MELISSA WANG

GM: How do you think society should steer conservations about diversity and safety beyond the #StopAsianHate Movement?

MW: Currently, U.S. judiciary processes are insufficient. For example, we can collect data on hate-crimes, but how do we enact justice when it’s almost impossible to adjudicate anti-Asian hate crimes? We are locked in decades and centuries-old debates about police brutality, school shootings, and/or reproductive freedom. A conversation is not enough to address the urgency of freedom from harm – people have to concretize change. That can take the form of governance – people running for office, unionizing, etc. – or advocacy, through policy proposals, petitions, or lawsuits. I also believe in the value of protest as the expression of a collective voice. As an artist, I’m less interested in appealing to institutions, and more interested in inspiring people with works that imagine different world views.

GM: What could art institutions do to better engage with AAPI art and artists, especially in terms of exhibition organizing and programming thematics?

MW: When working with institutions, I’m always curious: Does your leadership and board reflect partner or community demographics? Do you care about safety, inclusivity and accessibility, which disproportionately impacts those who are most vulnerable (and most often forgotten)? Does your organization fetishize the artworks that it sells or the artists that are represented? Personally, I think we can all dream a little bigger than identity-themed exhibitions. In my press release for Grow Our Souls, I didn’t explicitly call out the artists’ racial and gender identities. As an artist, our works are not necessarily expressing experiences of race, gender or sexuality, but looking at broader themes. For example, Connie Zheng’s speculative seed gardens and food maps interrogate the intricate and complex web of labor that organize one of our basic means of nourishment, while leveraging gardens as literal and metaphorical sites of re-worlding.

GM: What are you currently working on in your practice?

MW: I’ve been working on a new series of paintings titled Dreams. Laura Harjo’s kin-space- time theory has been helpful, as well as Silvia Federici’s works on ecofeminism and magic. I also draw inspiration from ancient cosmologies, mythology, and contemporary sci-fi or fantasy It’s a continuation and expansion of my exploration of the cosmos, and the speculative landscapes that I create about entanglements between human and nonhuman forms of sentience I’m interested in cycles of decay and regeneration, and the dialectic between chaos and form, mystery and materiality, isolation and intimacy, and sacrifice and solace. As technological advancements like artificial intelligence advance our existential crises (including the separation of self from nature), what intimate, nourishing and healing relations to the world remain? Are stars ancestors or future sites of colonization? What can we learn from queer, regenerative mycelium? These questions inform my process, in which I build dense layers of media or materials, reflecting the evolving and palimpsestic nature of identities, nations, and mythologies. By expressing the nonlinearity of space and time, I aim to do what Silvia Federici calls “re-enchanting” our relationship to the cosmos. In our age of extraction and precocity, my works profess abundance and bliss.