(New York, NY) Threshold in Relations presents materially diverse works by five artists and examines how these practices generate relations at the very limits of perception, reevaluating the assumptions of scripted engagement in the context of aesthetic experience. “Threshold phenomena” describe sudden shifts in which minimal changes in sensory input precipitate a disproportionate transformation of experience. Relations are most powerfully formed at perceptual thresholds—moments of visual, emotional, or multisensory saturation in which vision, attention, or affect destabilize and must reorganize, pressing us against a limit and compelling a recalibration of our engagement with the work.
Thresholds function as zones of emergence—fragile, volatile, and generative. High-saturation color drives the visual system toward overload, producing afterimages that bleed beyond the object; fragmented structures destabilize spatial orientation; poetic imagery oscillates between clarity and elusiveness, tracing thresholds where meaning flickers; mirrored self-portraits fracture psychic coherence and unsettle self-perception; suspended mechanized figures interrupt embodied perception, defining thresholds where material presence becomes uncertain. At such thresholds, various conceptual and visual relations and paradigm shifts arise through negotiating one’s own sensory and cognitive limits, as instability demands the continual recalibration of perceptual and emotional engagement.
Each artist articulates a distinct form of perceptual and experiential thresholds, generating encounters that operate at the limits of perception, affect, and spatial coherence. Zihan Cui’s paintings employ highly saturated hues to probe the threshold between optical and spatial perception, exhausting the eye’s cones. His works capture a state of perpetual becoming, turning seeing into a pursuit rather than possession—a threshold where the image is sought but never fully claimed. Yuyu He’s sculptural practice, rooted in architectural curvature, explores coherence within fragmentation, tracing how perception and memory navigate shifting realities. Her spatial interventions create thresholds in which uncertainty becomes insight, and relations emerge through the instability of space. Through allegorical imagery, Xiaohan Jiang constructs a spiritual realm where poetry acts as a vessel of transformation, chasing moments of identity, redemption, and belonging amid the interplay of personal memory and cultural dualities—thresholds where connection is sensed rather than defined. Aubrey LaDuke engages in self-portraiture at the threshold of perception and psyche, observing her own face in a mirror intuitively and obsessively. Her works manipulate, tear, mend, and reconstruct the self, activating relational tensions between hyper-recognition and estrangement, and embodying an unending process of becoming. Zhaochen Chen’s The Remains of Nothing mimics the human body through mechanical and mythical forms; its suspended figures hover between presence and absence, poised between pursuit and evasion, and reveal the fragility of identity within unstable relational states.
In the thresholds within these relations, perception trembles and connection flickers, revealing a site where meaning is never fixed but continuously unfolding. The works presented here do not merely depict thresholds; they engineer them, creating encounters at their most charged and transformative. At the threshold between coherence and fragmentation, familiarity and disorientation, sensation has not yet consolidated into emotion, and perception has not yet stabilized. These suspended moments dissolve into intensity, saturation, and uncertainty, where relationality emerges through active negotiation of sensory and cognitive limits. Thresholds are experienced not as passive states but as charged sites where spatial and emotional registers converge, enacting connections that are continually formed, unsettled, and renewed.
Exhibition Dates
December 12 – 17, 2025
Opening Reception
December 12, 2025 | 6 – 8 pm
Curator
Fanfan Yuxuan FAN
Artist
Zhaochen Chen, Zihan Cui, Yuyu He, Xiaohan Jiang, Aubrey LaDuke
Venue
Nguyen Wahed
504E 12th St, New York, New York 10009
About the Curator
FanfanYuxuan FAN holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Arts Administration from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and KEDGE Business School in Paris, and is currently pursuing her M.A. in Visual Arts Administration at New York University. Based in New York, she is committed to supporting post-90s artists through nomadic curatorial projects. She has served as Gallery and VIP Relations Coordinator for the 9th edition of the Asia NOW Paris Art Fair and as Gallery Assistant at Eli Klein Gallery in New York. She has curated group shows: Subcurrents (Shanghai), Threshold in Relations (Nguyen Wahed, New York), and Soft Instructions (Art Cake, Brooklyn).
(text & photo courtesy of FanFlus)
