me@wendiyan.com
A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technology
Princeton, NJ
May 8-21, 2023
TMMT presents a body of digital and physical work by Wendi Yan that investigates the construction of historicity and technological narratives. The centerpiece of the show is Tale of the Mammoth Goddess, a short animation film about a resurrected mammoth who escaped from the Siberian tundra and hides in a coal mine. While the resurrected mammoth serves as a symbol of a transgression of a natural timeline and a biotechnical object at once prehistoric and futuristic, the rest of the gallery features paintings, prints and sculptures about frozen life, artificial dreams, anachronistic technologies, organic laboratory, and mundane mythologies.
The show draws inspiration from radical museum projects and historiographical fiction, utilizing the language of museum as a personal practice of engaging with knowledge production and embodied cognition. Traversing between fiction and facts, TMMT stares into historicity and questions the linearity of technologies.
TMMT was Wendi Yan’s first solo show, as well as her undergrad thesis show for her art minor at Princeton University.
Coeval Magazine (2023.7)
Next Nature Network (2024.3)
Networked Worlds (2024.3)
Documentation website
A Tiny Museum of Mammoth Technologies
Sam Hutton Fund for the Arts, Princeton University
Interact Residency
Arctic Circle Art & Science Expedition
Arquetopia Honors Alumni Residency
Advisor: Tim Szetela
Additional advising: BJ Perlmutt, Amy Yao, Pam Lins
Installation assistance: Joe Arnold
Sculpture assistance: Ash Albeser, Michelle Zatta, Nick Sharpe