Edible Sculptures and Snap-Button Armatures Take Over Philip Johnson's Wolfhouse

Visitors to Philip Johnson's 1949 Wolfhouse in Newburgh, New York, ate the artwork. On October 10th, 2026, Studio No.29 presented Island on Land – A Landscape in Five States, a site-specific exhibition where edible sculptures, moving images, and modular metal and acrylic structures filled the modernist home's rooms, terrace, and grounds.

Artists Lang Lang, founder of Studio No.29, and Xie Peng developed the project as a spatial translation of Lang's 2024 experimental short film of the same name. The show's mechanism is simple and deliberate: durable industrial hardware carries ephemeral, consumable media. Guests moved through the estate in a non-linear sequence, eating the perishable elements while the fabricated armatures stayed in place.

What filled the house?

The exhibition mapped five thematic fragments from the film into physical works spread across the property:

• Black Pearls — textured chocolate spheres filled with grape jelly and jasmine cream, set into spiral spherical recesses on The Panel, a mirrored stainless steel tray by Xie Peng that reflected the living room as pieces were removed.
• A Drop Within — a translucent sphere with a deep-red core, supported by The Stands, circular acrylic panels and curved metal joints fastened with fashion-derived snap buttons rather than threaded hardware.
• Red Soil — an edible terrain of buckwheat, fig, and chocolate on The Table, a two-panel aluminum surface joined with snap fasteners and red steel stabilization rods, placed on the patio framing views of the Hudson River.
• White Trace — rice-paper vessels holding watermelon and perilla syrups, set into circular acrylic cutouts in The Partition, a folding, reconfigurable aluminum screen.
• A Quiet Turn — biodegradable door handles positioned directly on the turf, gradually blending into the lawn.

The contrast is the point. A 1949 modernist house built on permanence and glass hosted works designed to disappear — condensation on a translucent surface, syrup in rice paper, chocolate melting against mirrored steel.

Why snap buttons instead of bolts?

The joinery runs through the show. Xie Peng's armatures — The Panel, The Stands, The Table, The Partition — use snap fasteners borrowed from fashion and red steel rods, not welds or threaded hardware. That choice keeps the structures reconfigurable and demountable, matching the film-to-space translation the studio describes: five states, assembled and disassembled, with the architecture of Wolfhouse as the fixed frame.

David Luo photographed the exhibition, documenting the works against both the interior and the surrounding landscape.

Project details

• Name: Island on Land – A Landscape in Five States
• Designer: Studio No.29 (@no29)
• Lead designers: Lang Lang and Xie Peng
• Location: Wolfhouse, Newburgh, New York, US
• Photographer: David Luo (@davidluophoto)

The one-day presentation positions Studio No.29 within a growing strand of food-based installation art — and shows Johnson's 77-year-old residence still absorbing experimental programming without alteration to the building itself.