Wolfhouse, a 1949 modernist residence in Newburgh, New York designed by Philip Johnson, hosted a one-day site-specific exhibition on October 10, 2026, by artists Lang Lang (founder of Studio No.29) and Xie Peng. Titled Island on Land – A Landscape in Five States, it translates themes from Lang’s 2024 short film of the same name into physical installations spread across the house’s interior rooms, terrace, and surrounding grounds.
The material choices are the piece’s clearest statement. Several works are edible — chocolate spheres, rice-paper vessels, biodegradable door handles — built to decay or be consumed rather than persist. Everything else uses aluminum armatures, mirrored stainless steel, and acrylic panels, joined with snap-button fasteners instead of threaded hardware. That’s a deliberate constraint: nothing in the installation is actually screwed into a 1949 landmark residence. The structure holds together and comes apart by hand, which matters for a one-day show inside a house that wasn’t built to be modified.
Splitting a single film’s themes across five distinct physical states — the exhibition’s “five states” framing — turns a linear short film into something closer to a walk-through, where a viewer’s path through the house’s rooms, terrace, and grounds becomes part of how the piece unfolds rather than a fixed sequence they’d get from watching the film straight through.
The exhibition ran as a single day, documented afterward through photography by David Luo, published via designboom’s reader-submitted DIY feature.