New York’s Chinatown welcomes a bold new cultural chapter as MSCHF inaugurates The Wang Contemporary with a three-day immersive installation, 20,000 Variations on a Paper Plane in Flight. Open from Friday, February 20th at 9:00 PM through Sunday, February 22nd at 6:00 PM, the limited-run exhibition transforms the newly restored landmark building at 58 Bowery into a theatrical spectacle.
In true MSCHF fashion, the collective has turned the venue’s soaring seven-story atrium into a cascading torrent of paper airplanes crafted from traditional Chinese red envelopes. The installation, unveiled during Lunar New Year celebrations, invites visitors to participate directly: each guest may select and unfold a paper plane to discover a single-word invocation drawn from 5,000 of the most commonly used nouns in the English language.
The result is at once poetic and provocative. As thousands of planes descend from the domed ceiling in rhythmic intervals, they create what feels like a living organism—crowds gathering, gazing upward in unison, then dispersing again. The words, ubiquitous yet deeply personal, function as cryptic messages. They mean everything and nothing at once. In choosing a plane, visitors are less altering fate than revealing something about themselves.
MSCHF, renowned for its conceptual interventions that challenge cultural, political and commercial systems, once again blurs the line between spectacle and critique. Operating as both a communal ritual and a commentary on collective meaning-making, the work uses repetition and scale to produce a participatory, hypnotic environment. Read our interview with MSCHF to find out more about their art.
The installation also marks the official opening of The Wang Contemporary, founded by Ying and Alexander Wang as a platform dedicated to Asian and Asian-American creativity across art, design, music, and performance. Housed in a historic Chinatown building deeply rooted in the neighborhood’s cultural fabric, the space positions itself as both guardian of heritage and incubator of forward-thinking experimentation.
