Bienvenu Steinberg & C is pleased to present Yellow Earth, an exhibition of recent work by Michael Wang. In conversation with the work of artist Walter De Maria, the show is an exploration of contemporary and environmental issues which are increasingly omnipresent in the intersections of the cultural and natural world. An invisible “atomic” undercurrent runs through the work of Walter De Maria.

While rarely an explicit theme in his work, De Maria’s formal language and engagement with invisible energies evince the impact of the nuclear age on his work. The Lightning Field, installed in New Mexico—site of the first atomic bomb—itself sits atop uranium reserves. Michael Wang’s Yellow Earth reveals these hidden chains of relations. The artist incorporates uranium, the geologic origin of nuclear power, within several works, most often as a phosphorescent pigment safely embedded in glass. A few works contain thumbnail-sized fragments of New Mexico uranium ores. The slight radioactivity of these naturally occurring minerals has been neutralized by sculptural “containment structures,” which block the escape of radiation while rendering the samples within completely invisible.

The Diné, the Southwest’s largest indigenous community, call uranium ore leetso, meaning “yellow dirt.”  Uranium mining on indigenous lands began with the development of the bomb and continued through the Cold War. The known effects of uranium exposure were deliberately obscured by mining companies and the federal government. The land remains contaminated today. Wang links De Maria’s iconic Yellow Painting, also titled The Color Men Choose When They Attack the Earth, painted in John Deere’s signature yellow, to the yellow of New Mexico’s uranium ore. Archival images of yellow dust emerge from flat panels powder-coated in De Maria’s readymade shade.

In 1979, the year The Lightning Field accepted its first public visitors, a team of researchers from Los Alamos surveyed the uranium concentrations in well water in the areas surrounding Quemado and Pie Town, New Mexico—the two closest towns to The Lightning Field. Some samples recovered concentrations of nearly 300 parts per billion. The federally accepted level for uranium in drinking water is currently set at 30 ppb. The aim of the study was not in fact to assess water quality—but to locate potential sites for uranium extraction. These documents form the basis of a work by Wang on engraved aluminum: a schematic map charting well sites and uranium concentrations. The heart of the show is a long line of sealed aluminum tubes: each contains a sample of potentially contaminated earth collected from public lands within New Mexico’s uranium mining belt. This residue of the uranium age is here transposed to Lower Manhattan. The site is significant: the gallery sits across the street from the studio De Maria kept in the 1960s, at 42 Walker St.

Michael Wang uses systems that operate on a global scale as media for art: climate change, species distribution, resource allocation and the global economy. His works include Extinct in the Wild, a project that engages species that no longer exist in nature but persist under human care; 10000 li, 100 billion kilowatt-hours, a work that harnessed Shanghai’s hydropower-fueled electric grid to create a frozen facsimile of the glaciers at the origin of the Yangtze river; First Forest, a living replica of a Carboniferous forest installed in a disused coal-gas plant; and Carbon Copies, an exhibition linking the production of artworks to the release of greenhouse gases–envisioning all artists as "air artists." Born in Olney, Maryland in 1981, Michael Wang completed undergraduate and graduate programs at Harvard, New York University, and then Princeton, where he received a Master of Architecture. Wang's work has been shown in Europe, North and South America, and Asia, including Shanghai Biennale, Manifesta 12 in Palermo, Italy, the Swiss Institute in New York, Parque Cultural de Valparaíso in Chile, and Fondazione Prada in Milan.