Desert Garden
Written by Frank Wang Yefeng
Stay in the desert long enough, and you could apprehend the absolute. The number zero was holy.
— Margaret Atwood,
‘Time Capsule Found on the Dead Planet’
An uncanny “garden” emerges within an eight-by-eight-meter space, in which stands a giant transparent flower that sways continuously in the wind. This flower — a virtual plant on a totem — like LED ice screen — is the core element of the “garden.” Its structure is surrounded by various levitating fragments of an otherworldly desert landscape. Vivid flower sculptures are scattered throughout the space as if crawling out of the screen to playfully interact with viewers.
In reality, this place is a large-scale multimedia installation titled Desert Garden, created by artist Frank WANG Yefeng specifically for the Encounters sector of the 2025 Art Basel Hong Kong. At this vibrant art rendezvous, the project inviting us to ponder the following questions: How do we understand ourselves and our surroundings in an extended spacetime outside familiar urban spaces? How can we imagine a world beyond our anthropocentric narrative? And how do these essential quests of our time relate to a personal diasporic experience?
Inspired by a transformative journey to the Gobi Desert in northwestern China, WANG blends ambiguous landscapes and post-human discourse in the nomadic cartography of Desert Garden. The “worldless space” of the desert evokes loss and retention, terror and joy, boredom andcuriosity, and temporality and eternity. Such an immeasurable “in-between” space challenges our concepts of past, present, and future, as well as a sense of belonging.
By blending various media such as 3D simulation, glass/stainless steel sculptures, and painting and drawing, Desert Garden unravels an unknown expedition in the eerie dunes, where the poetic search for a virtual plant embodies creative truth. WANG’s “garden” captures the wind’s erosive movements and the terrain in its own exhaustion and becoming, hinting at life’s omnipresence even in a “wasteland” while probing new connections with our world. This “landscape in flux” immerses us in an uncanny “other” space, making us cosmic nomads in-between human and non-human things.
As a global traveler from Shanghai to New York, Frank WANG Yefeng’s personal journey catalyzed the depth of his creation. In Desert Garden, the artist pushes his trajectory to new speculative frontiers through the aesthetics of a land of in-betweenness.