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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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siding with things

06.17 – 07.09.2023

Hyoju Cheon
Yixuan Wu


In the exhibition, Hyoju and Yixuan materialize the inherent forces and gestures—gravity, elasticity, and hapticity—to inquire into our intimate relationship with space and the in-between state of familiarity and strangeness. Through using tactile materials, their works trace interactions between objects and human experiences and the ever-shifting connections between senses and things.

Hyoju Cheon’s kinetic installations explore the entanglement of mechanical and human movements. Animated by motors, her works swing, spin, produce vibrations, and leave marks on the gallery’s walls. By interrupting, triggering, and engaging in motions of the human bodies, Hyoju draws attention to the unnoticed, unexpected, and usually repetitive encounters between things and space. Soft materials are attached to the machine-driven wooden devices which encourages our bodily contact with the works.

Yixuan Wu’s sculptural arrangements deform a collection of everyday objects and subvert their general purposes through sometimes humorous interventions. The transformation of objects suggests the ambiguities and possibilities of sensory experiences within interior spaces. In Yixuan’s works, hand-blown glass is trapped beneath, pressed against, or inserted into altered structures, visualizing the mismatched memories and distorted perceptions in a constructed home-like environment.

Hyoju Cheon is an explorer and interdisciplinary artist currently residing in New York. Her multimedia practice often casts a space, an object, or a body in motion, which responds to the conditions of a site. Her work documents bodies as they move through space, drawing their trajectories and archiving the material traces left behind. Hyoju has exhibited her works at Dongsomun, Meindo, Gallery Imazoo, and Gaon Gallery in Seoul; the Lenfest Center for the Arts, the Abrons Arts Center, Half Gallery, Chashama in New York, and among others.

Yixuan Wu is an artist currently living and working in New York. She received an MFA degree in Visual Arts at Columbia University in 2022 and a BFA degree in Photography at Rhode Island School of Design in 2019. 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 of sensual qualities, the incongruous systems, and the uncanny. Embedding personal narratives into multiple cultural sources, Yixuan’s practice investigates fragmented recollections through layered intricacies.

- Yindi Chen, June 2023


Curated by Yindi Chen

All photos courtesy of Subtitled NYC, New York