ASTRA HUIMENG WANG

By Magnus Edensvard

Astra Huimeng Wang (b. 1990, Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, China) embodies an art practice that, according to her representing gallery’s profile, incorporates the creation of events and circumstances, as well as studies on the manufacturing of truth and identities. Astra has collaborated extensively with orchestras, poets, actors, and even strangers. With an MFA in studio art from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BE in biomedical engineering from Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Wang is currently preparing for her second solo show at Make Room Gallery in Los Angeles, set to open in January 2025. We jump into the middle of a much longer conversation that took place in Wang’s studio, located in the historic building of the former Federal Reserve Bank in DTLA.

MAGNUS EDENSVARD: During your undergraduate studies in Beijing, I believe you were on a more scientific academic trajectory?

ASTRA HUIMENG WANG: Yeah, my focus was in the field of implantable medical devices and spinal cord stimulators. But I was always trying to do something else in the meantime. I interned at a newspaper, and soon realized that that’s not really for me. I worked as a translator and interpreter and taught at some point as well. I traveled quite a bit when I was still in undergrad. Then I went on this long journey that took me to every continent except for North America.

ME: So these journeys were ways for you to seek out experiences that, to a large extent, you had only read about in books while growing up in Inner Mongolia?

AHW: Yes, and it’s how I learned the English language—largely through the lens of fiction. I was this coming-of-age avid reader who had a lot of trust in these novels, for better or worse. Proust wrote about how it was crucial for a simulacrum to find its way into the imagination first, before seeking out a counterpart in reality. If one of these authors had written about a specific place, I would find motivation to go and visit. So right after college, I visited Kars in Turkey almost entirely because of Pamuk’s Snow. There’s this hotel where they believed he stayed as he wrote the book. A translator later told Pamuk that everyone hated him in Kars, because the city seemed so harsh and hopeless in his book. [He] then allegedly confessed that he’d actually never been to the city. It seemed unlikely to me, but nevertheless intriguing—when reality confronts fiction in unexpected ways. It was also in that region where I met a German artist and writer who became a dear friend. We soon started traveling together, and we would talk about the lives we would go back to after our journey inevitably ended. One day she was like, Maybe you should apply for an MFA? I didn’t even know what that was at the time, or if I could apply with a bachelor’s in engineering from a university in China. I did a lot of googling and decided to apply. This was when my life path was altered, and I didn’t even know it at the time.

ME: You have your second solo show coming up in LA. Can you tell me a little more about what you are researching and what you will be showing?

AHW: Well, I’m very interested in the falling apart of a fantasy. It is an incredibly intriguing process. It causes disappointment. It causes wars and revolutions. So much of my research and my practice for the past couple of years has been rooted in this. If the very thing upon which you built your cultural identity falls apart, how do you rebuild it amongst the ruins, in the aftermath? How do you perceive reality in a new light? And how do you imagine a future separated from fiction? These are the questions I’ll ask and that my new work will attempt to explore.