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Through a range of diverse collaborative relationships with artists and curators, Subtitled NYC presents interdisciplinary practices through exhibitions.
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Waxing Moons

10.30 – 11.08.2026

Hyeree Ro and Annie Ling

Curated by –Riley Yuen


Waxing Moons, featuring the work of Hyeree Ro and Annie Ling, was found in the moment of ferment.
Notably, this exhibition was amassed rather than created in the typical sense—not in the frenzy of art
making and installation plans towards a fixed deadline or the quest towards a single comprehensive
image, but in the careful accumulation of to-do lists, drawings, clerical work, and myriad photographs
that were produced in tandem. These are the preparatory materials and documentation of Ro’s
contribution to the Korean Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Liberation Space: Fortress/Nest, co-presented
with Goen Choi and curated by Binna Choi. Ro’s installation, titled Bearing, features eight stations
embodying efforts towards child-rearing and, by extension, nation-building: waiting, planning, sharing,
mourning, remembering, outlooking, mending, and living.

That exhibition is elsewhere. What we have here at Waxing Moons are experiments, inevitable failures,
the sediment of process, and afterimages. Once the work has been cleared out of the studio, the
Openings opened, and Dinners dinnered, what do we do with the rest?

The waxing moon increases in surface luminosity every night, seemingly ‘growing’ day by day, and is thus
steeped in rich romantic symbolism; new beginnings, hope, growth, etc. Waxing Moons brings to light
the in-between phase or transition space that led up to Ro’s Bearing. In addition to this allegorical
meaning, the title also references the organza wall that snakes around the Korean Pavilion’s space.
Paying homage to the over 3,000 individually waxed and stitched organza circles, the title retains the oily
materiality of the installation. As in the active verb tense of ‘waxing,’ this exhibition returns to labor and
the artists’s bodies, bringing attention to the process of making that is often eclipsed by the final
artwork. The running band of Ling’s photographs offer a visual, affective, and experiential viewpoint of
Bearing, while Ro’s materials, accumulated with an archival flair, constellate the ideas, anxieties, and
efforts that brought Bearing to life.

Waxing Moons substitutes sight with site. It holds at its core the photographs of Annie Ling who spent
several days at Liberation Space. In these photographs we see the pooling of sunlight in the Bearing
(Waiting Station) bowls, the diaphanous walls of Bearing (Living Station), and ghostly hands from beyond
the organza wall. Ling’s viewpoint and attention are placed centrally as the momentum and pacing of

Waxing Moons. Naturally, the exhibition meanders as Ling is repeatedly drawn back and forth between
stations to capture a splash of sunlight here, a smattering of shadows there. Much like the way that
sailors use the moon for wayfinding, an incandescent logic is revealed in Ling’s navigation of the
exhibition. Each individual image hardly offers a comprehensive view of Bearing, as is often the priority
in documentary and exhibition photography. In the hundreds, however, Ling’s photographs not only form
a multifaceted visual representation, but an experiential one. She reconstructs the act of viewing,
simulating the way that the eye is naturally drawn to the filtering of sun through a pink plastic bag, a
glint off a metal star, or across a waxen crater.

At the center of the gallery, Carry (2025) recalls a single-occupancy tent from Ro’s past, created in
response to the loss of her father. Similarly draped in waxed organza circles, the sculpture offers a
precedent to Bearing as the last work Ro completed before starting her Venice project. The peaked
shape of Carry is echoed in Subtitled NYC’s skylight immediately above it, while at the base of the
sculpture, a single channel work of Seoul’s sky faces that of New York’s, refracted and diffused through
the waxen fabric. A fallible reconstruction of a long-gone tent, Ro reminds us that time, like memory, is
an imperfect circle—akin to a waxing gibbous.

Ro and Ling work in the language of memory: snapshots, memorabilia, fragments, and halflives. These
images and materials are holons, something that is simultaneously whole and part of a whole. Together,
they assemble a micro-archive of experience and creation that seeks to glean something essential from
Bearing, exhibited 4,000 miles away. Since its inception, Bearing has entered into an international
curatorial framework and historical narrative. Bringing together Ro’s hands and Ling’s eyes, Waxing
Moons retrieves parts of Bearing from the penumbra: labor, experience, and feeling. Taken all together,
these materials and images attempt something akin to painting a portrait in the dark—or in the slight
light of a waxing moon.

- Riley Yuen



All photos courtesy of Subtitled NYC, New York