BY ALBERT ABDUL-BARR WANG
BY ALBERT ABDUL-BARR WANG
BY ALBERT ABDUL-BARR WANG
BY ALBERT ABDUL-BARR WANG
BY ALBERT ABDUL-BARR WANG
BY ALBERT ABDUL-BARR WANG
Albert Abdul-Barr Wang is an indigenous Taiwanese-American Los Angeles-based Oulipo-influenced poetic bard, experimental writer, and visual artist. He received a MFA in studio art from the ArtCenter College of Design (2025), a BFA in Photography & Digital Imaging at the University of Utah (2023), and a BA in Creative Writing/English Literature at Vanderbilt University (1997). Wang’s artworks, prose, and poetry have appeared or are forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, New Delta Review (NDR), BRINK, Clockwise Cat, Ekphrastic Review, The Hooghly Review, Brooklyn to Gangnam, and fractured lit. His piece “Bryan Betancur, Insider #2160” was longlisted for The Masters Review‘s 2025 Summer Short Story Award for New Writers judged by Jennine Capó Crucet. You can find him at http://www.albertabdulbarrwang.art and on Instagram at @albertabdulbarrwang.
Artist Statement: Flashpoints explores the tension between performance, mediation, and simulation by staging images that operate as living tableaux—arrested scenes that echo the tradition Jean-François Chevrier identifies in his essay “The Adventures of the Picture Form in the History of Photography.” My work positions itself in that lineage, where the photograph is less an instantaneous capture than a carefully orchestrated theater of bodies, objects, and gestures. At the same time, the series acknowledges the instability of representation in the age of the simulacrum, where, as Baudrillard suggests, signs circulate untethered from origins. The tableaux I construct are not referential mirrors of reality, but instead self-contained systems in which authenticity is always already fractured, displaced, and refracted through layers of mediation.
My formal language draws equally from art history and digital culture. I consider video game environments as a contemporary reimagining of Renaissance perspectival space: worlds where spatial logic and choreographed movement converge to shape how a viewer inhabits the scene. My photographs borrow from both registers—the mathematical precision of Renaissance composition and the immersive design principles of digital landscapes. Each image stages an impossible convergence, where the perspectival grid of quattrocento painting collides with the algorithmic architectures of contemporary game design.
Methodologically, Flashpoints proposes a hybrid practice I describe as virtual photo-based sculpture. Each piece begins in the intangible: an amalgam of interpolated upscaling, 3D modeling experiments, and fragments of forensic photography that privilege indexical precision. These elements are sculpted, recomposed, and tested based on techniques from large format photography, where scale, materiality, and resolution are all pivotal. The resulting works are neither straightforward photographs nor pure simulations. They exist in the interstice: dimensional objects that circulate as images, images that contain the weight and density of virtual sculptures.
Through this process, Flashpoints asks how photographic form might be reimagined in an era when the real and the virtual are no longer oppositional categories but overlapping terrains. Each image is a flashpoint in that sense: a site where archival memory, technologies of mediation, and speculative futures collide, generating sparks that illuminate the unstable conditions of seeing today.
Next (Corey Q Baron) >
< Previous (David St. John)
