Emily Wang, who has studied abroad at NYU Berlin and also NYU Abu Dhabi, recently won an award for her work in the exhibition The Guest as Host, which showcased work by students from NYU Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin, and was at the Deutsches Haus at NYU. She reflects on her time overseas and her work below.

What is your school affiliation, class year and major? When did you study in Berlin and what has that meant for your NYU experience?

I’m a Junior studying studio art at Steinhardt. I studied in Berlin in the spring of 2015. The experience in Berlin has been a big growing experience for me personally and artistically and I’ve met some of my best friends there in the program.

What was it like being an artist in Berlin? How did time there influence your work?

Being an artist in Berlin is ideal, but I think Berlin already gets enough publicity as it is. There is an ease of life in comparison to more grueling cities like New York, and that makes it easier for artists to survive and to work outside of market concerns. In my time there, my work was pushed a lot formally. Much of the work I produced that semester was performance, and that laid the foundation for a lot of topics I think about now.

I understand that while in Berlin you worked as a studio assistant for Berlin-based artist Timur Si-Qin. Can you describe that experience? How did that experience contrast with your internship and curatorial experiences in New York and Abu Dhabi?

The experience was fun and quite low-key. I helped Timur do materials research and went to a crazy Vietnamese warehouse/mall (Dong Xuan Center) in Lichtenberg to buy possible materials for his show at Société. I really appreciated how Timur talked me through his aesthetic decisions and clued me into parts of his process. I’m currently working as a curatorial intern at the Whitney, and to work at an institution is drastically different – there is similarly a lot of uncertainty and changes, but the work is much more streamlined and you are working on multiple projects, involving diverse groups and artists, at one time.

As someone who has studied and created across NYU’s global network – in New York, Abu Dhabi, and Berlin – how did you feel that the ability to be immersed in these different countries influenced you as a scholar and artist?

Disregarding New York, Abu Dhabi, and Berlin, I already have many cultural influences in my life. I was born in Canada to Chinese immigrants and then growing up in Atlanta, I never fit neatly into any categorical identities. I think this made me long for more “foreign”-ness, places where I was not even expected to fit into a box of familiarity the way I am in the US. Abu Dhabi has influenced me more than a short answer here can begin to describe, Berlin as well. New York has given me a new relationship to my trash and it has deflated my ego in healthy ways. 

I understand you recently participated in and won an award for work in the exhibition The Guest as Host, which showcased work by students from NYU Berlin and Universität der Künste Berlin, and was at the Deutsches Haus at NYU. How would you describe the piece in this exhibition? 

The piece is a short video titled Long Distance Friendship: Hamda and Emily Forever that I made together with my friend Hamda Salah, who complements me conceptually in the best ways. We have collaborated together before, on her thesis film and also on an exhibition we organized at a space in Abu Dhabi. The video set to a remix from a Stephen Universe song is a portrait of a friendship.