibition, Without The Stars, There Would Be No Us which was conceptualized in late 2020 (Continued)

I read a lot of science-fiction about space flight and discovered Lee Bul’s work, a South Korean artist whose installation Civitas Solis was inspired by a birds-eye view of cities from above Many speculative/sci-fi theorists predict that light-speed space travel is the crux to humanity’s evolution. When we encounter other civilizations or worlds, will we see our greatest hopes, or fears, mirrored? Will we become our ideal, better selves – or our worst nightmares? I played with literal and metaphorical concepts of light; for example, light is one of the universe’s only constants, a form that travels in a line unless disrupted With the human eye, what looks like a star in the sky may already be dead; only its light is still traveling towards us. Subconsciously, I gestured towards stars as our ancestors.

GM: In 2022, you curated your first exhibition, Grow Our Souls, for SOMArts Cultural Center. The exhibition highlighted twelve Asian and Asian American femme and/or queer artists What was your experience curating this exhibition, and what do you hope the audience took from it?

MW: I grew up working in my parent’s shop. Customers would walk into our store, break our merchandise, and claim they were “cheaply” made in China My husband worked in his parent’s nail salon So it wasn’t hard to imagine that the six Asian women killed in Atlanta in 2021 could’ve been our aunties. After the shooting, I asked myself these questions: why do we fetishize or dehumanize certain kinds of labor? How has our relationship to labor been transformed by the pandemic? Around the same time, I read an interview by Grace Lee Boggs. Her lifelong investment in labor rights led her to develop her own dialectical philosophy: our souls grow our works and our works grow our souls. Logistically, the show was difficult to execute as earlier that year, I was diagnosed with Berger’s, a rare chronic illness. I’m grateful to the many artists, volunteers, partners (Asian Pacific Islander Cultural Center, Asian American Women Artists Association, and SOMArts Cultural Center), and community members who showed up to support and work on the show, as it could not have happened without them. Lastly, I wanted to target younger viewers who were reconsidering their line of work in light of the pandemic. I chatted with visitors who said it inspired them to seek creative abundance.