Curated by Xiao, Horizons in Rhyme brings together Sao Tanaka, Shuai Yang, and Tina Lam in a temporal configuration of ongoing artistic practices. Throughout the collective residency, the gallery space becomes a shared studio and a site of play, experimentation, and exchange. Rather than moving toward a predetermined exhibition, the artists allow their work to develop through the circumstances of making together. The open-studio format embraces continual change, locating artistic creation within exchanges among artists, materials, spatial conditions, and other human and nonhuman actors. The gallery space is not simply a setting for this process but one of its materials and subjects. Its floor, walls, dimensions, and existing irregularities enter directly into the work's formation.
The project’s conceptual center lies in the relations through which “the human” and “nature” are continually produced. “Landscape” is understood not as a preexisting scene, but as an effect of a viewing position that produces both a seemingly self-contained observer and a world arranged before them as an external view. The works do not claim to stand outside this apparatus. Instead, they work through and unsettle it, tracing how the division is maintained and displaced as land becomes desirable property, space becomes calculable through various measures, and the unknown is approached at the limits of perception.
Tanaka approaches landscape through two distinct but related processes. In one, she draws imagery from a real estate promotional catalog in which expansive views of land appear alongside properties offered for sale. The landscape is presented not as a neutral image of nature but as a construction of desire, value, and ownership. In another process, Tanaka lays paper directly on the floor and allows ink to spread across its surface. The floor’s irregularities intervene in the movement of the ink, registering the material conditions of the ground within the resulting forms.
Yang lays paper directly across the floor, mapping the gallery space through physical contact rather than prior measurement. She then folds the paper into a sculptural object, transforming a surface that occupies the space into a form that can be handled and displaced. The process brings attention to the instability of supposedly neutral systems of measurement: every map, unit, and standard depends upon a particular body, scale, and position. Smaller sculptures placed throughout the space extend her investigation of multiplicity and interrelationship, bringing body, object, and architecture into changing relations.
Lam works with large-scale, spontaneous ink drawings on silk and a wooden frame constructed on-site. Moving among drawing, sculpture, and temporary architecture, she explores how silk might occupy the space and mediate among its floor, walls, and the other artists’ works. Rather than attempting to represent or explain what lies beyond human perception, Lam’s work traces the contours of the unknowable. It locates an existential feeling within the experience of not knowing: an acceptance of perceptual limits that allows humility and awe to take the place of mastery before the vastness and interconnectedness of the universe.
Across the residency, the gallery space is repeatedly encountered and remade through each artist’s process. Within these shared spatial and material conditions, the three practices rhyme through proximity, repetition, and difference. After all, no single vantage point can exhaust what we call nature, which exceeds our understanding even as it constitutes us from within.