Moyan Iris Wang

Moyan (Iris) Wang (b. 2000, China) is a painter and multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans ceramics, sculpture, painting, and fabric. Her work investigates the intersections of personal, social, and historical trauma within China and the Chinese diaspora, weaving together the private and the public, the mythological and the real. Having lived across multiple countries, she reexamines identity through the lenses of gender, race, and cultural history, infusing her practice with layered perspectives.

Wang’s materials are central to her exploration of hybridity and transformation. Grainy ceramic surfaces, bleeding pigments, and wrinkled fabrics evoke both tenderness and rupture, giving form to abstract conflicts, memories, and wounds. Drawing from—but also estranging—Chinese cultural heritage, she uses materials “wrong” and transforms motifs into hybrids: red cords become veins or scars, Gong-bi florals morph into visceral growths, religious icons appear as fragmented bodies. These porous and unstable forms resist purity myths, unsettling nationalist demands for fixed identity and instead keeping wounds visible as sites of resilience.

By working with culturally resonant objects and tactile processes, Wang creates enigmatic metaphors for unspoken stories, inviting viewers into liminal spaces where migration, ritual, and trauma collide. Her practice holds history and intimacy in tension, asking how memory and identity might be reimagined through fracture, hybridity, and touch.

Currently an MFA candidate at UNC–Chapel Hill and recipient of the Graduate Merit Fellowship, Wang holds a BA from Northwestern University.