Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery

 Installation view of Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery, New York.

By FANFAN YUXUAN FAN June 12th, 2026

Show Me How to Fly Away is a group exhibition featuring nine artists from Shanghai, co-curated by Leo Yuan and Otto Neu, and co-presented by THE BLANC and Nan Ke Gallery. It is the first collaboration between the two galleries, arriving at a moment when the exchange between Asian art scenes and the West is running in both directions. Away from their original urban context, the works are given room to be encountered slowly, and reinterpretation or translation through a different cultural setting becomes part of the experience itself.

Installation view of Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery, New York.

That distance and timing are not incidental. The Chinese art market, after years of ascent, contracted sharply in the wake of the pandemic — and as one market tightened, galleries and artists began looking elsewhere. THE BLANC and Nan Ke Gallery, founded almost simultaneously in 2021 and 2022, are rooted in different urban and cultural soils yet converge around a shared commitment to early-career artists and critically engaged practices. THE BLANC operates from a "blank slate" ethos; Nan Ke Gallery is housed in a century-old lilong residence in Shanghai’s former French Concession, a neighborhood Otto Neu describes as Shanghai’s equivalent of New York’s Hell’s Kitchen, West Village and Greenwich Village combined: distinct in character, dense with creative energy, where the past is not backdrop but texture.

Tracing the arc across two decades, Otto Neu reflects with measured candor: between 2008 and 2019, the horizon appeared boundless. Since the pandemic, that momentum has gradually ebbed. For many international audiences, Chinese contemporary art may remain filtered through a handful of established names. Show Me How to Fly Away turns its attention elsewhere, to a younger generation of Shanghai-based artists whose practices are immediate, sharp-edged, and grounded in the present — artists for whom flying away is less escapism than a quiet insistence on widening the frame.

 
Panel discussion of Shanghai Stories. Joyce Chonghui Wu, Otto Neu, Leo Yuan. THE BLANC, New York.

 Panel discussion of Shanghai Stories. Otto Neu and Leo Yuan. THE BLANC, New York.

For curator Leo Yuan, the title Show Me How to Fly Away is deceptively simple, yet hard to translate. When the words come together, something poetic surfaces — a command, a joke, or a plea, escapist yet playful, mischievous and elusive. The nine artists approach this spirit from distinct angles, touching on urbanism, industrialization, time, and identity.

 
Otto Neu is stepping on Liu Xuan’s Sound is Fact, Music is Fiction #3 (2020). Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC, New York. Photo credit: Leah Ying Lin.

Liu Xuan's Sound is Fact, Music is Fiction #3 (2020) sets the tone. A dense cluster of black balloons, ensnared by steel wires, forms an inverted triangle anchored by a retired manhole cover from Beijing. When a viewer steps onto the cover, padlock-shaped bells shiver and ring; the balloons emit a low-friction sound, straining upward yet remain tethered. The metaphor of migration takes on a concrete, almost bodily form. Bai Mengfan's Asymmetrical Fountain Pools V (2025) and Nile VII (2026) approach the urban from a quieter angle: she renders ripples and shimmer of light on city pools and rivers, the landscape distorting beneath. Stillness and poetic suspension hover here, a quiet inquiry into how the real persists in an age of simulation. Joyce Chonghui Wu translates close observation of city life onto fabric. The Furcifer Labordii (2024) stitches overlooked fragments of Shanghai life into dense, intimate narratives, layering loose ends and traces of wandering across global cities into a private archive gathered in transit.

 Installation view of Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery, New York. Artists: Xie Linrou, Joyce Chonghui Wu, Bai Mengfan, Killion Huang.

Wu Muhan's Body (2025), composed of metal gaskets, brass, and iron, presents two organ-like objects that rotate around a central axis like clock hands. The work reconfigures industrial components between mechanical force and bodily energy, permanence and transience. Yang Di's video Safe Word (2020) imagines a journey to Mars, where bare bodies are repeatedly measured against a hyperreal, speculative landscape— clinical, precise, and faintly alienating. What becomes of human identity when the world we inherit no longer holds?

 Installation view of Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery, New York. Artists: Wu Muhan.

 
Installation view of Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery, New York. Artists: Killion Huang, Yu Wenjie, Zhou Meng, Xie Linrou, Bai Mengfan.
 

In Zhou Meng’s Sketches of Impression and Drama Show series (2023), figures dance across paper in light, spare ink — transparent, overlapping, catching the body mid-motion with weightless precision. Kuiper Sample No. 2 embeds a Claudiosaurus germani fossil: matter returned to dust, dreams still floating. Xie Lingrou's paintings capture glancing moments. In Preserved Traces (2025), two coupe glasses, said to have been molded from Marie Antoinette's breast, side by side, their silhouettes tinged with melancholy. Film stills, flowers, and portraits drift across her canvases, summoning memories. Fragility and resilience intertwine — time and living, flying away.  Yu Wenjie stitches cotton, linen, and elastic fabric into "sculptural quilting," each stitch repeated hundreds or thousands of times; the rhythm approaches meditation, revealing sculptural presence. Time is pierced, reorganized, and sutured into new forms. Killion Huang's queer figures recline in backlit scenes, often in silhouette yet unmistakably at ease. Intimacy and identity form through the quiet flow of relation, caught in those soft moments of connection, unhurried, and whole.

 
Installation view of Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery, New York. Artists: Zhou Meng, Yang Di.

Show Me How to Fly Away gently asks us where we might depart. The desire to seek elsewhere is a persistent impulse: when reality feels static, we drift toward distant geographies and reimagined worlds. It is this impulse, sharpened by the current climate, that brought these two galleries together. Yet impulse alone does not guarantee arrival. For the artists, New York represents a window, a chance to be seen beyond their original context. For audiences who encounter them, these might be unfamiliar names in a city saturated with art. Bridging global art scenes is a genuine ambition; the harder work lies in sustaining that bridge and allowing each practice to be encountered on its own terms, anew upon arrival.

 Installation view of Show Me How to Fly Away, THE BLANC X Nan Ke Gallery, New York.