(AGENPARL) - Roma, 29 Ottobre 2025 - (AGENPARL) – Wed 29 October 2025 https://whitney.us13.list-manage.com/track/click?u=387f59a72ae7b64ccae37d5c9&id=e8dc348713&e=59415c6e7e
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** WHITNEY MUSEUM LAUNCHES FRANK WANG YEFENG’S NEW DIGITAL ARTWORK EXPLORING IDENTITY AND CULTURAL DISPLACEMENT
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Artist Frank WANG Yefeng’s latest digital project launches on whitney.org and invites reflection on the evolving sense of identity and belonging.
New York, NY, October 29, 2025 — The Whitney Museum of American Art launches The Levitating Perils #2 (https://whitney.us13.list-manage.com/track/click?u=387f59a72ae7b64ccae37d5c9&id=a7b649c15b&e=59415c6e7e), a digital art project by Frank WANG Yefeng commissioned for artport, the Museum’s online gallery space for Internet art. This project is part of artport’s On the Hour (https://whitney.us13.list-manage.com/track/click?u=387f59a72ae7b64ccae37d5c9&id=a5091ce090&e=59415c6e7e) series, featuring projects that mark every full hour around the clock, unfolding over a time frame of thirty seconds. Using whitney.org as their habitat, these net art projects disrupt, replace, or explore the Museum website as an information environment. This form of engagement captures the core of artistic practice on the Internet: the intervention of net art in existing online spaces.
Presented hourly on whitney.org, The Levitating Perils #2 is a continuation of Yefeng’s explorations of identity and cultural displacement. Throughout his body of work, the artist examines his own nomadic, transnational experience and the oscillating sense of belonging and displacement that arises from it. The Levitating Perils #2 comprises a series of five animations and draws reference to historical newspaper illustrations and political cartoons that circulated at the turn of the twentieth century. The illustrations depicted Asian figures as menacing and invading the West, perpetuating xenophobic ideas rooted in European colonialism. Reenvisioning these images in the digital realm, Yefeng transforms a visual language of fear into one of speculative reflection, offering a space to contemplate the experience of “in-betweenness.”
“Frank’s work succeeds in engaging with cultural bias and the challenges of a transnational life in a playful way that still remains truthful to complicated histories,” said Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney. “His whimsical and uncanny animated characters create a space in which myth and history dissolve and open up spaces for transformation.”
As viewers experience The Levitating Perils #2, unfolding across four animations that rotate every six hours with a fifth clip interspersed randomly, they encounter a floating red dragon that is simultaneously unsettling and playful. The dragon specifically references the illustration The Ogre of the Orient (1904–05), which appears in the background of one of the animations, and is surrounded by handwritten messages of the creature’s imagined words. The dragon’s expressions are reconfigured phrases drawn from nineteenth-century newspapers and political cartoons permeated by anti-Asian bias. At times, a human head with tentacled horns, bearing the artist’s own facial features, emerges as kin to the dragon. The human head is pushed and pulled around by invisible forces, alluding to the turbulence of a transnational existence. Through these sequences, Yefeng immerses viewers into a speculative space where myth and history merge, reflecting on the fluid experience of identity and belonging.
Frank WANG Yefeng’s The Levitating Perils #2 was organized by Christiane Paul, Curator of Digital Art at the Whitney, and commissioned for On the Hour, which presents Internet art projects commissioned specifically for whitney.org. To see the current project, be anywhere on whitney.org on the hour. More information about artport can be found at whitney.org/artport.
** ABOUT THE ARTIST
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Frank WANG Yefeng (b. 1984) is a transdisciplinary artist living between New York City and Shanghai. Initially trained as a sculptor, Yefeng’s practice spans a wide range of media, including video installation, experimental 3D animation, painting, drawing, and writing. His art explores the experience of “in-betweenness” that arises from a nomadic transnational existence. His projects have been featured in exhibitions internationally, including the BRIC Biennial and OCAT Biennial, China; CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on Hudson, NY; Smack Mellon and International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), New York City; Gasworks London, UK; Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; and Hyundai Motorstudio, Beijing, China, among others. Yefeng has also been awarded residencies, fellowships, and commissions at K11 Art Foundation x ArtReview (Wuhan, China, and New York); Pratt Institute, Asia Art Archive in America, MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and the High Line Art and CHANEL Culture
Fund’s High Line Originals.
** ABOUT ARTPORT
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artport is the Whitney Museum’s portal to Internet art and an online gallery space for net art and new media art commissions. Launched in 2001, artport provides access to original commissioned artworks, documentation of net art and new media art exhibitions at the Whitney, and new media art in the Museum’s collection. Recent commissions include INFANT’S BANNED SKILLS (2025); Ashley Zelinkskie’s Twin Quasar (2024); Maya Man’s A Realistic Day In My Life In New York City (2024); Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s xhairymutantx (2024); Nancy Baker Cahill’s CENTO (2024); Peter Burr’s Sunshine Monument (2023); Rick Silva’s Liquid Crystal (2023); Auriea Harvey’s SITE1 (2023); Amelia Winger-Bearskin’s Sky/World Death/World (2022); Mimi Ọnụọha’s 40% of Food in the US is Wasted (How the Hell is That Progress, Man?) (2022); and Rachel Rossin’s THE MAW OF (2022). Access these and more projects at whitney.org/artport.
** PRESS CONTACT
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For press materials and image requests, please visit our press site at whitney.org/press or contact:
Meghan Ferrucci, Senior Publicist
Whitney Museum of American Art
(212) 671-8346
Whitney Press Office
whitney.org/press
(212) 570-3633
** ABOUT THE WHITNEY
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The Whitney Museum of American Art, founded in 1930 by the artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875–1942), houses the foremost collection of American art from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Mrs. Whitney, an early and ardent supporter of modern American art, nurtured groundbreaking artists when audiences were still largely preoccupied with the Old Masters. From her vision arose the Whitney Museum of American Art, which has been championing the most innovative art of the United States for ninety years. The core of the Whitney’s mission is to collect, preserve, interpret, and exhibit American art of our time and serve a wide variety of audiences in celebration of the complexity and diversity of art and culture in the United States. Through this mission and a steadfast commitment to artists, the Whitney has long been a powerful force in support of modern and contemporary art and continues to help define what is innovative and influential in American art today.
Whitney Museum Land Acknowledgment
The Whitney is located in Lenapehoking, the ancestral homeland of the Lenape. The name Manhattan comes from their word Mannahatta, meaning “island of many hills.” The Museum’s current site is close to land that was a Lenape fishing and planting site called Sapponckanikan (“tobacco field”). The Whitney acknowledges the displacement of this region’s original inhabitants and the Lenape diaspora that exists today.
As a museum of American art in a city with vital and diverse communities of Indigenous people, the Whitney recognizes the historical exclusion of Indigenous artists from its collection and program. The Museum is committed to addressing these erasures and honoring the perspectives of Indigenous artists and communities as we work for a more equitable future. To read more about the Museum’s Land Acknowledgment, visit the Museum’s website (https://whitney.us13.list-manage.com/track/click?u=387f59a72ae7b64ccae37d5c9&id=8827a70719&e=59415c6e7e) .
** VISITOR INFORMATION
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The Whitney Museum of American Art is located at 99 Gansevoort Street between Washington and West Streets, New York City. Public hours are Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 10:30 am–6 pm; Friday, 10:30 am–10 pm; and Saturday and Sunday, 10:30 am–6 pm. Closed Tuesday. Visitors twenty-five years and under and Whitney members: FREE. The Museum offers FREE admission and special programming for visitors of all ages every Friday evening from 5–10 pm and on the second Sunday of every month.
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Whitney Museum of American Art
99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014
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Image credit:
Frank WANG Yefeng, screenshot of The Levitating Perils #2, 2025