2025/03 - 'Desert Garden,' Art Basel Hong Kong: Encounters

Frank WANG Yefeng “Desert Garden"

Art Basel Hong Kong: Encounters

Hong Kong Convention & Exhibition Center, Hong Kong, China

2025 / 03

Desert Garden is a large-scale multimedia installation created by Frank WANG Yefeng specifically for Art Basel Hong Kong 2025’s Encounters sector. The project invites reflection on how we understand ourselves and our surroundings beyond familiar urban environments, how to imagine worlds outside anthropocentric narratives, and how these urgent questions intersect with personal diasporic experiences.

“A giant, transparent flower sways continuously in an uncanny garden—an ever-shifting landscape where mirage-like forms flicker between presence and absence. Desert Garden immerses viewers in a world where the boundaries between the human and non-human, virtual and physical, dissolve. At its core, the luminous flower—rendered on a shimmering LED ice screen—hovers between organic life and digital apparition, surrounded by fragmented desert landscapes that oscillate between desolation and renewal. Yefeng’s practice navigates the instability of identity, place, and perception, shaped by his experiences of migration and cultural displacement. Born in Shanghai and now based between New York and Shanghai, he works across 3D animation, video installation, sculpture, and text, constructing speculative worlds that explore the tensions of belonging and estrangement. "

“In Desert Garden, Yefeng draws on his journey to the Gobi Desert, translating its vast, liminal spaces into a poetic meditation on movement, transformation, and the paradoxes of nomadic existence. The work fuses digital and material elements, including 3D animation, sculptural interventions, and an immersive multimedia environment, blurring the line between simulation and sensation. The desert, often imagined as an empty expanse, becomes a charged space of adaptation, imagination, and shifting possibilities. The swaying flower, a recurring motif in Yefeng’s work, embodies fragility and persistence, existing in a state of perpetual motion yet tethered to an elusive ground. Blending playful aesthetics with conceptual depth, Desert Garden invites viewers into a speculative landscape where perception is fluid, and new worlds continuously unfold."

— Alexie Glass-Kantor

Interview with Art Basel Stories

In an interview with Art Basel Stories, Wang reflected on his desert experience: “Trying to find where I parked my car, there was a voice that said to me, ‘as long as you keep walking, you are never lost.’” This moment of disorientation and perseverance mirrors his ongoing engagement with migration, non-belonging, and the complexities of living between East and West, both geographically and ideologically.