In early 2020, Sicheng Wang was quarantined for 14 days in Shanghai with the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. After he was cleared, he decided to return to his home in New York City. His plane there proved to be one of the last before the travel ban took effect soon after. 

In late spring, the virus hit New York. For the first time in its history, the city seemed to become a ghost town, hospital beds overflowing as the streets lay empty. 

Life under the pandemic led Wang to experience the vital, yet tenuous, relationship between the individual and society. He endured malice and hate leveled at him due to his ethnicity; He helped journalists record images of life under lockdown and social distancing; and he became one voice among many during the events following the death of George Floyd, participating in Black Lives Matter protests and rallies. 

In the series of Spring to Summer in NYC 2020, Wang plays with the ephemerality of visual memory, and how such memories feed into one's relationship with the history, legends and stories of society at large. Wang’s series finds subjects both imbued by their historical setting, but aesthetically isolated. Images such as On the NYC street are immediately recognizable to us, but have already taken on the distant and blurry filter of an alienated memory. With the passing of years, we can’t tell where these remembrances come from. All remaining images define vague memories. The faces of the figures in Chinatown and a man in front of MET are already lost to the memory of the artist himself. Within this muted and abstracted palette of remembrance, flashes of color and photorealistic detail peek through, remnants of a reality past. Fireworks burst, spaceships blast off, and yellow blossoms float down dappled streams. Memories are never continuous, like a broken mirror reflecting countless broken images, the starry sky in the stagnant water is a projection of cosmic debris.