Exhibition Review: “To Elongate, To Entwine” at Chinese American Arts Council, SoHo (April 10 - May 1, 2026)

Installation view of To Elongate, To Entwine, New York. Artists Sangmin Lee, Yixuan Wu. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.

By LIAM OTERO May 13, 2026

An important criterion for what makes an artwork or an exhibition great is if the works actively stimulate one’s visual-conceptual engagement. The poetically titled, two-person exhibition To Elongate, To Entwine was a compelling example for how artists can adroitly position their works in an aesthetic language that on one end retains certain recognizable formal elements drawn from the real world and on the other end leave plenty of room for unbridled imagination. To Elongate, To Entwine featured works by the Korean-Canadian artist Sangmin Lee and the New York-based artist Yixuan Wu. Held between April 10 and May 1, this show was curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan at the Chinese American Arts Council in SoHo as part of her nomadic curatorial collective FanFlus.

Yixuan Wu, untitled, 2026, ink on silk. 10 x 6 x 1 inches / 25 x 15 x 2.5cm. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.

There is a ghostliness to Lee and Wu’s works denoted by their predominantly pale, white / whitish-gray appearances that further accentuated the already whitened gallery with a somberness. Flowers are recurring motifs in their works, to which Lee and Wu seem to focus on its metaphorical associations with transience and the cycles of birth-growth-death-decay. Wu contributed multiple ink on silk images of entangled floral bulbs that are completely washed of vibrancy because of an overall palish tonality suggestive of gradual wilting. Lee’s hanging rebar sculptures proffer a spatial intervention with their partially fallen apart flowers that seem to hold onto their stringed supports practically by a thread. Unlike Wu’s two-dimensional ink images, Lee’s flowers are totally devoid of any color, thus putting them much closer to the end of a flower’s life cycle. 

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 the artist and FanFlus.

As humans, our brains are hardwired to make sense out of objects or sights that may seem unfamiliar to our vision. When dealing with the uncanny, there is an even greater push or jolt to the mind’s eye of discerning meaning from imagery that possesses a semblance of the familiar between the unfamiliar. 

Wu’s sculptures present themselves more as functional objects rather than purely artistic works based on their constructed forms comprising utilitarian materials whose curatorial placement seems dependent on the gallery architecture. The revelation wanders off (2026) is a three-part piece featuring two beams where one crosses over from a corner of the wall before abruptly being separated by a gap from a much shorter beam. On the floor is a hand-blown, amorphously-shaped glass that leans directly against the wall. It is as if some kind of rupture occurred that caused the separation of the two beams from one another, perhaps implied by the intrusive presence of the bulbous glass. A similar strangeness occurs in held in a lean (2026) which depicts a useless cradle that is unnaturally too short with no bottom support, only the recurrence of another hand-blown glasswork inside, possibly a remnant of a once-reliable object of purpose.

Sangmin Lee, Moon Rabbit, 2025, ink and joint compound on canvas. 43 x 16.5 inches / 109 x 42cm. Courtesy of the artist and FanFlus.

Lee, too, switches gears between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional like Wu as they created an inkwork over canvas that competes within itself for a recognition that it is either purely hidden figuration or simply non-representationalism. Moon Rabbit (2025) has a vertical orientation akin to traditional Korean ink landscapes suggested by the elongated, wispy strokes recalling high mountain peaks connected by deep valleys. Conversely, another valid way of processing the image is to ascertain a smattering of blackened ink strokes that appear in greater intensity in the top diagonal half of the canvas bookended by a more austere bottom half. All of this becomes a yin-yang of fullness and emptiness, place and void, white and black.

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 the artist and FanFlus.

The dualism of Wu and Lee are apropos for To Elongate, To Entwine as their art not only appear to be in dialogue with each other, but function as two sides of the same coin. The purpose of this exhibition is not to detect a literalism from either of the artists’ works, but to seriously contemplate how their manipulation of material forms and allusions to nature or other aspects of the real world can produce an emotional resonance. Their shared fixation on aged objects tinged with the hues of days, months, or years gone by is demonstrative of where conceptualism can convey a novel approach to an emotional longing or sedate ennui as opposed to an academic sterility. WM