2026
HD video, sound, color
24 minutes

The Sky Is Not Real unfolds as a meditation on darkness—cosmic, psychological, and historical. Part of Wang’s ongoing Pyramids and Parabolas film series (2019–present), the film turns inward toward the unconscious while simultaneously reaching outward toward the mysteries of the universe.

Filmed at The Jump-Up Dark Sky Sanctuary and Ilfracombe in the Australian Outback, the film consists primarily of long takes of the southern hemisphere night sky. Dense constellations, nebulae, and distant stellar systems form an immersive field of attention, recalling the durational monochrome structure of Derek Jarman’s Blue.

Bookended by found footage from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the film interweaves astronomical observation with a voiceover drawn from Wang’s psychoanalytic inquiry, moving through aphantasia, birth, immigration, language, dissociation, family history, and the nervous system. Psychic experience and astronomical observation unfold as parallel structures through montage. If Solaris externalized memory as planetary encounter, The Sky Is Not Real internalizes the cosmos as psychic condition, suggesting that the unknown within the human mind and the unknown beyond our planet may be structurally intertwined.

Commissioned by the New Museum and supported by Capsule, Acting Method Production, London, and Pioneer Works. Presented in New Humans: Memories of the Future, opening on March 21, 2026.