Emilia Wang’s Shadow, Playing (2024) is a meandering, travelogue meets quasi-sci-fi fever dream that reflects on diasporic movement through the lens of a recent family trip in Japan where the artist is primarily based, and China where her relatives live. In abstractions of light and shadow and ambient sounds, both human and electronic, a dreamy filminess overlays scenes of the everyday sites and encounters throughout her travels. From tourists reading an illuminated map to her sister sitting in hotel room to carefully choreographed footage of ponds and parks, the work is a meditation on ideas of place and placelessness, permanence and transience, that seems entirely of this world yet divorced from the prescriptive patterns that constrain how we navigate social structures and systems.

Emilia Wang (b. 1994) is an artist, musician, and writer based between Tokyo and New York. Recent solo exhibitions and projects include Heaven Potato, Romance, Pittsburgh; Love, A Maior, Viseu, Portugal (2022); and wandering against dominant time (online project), 47 Canal, New York (2021). She has been included group exhibitions at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art, Hiroshima, Japan (2024), Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway (2023), and Goethe Institut Tokyo, Japan (2022). She has performed internationally at institutions and venues, such as SculptureCenter, New York, NY, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, and Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway.