Transcendence

Curatorial essay by Helena Jin

July 2026

As in the philosophy of the I-Ching [易经], the world is not an empty abstraction, but a living structure of patterns through which all things transform. At a moment when attention is increasingly pulled outward by speed, image, and instability, exhibition “Transcendence” turns inward, inviting viewers to explore within for the subtle flow of energy that connects body, mind, and the natural world. Bringing together painting and sculpture by Tianshu Zhang[张天舒], Xian Tao[陶显], and Gloria Fan Duan[樊段晓春], the exhibition considers abstraction not as a rejection of form, but as a way of approaching what cannot be fully represented: spirit, dream, memory, and the quiet forces that shape both human and natural existence. Through bodies, imagined organisms, and reconstructed botanical forms, Transcendence explores the traces of inner energy moving between consciousness and the unconscious, creating a path for viewers to enter a realm of inner light, meditation, and spiritual perception.

Tianshu Zhang’s paintings unfold at the threshold between dream, body, and inner energy. Across the body of work presented in Transcendence, the shifting relationship between body and mind reveals the artist’s sustained exploration of this subject.

Rather than depicting the body as a fixed anatomical structure, Zhang allows it to emerge as a vessel: spines, limbs, hands, organs, and embryonic forms surface only partially, as if recalled from a dream or sensed from within. In two slightly earlier works The Vas and As if it were a Silent Name, flesh, spirit, and Qi appear entangled and inseparable, merging into one another while emitting a mysterious, almost alchemical glow within luminous fields of ochre, violet, blue, and pale flesh tones. In the more recent works, the exploration of the body and energy becomes more pronounced. In Where We Recognize Each Other No.1 and Where We Recognize Each Other No.2, the entire pictorial field transforms into an abstracted body, where freely flowing colors become traces of Qi in motion, connecting the interior and exterior dimensions of body and spirit. In Opal, this energy seems to overflow outward with greater force, radiating beyond the kneeled form and into the surrounding space and refracting the iridescent light of the opal gemstone.

As viewers encounter these works, their consciousness seems to drift with the movement of Zhang’s brushwork and color, as though entering the artist’s dreamscape or following the wandering thoughts of meditation. Her paintings move between intimacy and cosmology, evoking the body not only as a site of memory and sensation, but also as a conduit through which consciousness passes between the visible and the unseen. Within the exhibition, Zhang’s works anchor Transcendence in the experience of embodiment, proposing that spiritual perception begins not by leaving the body, but by listening to the subtle energies moving through it.

Tao Xian’s paintings approach transcendence through the psychic life of nature. Drawing from Daoist philosophy, Jungian psychology, and botanical and marine forms, Tao creates luminous semi-abstract worlds in which plants, underwater organisms, and celestial landscapes become vessels for spiritual perception. The plants and organisms she paints originate from real species, images, and stories, which the artist then recreates through research and imagination.

In Tempered Light No. 1, the Queen of the Light flower opens like a quiet shrine, its yellow-green petals and red tendrils holding light in a softened, inward glow. The phrase “tempered light” in the title is derived from Dao De Jing [道德經]: “blunt its sharpness, untangle its knots, temper its light, and become one with the dust.” It suggests the restraint of one’s brilliance, the calming of disturbance, and the harmonizing of one’s inner radiance with the world. The work therefore does not suggest a movement from darkness toward awakening, but rather an already settled state of calm: light is tempered, absorbed, and quietly held within the form of the flower. The Queen of the Light flower also carries a Buddhist resonance, as well as from the painting’s quiet radiance and devotional stillness, which evoke a meditative state in which the mind rests in balance and coexists harmoniously with all things.

This inward light descends into the oceanic darkness in Sea Angel No.II, where an undersea organism becomes an ambiguous presence between marine life, plant, and apparition, suspended in a fluid space that recalls the unconsciousness. Filtered through imagination and personal reconstruction, these natural forms also become psychological landscapes, where the external world is transformed through memory and intuition. This process resonates with Carl Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious: a shared psychic realm in which certain symbols and archetypal images recur across individual experience. Rather than presenting nature as scientific observation, Tao’s paintings attempt to activate this collective symbolic space, allowing her motifs to appear as images already half-known by the viewer, as if emerging from a dream shared between the individual psyche and the larger world. For instance, in In the Silent Stars, inspired by the atmosphere of Edvard Munch’s Norwegian fjords, the work places a plant-like organism within an imagined fjord at night. Curling stems rise from the dark shoreline beneath a luminous sky, while stars, water, mountains, and organic forms seem to vibrate within the same field of energy. The landscape is not simply a setting, but an extension of the organism’s inner life. Through this fusion of natural scenery and symbolic form, Tao suggests that the soul and the universe are not separate realms, but interconnected dimensions of the same living structure.

Gloria Fan Duan’s sculptural works extend Transcendence into the space between nature, preservation, and spiritual attention. Working with cast resin, glass, and 3D-printed flower stems, Duan recreates flowers, leaves, and stems as translucent botanical forms, arranging them in handmade glass vases that recall both scientific vessels and artistic floral arrangements that contain a ceremonial connotation. Conceived during her residencies at NARS Foundation, An And Foundation, and Fou Gallery’s Tulum Residency, these works draw from the language of Japanese ikebana while transforming floral arrangement into a meditation on care, fragility, and ecological memory.

The works presented here are rooted in specific botanical materials gathered across different sites, including New York City, Wassaic, and Tulum, and arranged in various sizes and styles. In Hybrid No. 011, dogwood flowers collected in New York rise from a misty blue vessel, like crystalline traces of a remembered bloom. In Hybrid No. 012, peony flowers from Wassaic and the stamen of spider lily from Tulum are brought together into a single luminous flower, hovering above its glass vase as though caught between apparition and offering. In Hybrid No. 010, tulip from New York City, peonies and spider lilies extend into a taller, more expansive arrangement, with its long translucent stems arc upward and outward, while the blossoms gather at different heights, creating a sense of quiet movement and suspended growth.

Across these works, flowers no longer appear as living plants, yet they continue to carry the trace of organic life. Their cool translucency gives the sculptures an almost spectral presence: preserved but not lifeless, artificial yet still charged with tenderness. Through processes of casting, 3D printing, reconstruction, and arrangement, Duan transforms nature into a state of quiet suspension. Her flowers hover between garden and laboratory, memory and material, existence and disappearance. Within Transcendence, they offer a material counterpart to Zhang’s bodily energies and Tao’s psychic organisms, suggesting that spiritual perception may also arise through acts of preservation and attention. In Duan’s work, the artificial does not oppose nature; rather, it becomes a vessel through which the memory of life, the vulnerability of ecological forms, and the quiet discipline of care may continue to resonate.

Through the body, the imagined organism, and the reconstructed garden, form becomes a threshold through which inner energy, memory, and spiritual perception may appear. Rather than presenting transcendence as escape, the exhibition understands it as a process of attunement, a way of sensing what exists beneath the visible. Installed as a quiet and immersive environment, Transcendence invites viewers to move through the works as they might move through a breath cycle, a dream, or a moment of meditation, entering a space where the visible world opens onto its unseen dimensions. In this suspended space, transcendence becomes a quiet practice of returning to the energies that bind the self to the world.