Drafty Songs: Review On Yuhan Shen & Qiuyu Wu's Duo Exhibition "Soft Water"

BY RUI JIANG September 11th, 2026

Tiles hang low from the ceiling, in a lightweight streamlined form flowing downward, gathering upward; raise the ceiling a little higher, we shout; where they flow downward the tree trunks are low, beneath the tiles that gather upward the tree trunks grow taller; raise the ceiling a little higher, we shout. Wave after wave, the low tiles scrape against each other, crisp, arching up, and then the high tiles re-enact it in halting repetition. You do not know whether the tremor at the height is traveling toward the low end, or the reverse. Disco Radio is a bare television cable system, rotating and gathering in the signals that approach.

Qiuyu Wu, To Raise the Ceiling a Little Higher, 2026. Installation photo of  Soft Water at Area 405, Baltimore. Photo credit: farfar studio.

A huge, gentle balloon, diffusing light, stands towering directly opposite the stage, and you cannot help but take this as a manifest will, an oath spoken in cadence. The balloon does not deeply know fear; only the creatures that draw near it choose to circle around on tiptoe. Circling this huge, round oath, at its feet trails a fear that gradually overflows the everyday—what you hear instead are sounds arriving from all sides, pointing toward an old video work: a room of white balloons bursting one by one, while this huge round body remains unharmed, hanging in complete calm, making one forget, or rather doubt, its material and its fate—this is more like an invulnerable soft stone, proper and round and resilient, and so it gradually dissolves the fear of the unknowable, and from within it one searches for a roundabout reasoning like the tides of the moon-land.

Yuhan Shen, Weather Balloon, 2026.  Installation photo of Soft Water at Area 405, Baltimore. Photo credit: farfar studio.

Dweller, in a pool held up by a wooden table, scrapes against the water's ripples, blowing individual, scattered, halting whistles, from which overflows a long, winding tube that curls and coils, brushing lightly against the floor, drooping down like the incarnation of the whistle itself. Thousands of fired ceramic fragments of stone are linked to one another, iron bones clanging so that the flag's pole droops downward, the mournful bugle also stroking the floor, rippling across the earth. On an entire wall of stark white, a body is suspended between the iron window of home and the outside world, dragging downward an elongated reflection. The refrigeration unit, in one place, condenses the air and gives birth to droplets of moisture that will not rest, will not drop; in another place it forms a strange inch of snowfield—a piece of concrete that has undergone much rubbing now resembles a stone, hesitating at the center of the snowfield—and elsewhere, another stone sits on the ground within the snowfield.

Qiuyu Wu, Dweller, 2026; Yuhan Shen, Water System, 2023; Qiuyu Wu, A Square is a Flag, is a Perimeter, is a Mourning Place. Installation photo of Soft Water at Area 405, Baltimore. Photo credit: farfar studio.

Yuhan Shen, Untitled, 2026. Installation photo of Soft Water at Area 405, Baltimore. Photo credit: farfar studio.

You learn later that it is a weather balloon, rising and falling with the room's temperature, air pressure, and humidity, and with the explosion it may perhaps bring; it wraps itself around dread, observes the climate changing on every side, and also properly stores away many a cry. Yuhan Shen, using water, ice, and vapor, carries out, through their fluid nature, a cunning underground guerrilla action against violence and frame-up; in Qiuyu Wu's large-scale ceramic sculptures, the mourning flag, the person suspended in a broken window, the ceiling raised up by the crowd, the human figure sagging heavily onto home, onto the writing where person meets cruel political proclamation. This exhibition is a metamorphic reshaping of the draught that flows through the hall with water and flesh; it is the inescapable retreat of subtle political metaphor; it is the one in the midst of the water, gathering firewood for the multitude—is it agility, or, compassion?

Qiuyu Wu, Floating Body, 2026. Installation photo of Soft Water at Area 405, Baltimore. Photo credit: farfar studio.

It buries within it intermittent, subtle pauses, like the most deeply lodged urgency and anxiety, gathering it all into your sight, making you flee in confused haste; whilst you/they quietly await good news. The tiles still go back and forth between hanging low and gathering upward in their unfinished suspense; we still take pleasure in watching fear be suspended, be delayed, be transformed into an object one can stroll around and admire. The tenderness and wisdom of the ecosystem and the cruelty or tragic grandeur of human intervention are all twisted together into one knot in the exhibition, crawling low, standing tall, dripping downward along the pull of gravity, pouring out the solitary, unaided monologue of groups under each nation's internal political violence and world war, and also, within the guerrilla action and eyewitnessing of water's fleshly rhetoric, sounding a mighty and awe-inspiring horn. In the calm-seas feigned slumber, it happens that water is the most standpoint-less of substances, and by way of its own poetic alienation, welcomes a chance at fleeing—there is no vessel, no need for a vessel, to bear us up. WM

Yuhan Shen, DirecTV, 2026. Installation photo of Soft Water at Area 405, Baltimore. Photo credit: farfar studio. 

Soft Water is on view till September 11th at Area 405, Baltimore.