Department of Art and Art History

Opening Thursday, July 10, 2025, 6-8 pm

Open by appointment thereafter, contact mow@unc.edu or felixthethird@gmail.com

Moyan Wang and John Felix Arnold present a two-person exhibition that brings their distinct practices into dialogue, tracing how memory, material, and movement shape personal and collective transformation. Across painting, ceramics, installation, drawing, and performance-informed processes, both artists create layered, sensorial worlds that reckon with inheritance and rupture. Together, their works form a conversation between erosion and becoming, asking how place and memory persist through abstraction, touch, and the altered terrain of identity.

Wang (current MFA candidate) draws from Chinese ink traditions and fragmented mural surfaces to explore diasporic experience, psychological dissonance, and the shifting boundaries of the self. Her use of wild clay, natural ash, and hand-ground pigments evokes bodily and ecological entanglements, where form dissolves into trace and gesture.

artist website: https://teaoc.art/pages/moyanwang/chinese-painter

Arnold (MFA 2025 Alumnus) works in drawing, movement research, and video, interrogating and re-imagining southern histories of landscape, monument, and rupture in collaboration with movement artists and dancers Amari Jones and Leo Ryan (both Duke MFA alumni). Using found and vernacular materials, the work deepens the conceptual nature of drawing, exploring the capacity of embedded trace, questioning how Southern histories are remembered, embodied, and confronted.

artist website: http://johnfelixarnold.com