Groundless Flower - ཨ

4K video with sound, projection, 13'23", a High Line Art and the CHANEL Culture Fund’s inaugural High Line Originals co-commission

​

Sound by Frank Carlberg

​

Groundless Flower – ཨ is an experimental video that continues Frank WANG Yefeng's exploration of themes related to estrangement, and considers questions relevant to his own diasporic existence between East and West. Titled after the Tibetan letter “ཨ”—the primordial vowel signifying the “beginning of all things”—the piece interweaves and reimagines various cultural, historical, and religious motifs to evoke a sense of placelessness and liminality.

​

Groundless Flower – ཨ draws on WANG's journeys to wild landscapes such as the Gobi Desert, the Qingzang Plateau, and New Mexico’s Badlands, translating their vast open spaces into a poetic meditation on movement, transformation, and the paradoxes of nomadic existence. A luminous flower hovers between organic tangibility and digital apparition, evoking simultaneous feelings of desolation and hope. The flower character morphs into what WANG calls a “cosmic tree”—traditionally known as the “Tree of Life,” a symbol that exists across countless religions, mythologies, and folk tales around the world to represent the hierarchy of existence. In the work, this symbol is subverted and uprooted, levitating as an interconnected, non-hierarchical web.

​

On the High Line, WANG presents a space where fixed definitions and traditional classifications break down, inviting viewers to imagine a more fluid, ambiguous, but intertwined reality that transcends rigid boundaries. He expands the space between what we consider to be binaries: East and West, celestial and terrestrial, organic and digital, human and non-human, isolation and connection, and past, present, and future. In doing so, WANG presents an optimistic interpretation of liminality—you are not “nowhere” or “nothing” but rather, you could be “everywhere” and “everything.” The desert in Groundless Flower – ཨ, a landscape often imagined or discussed as an empty expanse, becomes a space of adaptation, imagination, and possibility.​

​

​

Relevant readings: 

https://www.thehighline.org/art/projects/frank-wang-yefeng/

​

​