This interview has been collected and condensed by Kelly Lin-Kremer.
Class of 2023, History of Science
Tell me about yourself, where you grew up, and what you're doing now.
I grew up in Beijing, China, and I came to the States at fifteen for high school. Now I’m in Los Angeles, making art with game engine and 3D software.
What led you to history of science?
I came to Princeton with the conviction that I was going to study visual art because I wanted to be an artist. But my first semester, I took a class with Michael Gordin on History of Contemporary Science because I had always loved reading about science and how important discoveries were made.
I went into his class thinking that was what I was going to get, but he just completely rewired my brain. Instead of looking at the history of science from the perspective of what individuals did and thought about, we looked at the history of knowledge from societal and economic perspectives.
He asked us questions that I thought were crazy to ask. He wanted us to critique the peer review system and the Nobel Prize system, and to think about how they impact how science is done. He also got us to think about the PR issue in certain scientific disciplines because of the amount of resources that they need to mobilize.
Then I took a year off after freshman year to pursue the things I wanted to learn in art, and I ended up naturally working with my scientist/technologist friends on projects where I needed to come up with visual illustrations of their imaginations and their theories.
It was during my gap year that I realized I needed to study history of science to have the conceptual tools to become the kind of artist I wanted to be. I knew how I wanted to practice art, but I had no idea how to really rigorously think about sciences and technologies, so that's how I ended up majoring in history of science.
What were some other memorable courses and professors in history?
When I signed up for Erika Milam’s class HIS 394: History of Ecology and Environmentalism[1], I thought it would be about learning how certain disciplines came about and changed over time, but what I really took away from that class was that when we talk about nature, we're actually talking about how we see other humans.
I also took Professor Katya Guenther’s class Broken Brains, Shattered Minds. Every week, we read secondary literature about one kind of psychiatric illness, and we would also read what patients wrote about their own experiences. Every week when I was doing the reading, I got more confused about what a mental illness was. Especially for bipolar disorder, when I read how patients said they felt more alive and more themselves when they were in their manic episodes, I thought, I don’t know how I would be a doctor in that case, because maybe I should just let them be whatever they want to be. But in this case what they identified with was categorized as part of their illness, as an anomaly.
I also took a history of Chinese medicine class with Professor He Bian called Medicine and Society in China: Past and Present. I learned new things every single week from that class about how people approached medicine at each time period in the 2,000 years of Chinese history. Everyone knows that traditional Chinese medicine operates so differently from modern Western medicine, which developed from the ancient Greek tradition. But I didn’t know how to talk about what made them different philosophically. What we learned showed me that they originated from different ways of seeing and thinking about the cosmos. There’s a very organic, correlative view of the cosmos embedded in Chinese thinking that shaped how medicine was done and practiced.
How would you describe to someone what history of science is?
There are a few different ways I use to describe what this discipline is to people. One thing that I say sometimes is, I feel like it's a materially grounded way of looking at intellectual history and the history of ideas. But instead of only reading the text of philosophers and theorists from the past, you’re also looking at what’s going on in their society, where they were and where they went, what kind of training they got. What was the material culture at the time? You can take very different perspectives, but you have to be grounded in something more than just what this person thought. You have to talk about what was behind their thoughts that enabled them to inquire and make knowledge the way they did.
History is kind of like a science because there are real facts and truths to be excavated, even as you also know you can’t excavate everything that happened. So you try your best to get closer to what really happened. It's not just you expressing a certain opinion.
Tell me about your thesis.
I wrote my thesis on the first two years of the Arctic Research Lab, from 1947–1949, in Point Barrow, Alaska, which is one of the northernmost parts of Alaska. Specifically, I focused on P.F. Scholander, who was one of the seven scientists that were part of the initial team for this lab. That sounds extremely specific, but in the beginning my question for this project was very broad: I wanted to know about the origin of Arctic science.
Arctic science in the United States began in anticipation of the Cold War with the Soviet Union. In 1945 and 1946, the U.S. military began to realize that we knew nothing about the northern part of our territory. What if there was an air strike or a polar battle? We wouldn’t be prepared for that.
So they started talking about setting up a lab in Alaska. It was out of this strategic military context that scientists who were not interested in war, and many of whom were not even Americans, were given the resources to go to the Arctic and study things that probably had nothing to do with preparing for war.
P.F. Scholander in particular was an example of this. He's a Norwegian who just wanted to study plants and animals and how physiological phenomena could happen in extremely cold conditions. He wanted to know how some of them could be frozen in the winter and then thaw out and come alive in the summer.
Part of his research from this time ended up being foundational to the study of glaciology. He realized that you can use ice to figure out the history of atmospheric conditions if you take samples from really deep ice cores. People didn’t start doing this until 10 years later, but he figured it out just because he was studying physiological phenomena in low temperature. He had this childlike curiosity about the world, and it was such a contrast to the broader environment that enabled his research in the U.S.
I wrote each chapter of my thesis at a different scale. The first chapter was about how the lab came about amidst this broad, strategic context and how cartographically, the Arctic was very much uncharted for the U.S. The second chapter was at an organizational level about how this lab was set up and what it was for. It was basic science, but for strategic purposes with military funding. But the scientists did not want to do anything with the military, and so they had all of these debates and misunderstandings. And then the third chapter was on the individual level, about how this specific scientist was doing his own work.
What have you been doing since you graduated?
I did a fellowship with the Steve Jobs Archive, which was an amazing opportunity for me to make the art that I want to make without any restriction. I have been making a game with a programmer and game designer that puts a lot of my learning from history of science into practice.
I combine two concepts in this game: one is highly futuristic and technological, and the other is ancient and philosophical. It's inspired by a diagram called the Chart of the Inner Landscape, which I learned from my history of Chinese medicine class. It’s a Taoist diagram of the human body, and you’re supposed to visualize this when you meditate. I’m making my own version of that diagram and connecting the human body to the planet’s breath by thinking about how carbon is circulated on Earth and how people are coming up with technologies to extract carbon from the air and convert it into other things. In the game, you can practice a different kind of technology where your breathing changes the environment, and you can think about yourself as the planet.

A still image from the game, The Inner Carbon Classic. Image credit: Wendi Yan.
I am also a finalist for the VH award by the Hyundai Motor Group, an award for Asian media artists, so I am going to make a short art film. My proposal for that was a fictional story inspired by a handful of specific moments in the last few centuries when Chinese and Western knowledge systems came into contact and experienced various frictions for one reason or another. The film will juxtapose the epistemic vision and imaginaries between Europe and China at the height of the Enlightenment.
I was also commissioned by the Future Humans group at the Berggruen Institute to make digital artwork. The projects touch on fundamental questions about life and humanity, and I love that scientific research, humanistic inquiry, and artistic expression get to be highly intertwined at Future Humans.
I’m starting to write for publications too. Back in the spring, I wrote an article published by Asimov Press that was about how Artemisinin, a malaria drug, was discovered in China during the Cultural Revolution by merging Eastern and Western medicine. To my surprise, that was really well-received.
I'm obviously not operating on the level of a Ph.D. and excavating first-hand materials and going super deep into things, but I'm happy to play the intermediary role of someone who got this amazing training from Princeton to know how and where to look for sources, how to think about what I’m reading and pull multiple threads together into an essay or artwork that’s more easily digestible to a broad audience.

Wendi Yan spoke at Gray Area Festival 10 in San Francisco. Photo credit: Barak Sharma
Is there any advice that you would give to someone thinking about majoring in history of science?
I want to get as many people as possible to study history of science. Everybody I have met post-graduation, it doesn't matter if it's a tech person, startup founder, artists, or writers, when I tell them that I studied history of science, their eyes light up. They're like, gosh, I wish I could have studied that in college. I feel so much gratitude about the education I was able to get at Princeton, especially with history of science. All of the history professors I had at Princeton were so amazing, and they were all so ready to help you if you needed their help, so you should just talk to them.
The only advice I can give is focus on your work, do the readings, and maybe read even more outside the syllabi, because it's such a precious time where everything is there to encourage you to think deeper and learn more. It will be hard to come across a place like that in the future. Cherish the time you have right now. I miss it a lot.
[1] This course has since been renamed HIS 394: Thinking with Nature: Histories of Ecology & Environmentalism.
