Tribeca, New York
Ryan Muchen Wang
Perhaps It Was Not Still
Isabel SullivanPerhaps It Was Not Still is a week-long exhibition, presenting the work of New York–based artist Ryan Muchen Wang. With a practice that spans text, sound, photography, video, and installation, the exhibition brings together four moving-image works and sculptural installations the artist has created over the past three years. Drawing from interviews, memories, and the artist's personal writing, Wang layers narratives that unsettle the presumed linearity and stability of memory. Together, these works explore the formal and conceptual possibilities of documentation and fabulation, and the ways human experience is continually reconstructed through different technologies of seeing. Ryan Muchen Wang is an artist and filmmaker based in New York City. Working across photography, video, installation, and text, he draws on personal and collective histories of travel and migration to examine memory and its metamorphosis across reality and fabulation. Across his practice, Wang explores modes of human adaptation and change, paying particular attention to the emotions that emerge in the unfolding of everyday life and within the spaces between transit and separation, homeland and hostland. Wang’s work has been exhibited and screened at the Jewish Museum (New York), the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn), 4C Gallery (Los Angeles), the Manhattan Film Festival, the Athens Animfest, the Shanghai International Short Week, and other international festivals in Sweden, Canada, Chile, and the United States. His work has also received recognition from the New York Cinematography Award, the Independent Shorts Awards, and the Art Film Spirit Awards. He received his MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia UniversitY.