Island on Land by Lang Lang & Xie Peng
At Wolfhouse, a metal-and-wood home set within the landscape of Newburgh, New York, Island on Land brings a dream from the screen into physical space. The exhibition combines film, edible sculpture, architecture, and the changing conditions of its surroundings. Its five edible works and a series of spatial interventions invite visitors to wander, pause, look closely, and taste. There is no prescribed route. Each encounter can shape a different experience of the exhibition.
The project grew from Lang Lang’s 2024 film of the same name. Lang began recording dreams that stayed with her, seeing them as fragments of memory, fear, experience, and imagined futures. In her view, memory resembles an inner landscape made of separate places and impressions. Some are open and sparse, others dense or industrial. Though they may seem unrelated, they all belong to the person carrying them.
Lang is a New York-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans moving image, installation, edible sculpture, and photography. Her work explores memory, dreams, landscape, and the relationship between the body and place through image, text, sound, material, and taste. She holds a BFA in Fashion Design and an MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design. She is also the founder of No.29, where she develops edible landscapes and works with food as an artistic medium.
Xie Peng, a New York-based multidisciplinary designer, works across fashion, architecture, and installation. He holds a BFA in Fashion Design from Parsons School of Design and is pursuing a Master of Architecture at Cornell AAP. His practice explores material, connection, and the translation of design ideas between fashion and architecture. For this exhibition, he brings those interests into a collection of structures that respond to Lang’s film and edible works.
The collaboration began with a shared question about how Island on Land might leave the screen. Lang translates sensations and memories through film and food. Xie works through architecture, materials, and spatial interventions. Their contributions meet throughout Wolfhouse, where metal and acrylic echo the film’s industrial imagery, while red details evoke its dream sequences.
Xie’s background in fashion also informs a distinctive construction detail. Snap buttons, familiar as garment fastenings, become joints that hold the installations together. They let elements connect, detach, fold, and change configuration. The familiar hardware takes on an unexpected role, adding a subtle strangeness to structures that sit between furniture and sculpture.
Lang Lang, Island on Land, 2024. Film stills from single-channel video.
Lang Lang, Island on Land, 2024. Film stills from single-channel video.
Black Pearls, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Black Pearls, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Black Pearls, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Black Pearls, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Red Soil, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
The exhibition’s five edible works each begin with an image, sensation, or transition from the film. They continue to change through light, weather, touch, and consumption.
Black Pearls takes inspiration from the film’s industrial landscape. A dark chocolate shell gives way to green grape and jasmine, bringing freshness and delicacy beneath a visually dense exterior.
Red Beneath considers the body as a place where emotion and memory can remain hidden. Red wine-infused figs, dark chocolate, and buckwheat crumble suggest traces of resistance and feeling that may fade from sight without vanishing from the body.
A Drop Within explores water as a changing state. Its transparent surface holds a crimson form while reflecting light and its surroundings. The view shifts with the visitor’s position and with any touch.
A Quiet Turn marks a passage between environments. A series of handles suggests thresholds without doors, evoking the moment of moving from the physical world toward the subconscious.
White Trace is made with watermelon, shiso leaves, and rice paper. Its fragile vessel slowly changes shape as it holds liquid. The container is altered by what it carries, even before anyone tastes it.
These pieces are not intended to remain intact. Some are eaten, while others respond to air, water, light, and weather. Visitors also affect the landscape through their presence and actions. The arrangement they first encounter may have changed by the time they leave.
Red Soil, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Visitors gathered on the grounds of Wolfhouse during the exhibition, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Installation view of White Trace, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Detail of The Partition, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
White Trace, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
A Quiet Turn, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Xie’s installations give the edible works a physical setting, while creating their own shifting views of the room. A mirrored stainless-steel panel holds chocolate balls in spherical recesses arranged in a spiral. Its surface reflects visitors, food, and surrounding details, drawing them into the work as they reach for a piece. Reflection and distortion share the same plane, making the panel feel at once grounded and dreamlike.
The stands use interlocking circular acrylic panels to form transparent, spherical volumes. Red outlines trace their structure, recalling the film’s dream sequences. Metal connectors follow the acrylic’s curved profiles, and snap buttons take the place of conventional bolts. As visitors approach the food, the clear panels allow the red contours, metal details, and background to overlap, making the boundaries of the stands harder to pin down.
A table made from two aluminum panels can be joined, separated, or reconfigured as one or two surfaces. Red steel rods reinforce the slim panels, and centrally positioned legs provide balance. The table supports a red cake whose soft, irregular contours contrast with the rigid aluminum. Its shape suggests an island rising from a metallic terrain.
At the end of the exhibition, a modular partition brings together the project’s materials and ideas. Its aluminum panels connect with snap buttons and can be detached, folded, and rearranged. Circular acrylic panels rotate to form small platforms and cup holders, allowing the structure to function as both divider and furniture. Precisely sized openings hold rice-paper cups. From a distance, the clear acrylic seems to recede, leaving the cups apparently suspended between the metal panels.
Taste gives the exhibition an especially intimate point of contact. Looking at an object leaves a degree of distance, while eating brings the work into the body. A flavor that feels familiar to one visitor may be new to another, and each person brings their own memories to the encounter. When people taste the works together, the experience can also become shared.
Lang describes a central tension between the film and the food. The film can be replayed, while the edible pieces disappear through consumption. Yet physical survival is not the only way something can last. A taste, a place, or a moment with other people may persist in memory after its source has gone.
Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States was presented at Wolfhouse in Newburgh, New York, on October 10, 2026, with a film screening at 2 pm. The exhibition leaves visitors free to follow their own path through its five states. What remains afterward may be an image, a sensation, or a flavor carried away in the body. As Lang hopes, a visitor might leave feeling as though they have had a dream.
Audience interaction with A Drop Within, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
A Drop Within, Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States (2026)
Audience during the screening of Lang Lang’s film Island on Land at Wolfhouse
Exterior view of Wolfhouse during Island on Land — A Landscape in Five States
