There is something revolutionary in Wang’s process of inviting ruin into Western ceremony, informed perhaps by a lifetime of engaging with the Western canon for the sake of learning English, and subsequently seeing herself rendered on the page through an Orientalist gaze. She showed me a brimming binder where she collects literary passages to work with and through in her art. Her latest show’s title, In My Experience the Spider Is the Smallest Creature Whose Gaze Can Be Felt, is lifted from a passage in Iris Murdoch’s 1954 novel Under the Net where the speaker Jake experiences the uncanny sensation of being watched and finally notices a set of masks “whose slanting eyes were turned mournfully in my direction,” commenting on their “Oriental mood.”

The sense of being watched is most keenly felt in the painting Beneath a Dreamy Chinese Moon, Where Love is Like a Haunting Tune (2022). Here horses are being paraded in a circle; the sense of pageantry and showmanship is cleverly undermined by the ice-blue flocking that creates a chilling effect and casts a ghostly mood. All we see are the horses and riders’ amorphous silhouettes as they melt into the valley landscape. While the show goes on, the aubergine sky looms and draws the eye to a second, truer splendor—nature’s. The patch of yellow and tiny green clouds lend their own lighting effects toward a different focal point. Rather than stage footlights, our eye is drawn to an aurora borealis that calls our gaze out beyond the constructed reality. Where a stage curtain might hang, we instead see a sprawling spider web. The flocking here blurs the delineation between web and spider body, of spectator and spectacle.

If the Modernists’ inheritance this past century has been to see nothing but “a heap of broken images,” Wang flips through the discard-pile of cultural memory, repurposing these fractured pictures to create a new narrative in painting: one that draws our eyes to the red velvet, the spectacle, all the while winking from stage left and asking the viewer—Who is watching whom?