In New York, you can tell very quickly if someone wants to know you. Coworkers, acquaintances, strangers on the train—she gauged their uninterest from their close-lipped smiles. It wasn’t that being a Chinese immigrant had made her so alien that Americans didn’t know how to act around her. No, it’s that Americans assumed they understood her before she said a word. At first, she smiled back, reflecting the same polite dimness back to them. But repeated enough times, the performance hardened into something like a second life. There were two Carrie Wangs: one, the nice Chinese girl she performed, like a stunt double, just to get these interactions over with; and then the vast, unknowable canyons of her inner life, the second Carrie Wang, whom others, even her closest friends, knew nothing about.

She moved to New York in 2015, after finishing undergrad in Chicago. For a time, she worked as a graphic designer at an interior architecture firm. She loved New York more than she loved New Yorkers. Nobody understood her, but didn’t everyone feel that way to a certain degree? She stopped correcting misunderstandings. She was content to let silence sit in conversations, like a cat in sunlight, which she knew put others on edge. But she liked being a silent observer. American corporate culture seemed comic and Kafkaesque. Everyone was so positive. In China, complaining about your job was the default mode of socializing. But in America, it wasn’t enough to do your job—you were expected to love it.

“Help me help you,” the HR person was always asking, as if this were therapy.

She felt like an outsider, at once conspicuous and ignored. She was drawn to pockets in the city where she could disappear—JFK Airport, or IKEA—because she knew she would find freedom there. There’s a Chinese proverb she liked: “If you want to hide for a little while, you hide in the forest. But if you want to hide longer and deeper, you hide in the city.”

Her favorite place to hide was Hudson Yards. Alone, she’d ride the escalator within that fortress of glass, amidst the lights and glowing logos. Only there did she feel at home, reminded of growing up in Shenzhen—a citywide network of shopping malls and twenty-four hour air conditioning. Shenzhen was not a “real city” to her. It had been created overnight in 1980, when the government decided to make it a Special Economic Zone, converting its agriculture to manufacturing. The economic boom drew people in from across the country, like her parents—a professor and arbitrator—who moved there when Wang was six. Shenzhen was a fake city, but having constructed a new self in New York, she identified with that on a fundamental level.

This was a surprise that came with age. When she was a teenager, attending boarding school, she was impatient with phoniness, politeness, and fakery of any kind. In her journal, she wrote, “I despise all adults, they are all hypocrites.” She detested small talk, and wanted to cut straight to the heart of the matter. In New York, she felt differently. What if there was no heart of the matter? What if there was no authentic self at the core of being, but an unknowable void? Peer into the heart of man, and you’ll find a structure akin to Hudson Yards, all the way down. Fiberglass, a food court, and Le Labo Santal.

But of course, this could not be directly acknowledged. She kept it to herself.

*

Wang, 35, is a multidisciplinary artist who often creates computer programs exploring corporate culture, artificial intelligence, and the immigrant experience. She was introduced to interactive design during her MPS program at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program. She found she could move her body in space, and trigger motions on a screen—a line drawing, or a flower animation. She was drawn to this kind of artmaking, because it was a level above the mere expressions that preoccupy most young artists. A game or an app creates a situation that locks the artist and viewer in mutual feedback. Participation is more active than mere empathy, which is passive. “I’m using my work to reach out to the world around me, attempting to connect, and to see and be seen in a way that cannot be simply conveyed through language,” she says.

One of her earliest interactive programs, An Interview With ALEX (2020), is a game run on your internet browser that interviews the user for a “professional minigamer position” at the fictitious “Open Mind Corporation.” It was inspired by the corporate culture she witnessed as a graphic designer in America. The last part of the game is an interview with a series of invasive personal questions. The participant is asked, “When did you last cry in front of a person?” Then, obscure algorithms analyze facial and vocal expressions, rating affect along a scale. (No data is collected.) The game is rigged; its standards are almost impossible to pass.

Wang developed the program during a fellowship run by the Mozilla Foundation, the parent organization behind the Firefox browser. During the fellowship, she had regular video-conferences with other fellows in the program, wherein they developed their pieces from conception to production. She spent a year on the project, coding the back-end and designing the interface. When she developed a prototype, she put out calls on Discord and academic listservs for participants in user testing, a standard practice in tech companies, but not necessarily in the art world. She started with a prototype, tested it, incorporated changes, and then iterated. “It was like releasing a product,” she said.

A Thousand Lines of Nonsense (Markov chain generated text based on chat histories collected from Whose AI? workshops), 2024. Installation with digital print and folding chair, 11 inches by 18 feet.

Courtesy of the artist

Wang’s education and experience as a graphic designer influences her art practice. It’s a discipline more comfortable with words like “problem” and “resolution” or “success” and “failure.” “In school, we called it ‘visual communication,’” she said. Her practice enlists a level of attention to the viewer’s experience. She cares what they think and feel. She’s never assumed people to be automatically interested in her, so she’s maintained the impulse to entertain. “I don’t believe people are innately interested in other people,” she said. She admired the videos of the artist Hito Steyerl, which were smart, but also funny. Wang wanted to be funny.

Wang has largely evaded commercial venues for her work. She has mostly shown in institutions, such as the New York Transit Museum, the Spokane Public Library, and the Art Museum of Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts. She sees schools—not galleries—as the proper context for her work. She teaches at NYU as an adjunct professor, and leads workshops with different cultural organizations in New York. Collaborating with students has taken a central role in recent pieces exploring text-based AI. When I visited her in her studio at Pioneer Works, I saw Samsung tablets showing video responses from participants in her interactive project called Whose AI? (2024). The work takes the format of a workshop, where participants from different neighborhoods, aged 14 to 20, participate in prompts that involve text-based AI like ChatGPT. In one workshop, they learn how to code their own “rule-based chatbot” using an open source JavaScript template, which Wang learned how to use during grad school.

One workshop asks participants to “write a conversation between a human and an AI where you talk through your feelings, thoughts, curiosities, wonders, hopes, and critiques of AI technology.” These scripts were then fed into a JavaScript chatbot, which staged the conversations. One student’s response compared AI to Frankenstein, defined as “a man made creature that represents desire to be superior and the danger of knowledge.” Another student, slightly misunderstanding the prompt, wrote about an AI in close third person: “The AI looked through the camera at the soul of the human. Did it even have a soul?”

Wang intends her workshops to “empower” or “center” the human within a scenario of accelerating technological development, which can feel dystopian. Already, people behave as if algorithms know them better than they know themselves. AI often asks users to give up privacy in exchange for convenience. The more AI tries to mimic humans, the more humans will try to mimic machines, disposing of the aspects of human personality not optimized for maximum efficiency. “In that process, we’re alienating ourselves,” she says.

Wang often felt like she was mimicking machine intelligence when she first moved to the U.S., recognizing patterns in American culture and mimicking them in social situations. “I was finding ways to generate content in a way—to learn, to observe, and build a new self,” she said. This often happened on the level of language, which evolved her interest in text-based AI. Wang thinks in Mandarin, and has to translate her thoughts into English when speaking to most Americans. Like AI translators—such as Google Translate, for instance—she's frequently mistranslating herself, not saying exactly what she means. Often, she feels as if words are physically jammed in her throat, lodged in the space in her neck right below her jaw, unable to get out.

If the psyche is structured like a language, as Jacques Lacan argued, a unique subjectivity—formed in the slippage between languages—becomes entirely private, and utterly occluded from others. In video documentation of her performance at the Ace Hotel, Lost and Found (2022), Wang begins by performing an improvised monologue in Chinese about language, immigration, and the self. Behind a desk decorated in plants, Wang sits holding a microphone, smiling. “I am here to share my inner thoughts with you,” Wang says, which is ironic, since a majority of the audience could not understand Chinese. Each line is live-translated into English by an AI, and then recited aloud by an automated voice using text-to-speech technology. Wang then prints the English translation, and reads it aloud as an AI translates it back into Chinese. Then she repeats the same in reverse: printing the Chinese transcript, and reading it aloud to an AI that translates it back into English.

Lost and Found, 2022. Live performance and an experiment with flawed technologies, 30 minutes.

Photo: Zack Shorrosh.

The results are riddled with mistakes. Some lines approach a kind of accidental, apophatic poetry: “No all but not.” Other lines lose their meaning entirely. “It’s very likely you are no longer the original you. But you don’t have a new you,” says the first round of English translation. “In this very inner feeling, I have a very strange feeling of freedom.”

Once that line is translated into Chinese, and then translated back into English, it reads, “I have a very strange sense of freedom in our senses.”

When words lose their meaning, they become noise, like the busy streets and shopping malls of the city Wang liked to disappear in. She finds that the chaos of mistranslation can be a cover to hide behind. It’s a similar logic to Hito Steyerl’s essay, “The Spam of the Earth: Withdrawal from Representation,” which explores how people don’t use stock images to represent reality, but rather as a decoy for real human lives to hide behind, unrepresented and free. “I felt very safe hiding behind this system that I set up,” Wang said of her performance. In accepting inaccuracy as a guarantee rather than an aberration, she’s found a way to articulate her inner self—that deep, unknowable interior—by what it is not. It’s a kind of negative subjectivity, free to change its mind, disidentify at a second’s notice, and vanish.

*

During boarding school in Shenzhen, Wang wore a uniform. Early each morning, a bell rang, and all of the girls in the dormitory would wake up and report to class. On Saturday, a bus would take her back home to her parents. Then on Sunday, the bus would bring her back to boarding school. She hated this life, stifled by rules and routines. In class, she watched her teachers with contempt, feeling pity for their small lives spent entirely in Shenzhen. “I always had this thought that I’m going to leave this place,” she said. She watched Wong Kar Wai movies and dreamed of different countries. She fantasized about New York.

Wang has lived in New York for nine years. She still feels like an outsider. Over the years, she’s sent several applications for visas—a student visa, a work visa, an artist visa, and a green card. This constant process of applying, again and again, for permission to stay in the U.S. has had the effect of accentuating all of her feelings of not belonging in this country.

Wang’s Hey Alien (2023) is an interactive program, run on an internet browser, that simulates a science-fiction scenario where immigrants, or “aliens,” are interviewed before moving to the Beautiful Planet, after Earth has become uninhabitable. A slogan at the top of the screen reads, “HOME OF INFINITE BEAUTY: WHERE STARS AND DREAMS ALIGN,” drawing equally from both Chinese propaganda and American platitudes about manifestation. During the interview, aliens are prompted to look into the camera and smile, and their affect is rated on a scale, using facial recognition algorithms that measure compliance, energy, and positivity. When answering a question, a participant might be told, “I don’t see your determination.” At one point, an automated voice says, “I know you all want to come here, but our portal isn’t open for everyone.”

Hey Alien, 2023. Installation with digital video, welcome flyers, and a screen-based interactive experience.

Courtesy of the artist

The humor is more gentle and benevolent than biting. This is partly because Wang has benefited from the system; she has largely succeeded with immigration, which she attributes to luck. Over the years, she’s seen many friends be denied for seemingly arbitrary reasons, forced to sell their possessions and fly back to their home country. In those moments, she experiences a sense of “survivor’s guilt.” Why her, and not someone else? Was she just a better performer than the others?

“I have built a new self that I’m happy with,” she said. “I [became] okay with being misunderstood, and only then did people start to understand me.” She is starting to settle down in New York, her adopted city, yet she still feels the impulse to fly away. She still enjoys spending time exploring JFK Airport, watching people wander aimlessly, amusing themselves with mass-marketed perfumes and jumbo-sized chocolates. Backpackers slump on the floor against the wall, their cell phones charging beside them. People’s faces look different when they’re waiting. She’ll stare at the monitor screen that displays departing flights, and pretend to pick one at random to take her to an unknown destination. She associates this impulse with being an angsty teenage girl in Shenzhen, watching Wong Kar Wai’s Happy Together. As a misfit, she identified with its gay characters, outsiders in Argentina. She once fantasized about absconding to Buenos Aires, where she would chain smoke on balconies, dance all night to bossa nova, and start a new life. Staring at the flights listed on JFK’s monitor screens is to catch a glimpse of endless possibilities. “It’s like seeing all these different lives,” she says. “That’s the thing. You don’t have to just live one life.” ♦

Carrie Wang’s 2023-2024 Pioneer Works residency is supported by the Rockefeller Foundation’s inaugural Working Artists Fellowship program, a part of the Foundation’s The Artist Impact Initiative.