Melissa Wang

Melissa Wang is an artist based in California. After a long career in designing for major global companies, she noticed that tech, as a neoliberal industry, fuels environmental racism at an unprecedented scale. Thus in late 2019, she began full-time art-making as a means of pursuing social and ecological liberation.

She shares, “Growing up in San Pedro, California - a site of environmental racism - my lived experiences led me to explore the intersection of social and ecological relations. My works ruminate on life throughout the cosmos; in them, light, color and shape reflect matter: the observable parts of our universe. I employ scraping, finding the palimpsest a metaphor for nature’s regeneration. Spontaneous mark-marking creates dynamic transitions like the energy that moves matter through space and time. Through deeply layered paintings and immersive installations, I aim to explore the material and spiritual aspects of cosmic rebirth, as well as the ontology of human consciousness within our vast and ever-changing universe. This ethos aims to illuminate new ways of thinking about one of our most pressing global crises: climate change, the byproduct of human supremacy.”