High Line Art, the art commissioning body of Manhattan’s beloved disused-railroad-turned-suspended walkway, is headed in a new direction, and it’s getting there in good company.
Beginning this September, High Line Art and the Chanel Culture Fund will co-commission rising artists working in digital and time-based media for High Line Originals, a film series hosted in the park’s covered passage at 14th Street (better known as the High Line Channel). The partnership marks a landmark shift for the program: from a biannual to an annual commissioning cycle that aims to offer a “breakthrough moment” for artists as well as passerby, Taylor Zakarin, the High Line curator overseeing this commission, told ARTnews.
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“Encountering art in a public setting like the High Line empowers audiences who might feel out of place or intimidated by a white cube gallery,” Zakarin said. “That goes tenfold when you’re talking about a medium like video art, any time-based media really, which more so than painting or sculptures can be hard for people to approach.”
Past channel artists count Tourmaline (who inaugurated the video series in 2019 with Salacia), Zineb Sedira, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Sky Hopinka. Each cycle is a mix of solo and group presentations. Its fourth cycle officially kicks off on September 10 with the premiere of Groundless Flower – ཨ (2025) by Frank Wang Yefeng. The Shanghai-born, Brooklyn-based artist is an apt pick for the program: fresh off a residency at the Shanghai Museum of Glass and presentation at Art Basel Hong Kong, with a multimedia practice that often mines how urban landscapes can exacerbate or ease social estrangement. Sounds like the High Line; once an unruly industrial ruin darkening the sidewalk beneath, now an idyllic (if occasionally crowded) stretch of shade and greenery.
Groundless Flower – ཨ will play daily on loop until November 2025, after which it will screen in London as part of the Window, the Chanel Culture Fund’s site-specific public art program. The work is titled after the Tibetan letter “ཨ,” and explained by the artist as “the primordial vowel signifying the ‘beginning of all things.’” Viewers can expect something like a glimpse into his deep dream, in which cultural motifs from the East and West, as well as images from the artist’s nomadic journeys through the Gobi Desert, Qingzang Plateau, and New Mexico’s Badlands, churn and collide.
Additionally, the program will feature the U.S. premieres of Cao Fei’s DUOTOPIA 2, Lu Yang’s DOKU Pieces, and Triglav of Berl Berl by Jakob Kudsk Steenson on September 8 and 9. Petra Cortright’s wet sunlight Paradis ‘pomme de terre’ 3D, which first screened at the Window, will be shown in an upcoming High Line Channel group show in November 2025.
“Frank’s work has a technical inventiveness that really captures the experience of rootlessness, of universal themes like global fluidity and the digital change,” Yana Peel, President of Chanel Arts, Culture & Heritage, told ARTnews. “We always ask: What can artists that are commissioned by the High Line or showing at the Window, do in terms of furthering the limits of human imagination?”