(New York, NY)
To elongate: to stretch indefinitely, to arrive nowhere;
To entwine: to tangle ceaselessly, to resolve nothing.
FanFlus and CAAC(Chinese American Arts Council | Gallery 456) are pleased to present a duo exhibition featuring Sangmin Lee and Yixuan Wu. Their practices bring together through a shared attunement: to gravitate toward what slips just behind. Their works hold and fail simultaneously, structures that coil and unsettle, materials that carry meaning that thins at the edges. Nostalgia haunts here: the stronger the longing, the emptier the memory it draws from; like the more Odysseus yearns, the more he forgets. These two artists’ works inhabit an interval between elongation and entwinement, depicting the stretch that remains held and entangled.
Sangmin Lee’s practice begins where systems fall apart—along fraying edges, makeshift supports, and acts of repair. Working with peripheral materials such as joint compound, window screen mesh, and rebar tie-wire, he cultivates forms that gradually depart their narratives: self-entangling, interdependent, teetering at the threshold between collapse and continuation. His sculpture grows in interlaced configurations, reaching with a compulsive persistence, as if stretching without end. Images extend this logic across surfaces, as memory landscapes dissolve at their borders. What remains is a faint structural residue: traces of something that thinned too far to hold itself. Here, to elongate is to extend against the inevitable drift of untethering.
Yixuan Wu approaches the same threshold through domestic care infrastructures. She reconstructs “questioned comforts” with deformed support structures functional in appearance, destabilized in effect. Working from sensory-derived material vocabularies, Yixuan embeds assistive gestures into everyday, domestic objects, where soft resistance and bodily negotiation reiterate acts of care. What holds also withholds. In these familiar domestic structures, she introduces irregular glass orbs that lock onto the sculptures’ joints. Soothing yet disquieting, they carry the sensual charge of bodily gestures: the in-between gestures of care and dependency. In dialogue with Sangmin’s interlaced sculptures, Yixuan’s works occupy the margins of the space, where attachment is felt. To entwine is never to resolve: it binds without stabilizing, holds without settling, remaining in contact with what cannot be reconciled: care and doubt, support and unease, dwelling together.
What Sangmin and Yixuan share is a refusal of arrival. Neither seeks to dwell in the fully recovered past, as in Proust’s madeleine, where memory is momentarily restored. Instead, they sustain the presence of elongation and entwinement itself. For what nostalgia reaches toward is perhaps not the past itself, but the sensation of having once been nearer to it. Their work remains within that reach: suspended, persistent, pending, attuned to the ephemerality of memories, where proximity is felt but fails to be retained.
Exhibition Dates
April 10 – April 24, 2026
Opening Reception
April 10, 2026 | 6 – 9PM
Curator
Fanfan Yuxuan Fan
Artists
Sangmin Lee
Yixuan Wu
Venue
Chinese American Arts Council | Gallery 456
456 Broadway, 3rd Floor, New York, NY 10013
About the Artists
Sangmin Lee
Sangmin Lee is a Korean Canadian artist whose work spans image, sculpture, and installation. They have exhibited internationally in Canada, South Korea, Japan, and Ecuador, and participated in residencies at the NARS Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and NAVE Residency in Ecuador. Lee received an MFA in Expanded Media from Columbia University in 2023 and a BFA in Sculpture and Installation from OCAD University. Their work has been supported by the Canada Council for the Arts, Ontario Arts Council, and Toronto Arts Council. They are a 2025 Bronx Museum AIM Fellow. Currently they are based in New York.
Yixuan Wu
Yixuan Wu is a visual artist who currently lives and works in New York. She received an MFA degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a BFA degree in Photography at Rhode Island School of Design.
Drawing from the ungraspable yet familiar everyday situations, she reconstructs and reconfigures vignettes of domesticities into substructures. Her sculptural arrangements address the subtle gestures that endow the objects with sensual qualities, the incongruous systems, and the uncanny. Embedding personal narratives into multiple cultural sources, Wu’s practice investigates fragmented recollections through layered intricacies. Wu’s works have been the subject of exhibitions at the Yeh Art Gallery at St. John’s University, Chashama, Lenfest Center for the Arts, CICA Museum, and SOMArts Cultural Center. She has been an artist in residency at MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, High Desert Test Sites, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and NARS Foundation.
About the Curator
Fanfan Yuxuan Fan graduated with an M.A. in Visual Arts Administration at New York University. She holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Arts Administration from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and KEDGE Business School. She has worked for Asia NOW Paris Art Fair in Paris, Eli Klein Gallery, and Marc Straus Gallery in New York. Her curatorial approach is grounded in artist-practice–driven methodology, spotlighting emerging artists and examining the shared challenges and aspirations of her generation through nomadic, site-responsive projects. She had curated exhibitions that include: Subcurrents (Shanghai), Threshold in Relations (Nguyen Wahed, New York), and Soft Instructions (Art Cake, Brooklyn), To Elongate, To Entwine (China American Arts Council | Gallery 456, New York). Her curation has been featured in Whitehot Magazine, Hot Coffee Conversations, DART Magazine, TUSSLE Magazine, and LI TANG.
(text & photo courtesy of FanFlus & CAAC )
