4N Exchange: Alias
August 18, 2026 The role of the artist and creative is an ever-changing identity. Our fifth issue of 4N explores the theme of alias. Artists from this issue participated in a panel discussion on August 18 at Printed Matter, discussing the many hats they wear—designer and printmaker, curator and critic, direcor and scout, among others—and how their creative identities shape the work they make.
Led by Fía Benitez, guest editor of 4N Issue 5, the conversation featured Wei, Julia Hung, Zihan Yang, and Annette An-Jen Liu, guest editor of Issues 3 and 4—all multidisciplinary artists exploring identity through their work. Here are excerpts from the conversation:
Zihan (Z) Yang is a filmmaker, writer-director, and street scout whose practice explores the meaning of “home” through drifting memories, personal borders, and chance encounters. Z’s work is rooted in self-taught ways of seeing and connecting—recognizing the familiar within the unfamiliar and transforming fleeting moments into layered cinematic worlds.
Z: When I got the brief, I was thankful that 4N gave us a lot of freedom to come up with our 10 pages. Because I do film, fashion, commercials, it’s not like I can put the videos onto the page. So it’s very interesting to think about how to represent this on paper. The first thing that I thought about was the faces of people I scouted. I was imagining having a huge page of faces, and went through my database to create this. It’s kind of hard because you have to go back and ask people for their consent to be printed, so it was actually an interesting process to look back through all these faces and reach out to those people.
I also wanted to put my experience as a scout into a narrative, and write my feelings behind the camera when I approach people. Something else I included was a film I made myself but never put anywhere–it’s just been sitting on my drive. The film is called As I Pass You, You Pass Me, We Pass Each Other. I made this in my very first year of film school, and feel that it reflects how I chose to be a scout at this stage. I think scouting is a very romantic job. The moment you choose to talk to people, when you pass someone, it’s the exchange at that moment. You go into them and leave each other.
Wei Yuan Wang is a graphic designer and print maker based in New York. Her practice explores the boundaries and possibilities of printmaking through playful experimentation with materials and processes. Wei received her BFA in Taiwan, and her MFA from Pratt institute 2026.
Wei: When I saw the theme was “alias,” I thought–this theme is made for me. My star sign is Gemini, so my work is often about two people interacting. I feel like I have two sides in my artistic practice. One is about the character stuff, and then the other is more like making fun of things. Working as a graphic designer taught me how to see things from a design perspective, and I’m always thinking about what other people are seeing. I realized I like to make fun of myself and make people laugh. So in most of my work I am eager to see how people react to it, whether they find it funny or it makes them angry, I just want them to have some kind of reaction. To me, that means the work has good communication, and good design.
Julia Hung creates poetic, immersive installations that explore the fluid interplay of material, form, and perception. Hung holds a BDes from OCAD University (2012) and an MFA from Haute école d’art et de Design Genève (2016). Her work has received numerous honors, including the Asian Cultural Council’s New York Fellowship (2024), and finalist recognition in the New Heads-Fondation BNP Paribas Art Award (2017) and the Taoyuan Fine Arts Exhibition (2023).
Julia Hung: I chose works that were meaningful to me, both personally and professionally. The first one is called Biomimicry, and it was the first piece that I made returning to Taiwan from Geneva. I heard someone say in a documentary that “art that cannot be sold is garbage.” So I was like, okay, I'll make garbage into art. So I used plastic bags, I ironed them, fused them together, and shaped them into organic forms to question what is valuable and who decides it. And then the second work, Bloom, it's my largest public work so far. I was in this tiny studio, and my team and I stacked up everything, and we only had a tiny way to like side-walk to the washroom. There’s this stainless steel structure within the sculpture. To make it organic, I had to convince myself that I'm a powerful Wonder Woman, that I'm even stronger than the iron smiths that we hired. So I hand-bent all the structures by myself in the end. The last one is called Being as a Woman, and again, it's about the identity of woman, performing all the daily expectations from family and society, and it's hand-woven with enamel copper wire.
I just got my O-1, and the process was quite crazy. The whole time I had to ask myself what makes me an extraordinary talent. I tried to think like the immigration officers, so I looked at what would seem valuable instead of what I think is meaningful, in a way. And this connects back to my artwork: what is value, and who decides it, and what is extraordinary, anyways?
Annette An-Jen Liu is a Taiwanese contemporary art writer and curator currently based in New York City. Her practice is informed by her studies in photography and anthropology in Australia. She is a 2026 AICA-USA Art Critic Fellow.