Soft Instructions, Hard Structures, ArtCake, New York

Installation view of Soft Instructions, New York. Artists: Yshao Lin, Gabriel Siams. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan FAN. Photo credit: Kon Zeng. Courtesy of FanFlus.

Author: Kun Sok

Published Sunday, February 1, 2026

Power doesn't need to shout anymore. It prefers to whisper through design and the language of care. Soft Instructions, curated by Fanfan Yuxuan FAN, treats intimacy less as a promise than as a condition where guidance can arrive gently and still leave an uneven residue. It begins with closeness and ends with a harder recognition. Voluntary participation does not guarantee equality, and softness can be the texture that makes the structure durable. 

Foucault helps, briefly. Power is as productive as it is repressive, training bodies and normalizing conduct through everyday techniques. Soft Instructions make those techniques feel ordinary. They become arrangements we enter willingly.

Yshao Lin unsettles the belief that reversal equals repair. In Not Even God Can Judge Me, the suit reads as authority. It signals professionalism, class, and an institutional “standard” that carries power before anyone speaks. Yshao uses that clarity to stage a reversal as a test rather than a victory. The questions are procedural: who sets the terms, who is exposed, who absorbs risk, and who controls what remains after the scene ends?

That afterlife is where Yshao is most precise. The camera is not simply a record. It converts a private arrangement into an image with a public career. Power doesn’t disappear; it redistributes, migrating from the encounter into the frame that survives it. Even the confessional undertone, desire spoken in the shadow of Christian guilt, doesn’t seek absolution so much as reveal authority relocating from theology to optics and from sin to visibility. When the Cicadas Cry offers a spare echo of the logic. We see broken, gilded bodies and a looping hum, as if what survives is not emergence but the vibration it leaves behind. 

Installation view of Soft Instructions, New York. Artists: Yshao Lin, Soomin Kang. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan FAN. Photo credit: Kon Zeng. Courtesy of FanFlus.

Soomin Kang approaches the problem from the opposite end. She is less concerned with erotic protocol than with the everyday machinery of discipline that arrives dressed as care. In Soft Exit, gym grip handles, tools of repetition and training, become something that resembles a swing. The work borrows the visual language of ease, then denies it in practice. That bait and refusal continue across Toys For. Play is suggested through scale and placement, but it is never comfortably delivered. Functions stay unstable, surfaces are hard and metallic, and the body learns to pause before it touches. Soomin stages intimacy as a lure. Familiar forms invite closeness, only to reveal the constraints built into the invitation.

The Sinks continues this logic through a different kind of “support.” Soomin reconstructs parts of Soft Exit’s packaging into bodily holds, as if the material meant to protect the work now returns as a device that protects the body. The curves feel borrowed from products designed to meet skin and posture, then hardened into structures that insist on a certain angle of use. The weight-lifting bar reads like a spine or brace. It makes support look neutral, even helpful, while quietly prescribing how a body should stand, lean, or recover. Here, care does not arrive as comfort. It arrives as form. It holds, and in holding, it instructs.

Installation view of Soft Instructions, New York. Artists: Yshao Lin, Soomin Kang. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan FAN. Photo credit: Kon Zeng. Courtesy of FanFlus.

Gabriel Siams’s Madonna’s Runway is the show’s most distilled articulation of power as perception. A church sort of presence: what can be seen, said, confessed, and forgiven. Gabriel refuses that visual economy and leaves only resonance- heels echoing through Sint-Pauluskerk. You want to decide what kind of body produces that sound; you want gender to settle; you want the trace to become an image. That urge to classify becomes the work’s pressure. 

Gabriel Siams, Madonna’s Runway, 2025. 4K video and stereo sound, 50’’. Courtesy of the artist.

In a space invested in obedience, the heel’s echo is an elegant disturbance. It marks a presence registered without permission to appear. The reference to confessional sculptures whose figures lack feet, with angels exempt, indexes an embodied hierarchy. Some bodies are permitted wholeness, and others are assigned absence. Gabriel answers that hierarchy with audibility, not image. 

This is where Fan’s curatorial framing lands with its cleanest force: asymmetry persists in the zones we associate with choice—desire, play, devotion—not because we are duped, but because “softness” is how structure becomes livable, and how it slips past our defenses. Fan’s bright, restrained installation, and its tight sequencing across photography, soft sculpture, and video, make “pureness” read as a method rather than décor.

What lingers after Soft Instructions is a question that refuses to flatter the viewer: when guidance feels gentle, how often do we mistake format for freedom? 

SOFT INSTRUCTIONS is on view at ArtCake, New York, through February 1, 2026.

About the author: Kun Sok is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and writer interested in relationships and collaboration. She creates rule-based participatory projects that invite non-artists to participate in making through small, direct encounters. Her writing has appeared in Two Coats of Paint and Tussle Magazine.

Artists Yshao Lin and Soomin Kang. Curator Fanfan Yuxuan FAN. Installation view of Soft Instructions, New York. Photo credit: Weican Wang. Courtesy of FanFlus.