Ione Wang — CalArts Post Grad Show Y25

Ione Wang with MJ Tom, photographed by Riven Ratanavanh

(Art MFA 25)
IG: @ioneartprojects

Working girl, 2025

In Working girl, Ione Wang stages an intimate confrontation with a close-up image of her body, in which the labor of prostitution opens a wound as much as it embellishes it. A rice paper screen, fragile and semi-transparent, floats at the center of the installation, carrying an image which can be encountered on both sides. On one side, the text “my body” is written into her flesh. The other side reveals the words “our time,” as hair stitched over skin. A visual contradiction is posed: an opposition between the site of her body articulating itself as itself, and the thread of shared time, which we might imagine hanging in suspension like the never ending moment of this photograph. This piece was created through queer sadomasochistic ritual in close collaboration with MJ Tom and photographed by Riven Ratanavanh. It is part of a practice that is relational, serial, and durational. Wang explores how the self recognizes itself through encounters with others — encounters that are simultaneously historical repetitions and new experiences of difference. These encounters, or scenes, stage what she calls a “perverse” form of care. In this ritual, the wound of sex work is opened, a new erotogenic zone. Wang and her collaborators refuse the easy comfort of frameworks such as sex worker as subject, sex work as work, or sex work as normalized or respectable, and instead gesture towards “inhabiting the wound more fully.”

PROXY CHIMERA ORACLE

CalArts 2025