Seeking the Light, Review for “To Elongate, To Entwine”
Installation view of To Elongate, To Entwine, New York, artists Sangmin Lee, Yixuan Wu. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Photo credit Weican Wang. Courtesy of FanFlus.
by Jeff Crosby
Etiolation is a condition in plants triggered by a lack of sunlight. The plant’s limbs will stretch outwards, its leaves growing pale and sparse as it elongates its body in search of light to fuel photosynthesis. A plant in this state appears precarious and fragile, but this is also a demonstration of strength—of the plant’s ability to radically transform its own body to adapt to a harsh environment. This kind of contradiction is at the core of To Elongate, To Entwine, which opened at the Chinese American Art Council’s Gallery 456 on April 10, curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan and featuring the work of Sangmin Lee and Yixuan Wu.
Sangmin Lee’s Etiolation (Nostalgia without memory) 2022-2026 transforms this state into sculptural gesture with a spindly accumulation of wires covered in paper, ink, and joint compound, along with peach seeds and bronze fishbones, that stretches and twists as if seeking the light just outside the gallery door. Lee’s sculptural practice transforms ordinary and not-so-ordinary materials into things that grow and stretch and turn, threatening to break free from the precarious support provided by the wires that hold them up.
Support is also a central theme in Yixuan Wu’s recent sculptures. Rooted in the assistive fixtures and sensory stimulation activities of elder care spaces, everything is unobtrusive, made to provide comfort and support. It is also expertly crafted. But something is off. Each object feels like something we should recognize, but fail to, as if it is our own faculties that are failing us.
A bulb of hand-blown glass holds up one side of a rocking chair, appearing soft and gently reassuring, or perhaps about to pop and bring disaster. A set of railings bends down to accommodate a hunk of marble, or perhaps buckles under its weight. Furniture socks separating the railing from the ground are both comforting and slightly unsettling. The surfaces are often coated in seeds, grains, or powders that serve to soften the hard surfaces yet also introduce an element of disquiet. As she says, “the works reimagine the frustrations caused by the inability to interpret and give meanings to familiar surroundings.”
Curator Fanfan Yuxuan Fan deftly places these works in poetic dialogue across the small gallery space. Seen from the gallery entrance, one of Sangmin Lee’s spindly white sculptures rises up between a break in Yixuan Wu’s railing on the wall. Wu’s faint paintings of elongated flowers and leaves on semitransparent silk seem to join with Lee’s Etiolation in search of light. As Fan shared: "I want to linger on a refusal of arrival: nostalgia reaches toward the sensation of having once been nearer. Their works remain suspended, attuned to memory's ephemerality, where proximity is felt but never held."
There is a paradox of precarity and stability inherent to the work of both artists. Lee’s sculptural accumulations feel overextended, barely held up by the wires and improvised supports such as bronzed fishbones. Wu’s steady fixtures bend in soft resistance while hinting at a slow-moving collapse. Both are rooted in personal experience, which is perhaps why curator Fan has brought them together, and why they capture something of the zeitgeist today, with stock markets soaring amidst cratering employment and a smoldering affordability crisis. But there is also a sense of hope, a feeling that if we can just hold on, just stretch a little bit more, we will find that light just around the corner.
Jeff Crosby is a translator and curator focused on contemporary art from China. He served as Deputy Director of Contemporary Gallery Kunming from 2018 to 2024. He currently lives and works in New York, where he writes the newsletter Art in Translation.
Fanfan Yuxuan Fan is a curator and writer based in New York City. She has worked for Asia NOW Paris Art Fair in Paris, Eli Klein Gallery, and Marc Straus Gallery in New York. She has curated exhibitions that include: To Elongate, To Entwine (China American Arts Council | Gallery 456, New York), Soft Instructions (Art Cake, Brooklyn), Threshold in Relations (Nguyen Wahed, New York).
Installation view of To Elongate, To Entwine, New York_Artists Sangmin Lee, Yixuan Wu. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Photo credit Kon Zeng. Courtesy of FanFlus.