The Overslept Mayfly: Ailyn Lee and Tianshu Zhang, curated by Shuang Cai at Latitude Gallery in Lower East Side, Manhattan.

Installation view of The Overslept Mayfly. Artist: Ailyn Lee. Curated by Shuang Cai. Latitude Gallery, New York. Photo: Fanfan Yuxuan Fan.

By Fanfan Yuxuan Fan, July 24th, 2026

Mayflies are the only insects that must molt once more after their wings have already formed, one last thin film clinging to them before they become, at last, themselves. It is this creature, never quite finished arriving, that lends its name to The Overslept Mayfly: Ailyn Lee and Tianshu Zhang, curated by Shuang Cai at Latitude Gallery in Lower East Side, Manhattan.

Stepping into the space, the first thing you encounter is a dreamlike corner the curator has constructed for Ailyn Lee: one wall painted indigo, a golden moon and a magical mobile drawn by hand across its surface, and small wooden pieces scattered throughout the corner like windows. Together, they conjure a private night sky. Nabi (2026) sprawls beneath it: an enormous pink moth, wings splaying across the concrete floor, as if caught mid-metamorphosis, suspended between resting and becoming. Formed from stone clay, hanji paper, nobang silk, and layers of fabric, the wings feel less made than grown, pink bleeding through silk in translucent folds. At the moth's center, where a body should be, stands a walking cane crowned with a small human head: at once grotesque and childlike, both relic and joke. Above, Threaded Wings (2026) and Please Do Not Open the Drawer (2026), two small paintings hung side by side, depict sprites sprouting butterfly wings, playful and slightly feral. Through the curator’s arrangement, these works appear as parts of the same nocturnal world. Lee's imagination works like a quiet alchemy: taking what has been discarded and coaxing it, gently, back into something alive. She builds her dreams intuitively, the way a child assembles a story from found objects. Nabi reads less like a finished creature than one still becoming.

Returning to the center of the exhibition, Ailyn Lee's Counting the Wings (2026) unfolds like a dream one can physically enter: a large pink rug scattered with countless butterflies, some painted, others affixed to the surface. A small stool and an open cabinet sit atop the rug. Inside lies another uncanny world: miniature drawers stacked three levels high and a weary doll reclining across the top, its legs dangling limply off the edge, its wings shrinking, as if falling away. This piece reads in parts like a grotesque cabinet of curiosities, a domestic space gone slightly wrong, suspended somewhere between dream and insomnia. Lee combines found objects with her own hand-drawn additions, describing the work as evoking a hypnagogic state, that layered, mysterious threshold between wakefulness and sleep. The drawers become containers for feeling withheld: small enclosures built to hold what otherwise has nowhere to go.

They are crafted with such dreamlike devotion precisely because every act of enclosure already carries the knowledge of what it cannot enclose. The more elaborately they are adorned, the more acutely we feel the longing for what it cannot keep from spilling out. The same instinct appears three thousand years earlier in the Book of Songs set to verse: "The mayfly's wings, garments gleaming bright. My heart is heavy, where shall I return?" (蜉蝣之羽，衣裳楚楚；心之忧矣，於我归处。）The poem seems to praise the mayfly's radiant wings; underneath, it mourns a beauty too brief to hold. Lee's impulse is strikingly identical: wrapping the perishable in ceremonial beauty, not to preserve it, but to mark, with tenderness, that it cannot be saved. Rather than consoling us, the work draws us gently deeper into its dream, where beauty and loss remain inseparable.

Installation view of The Overslept Mayfly. Artist: Ailyn Lee, Tianshu Zhang. Curated by Shuang Cai. Latitude Gallery, New York. Photo: Fanfan Yuxuan Fan.

Turning back toward the walls, Tianshu Zhang's paintings interweave with Lee's sculptures, each answering the other. In Being Woven (2025), two figures slowly dissolve into one another, their bodies loosening into abstraction, rising as they disappear. In Toward the Last Light (2026), a torso-like skeletal form pushes forward with unexpected momentum, its body liquefying into a stretched, luminous blur, as though dissolution were already written into the flesh. The bodies feels only ever on loan, inhabited by something already beginning to overflow them. Throughout Zhang's paintings, figures are caught in the act of emerging and dissolving simultaneously, suspended in a state not yet permitted to call itself finished — not creatures that have completed their transformation, but ones still trapped inside it. In this sense, her work becomes a visual translation of the exhibition's drifting condition: existence held in the unstable interval between appearance and disappearance, the overslept mayfly's own unfinished hour.

Installation view of The Overslept Mayfly. Artist: Tianshu Zhang. Curated by Shuang Cai. Latitude Gallery, New York.

That unfinished hour belongs not only to the work itself. It was written into the exhibition's own arrival. The exhibition was meant to open in May. It opened in June instead — May, having flown. The delay came first; the title arrived afterward, recasting the lateness as a fable about mayflies, about whatever refuses to be contained. When a delay is narrated, is it still an accident, or has it become the work? Su Shi, drifting beneath the cliffs at Chibi, imagined the mayfly entrusted to heaven and earth—a creature too fleeting even to claim permanence. The mayfly claims no right to possess anything, only to hold it a little longer. Lee's wings hold their shape even as they thin; Zhang's bodies caught somewhere between arriving and leaving. Curator Cai holds these practices together within the same suspended hour. This exhibition arrived a month late. Perhaps lateness was the honest way for it to arrive at all. 

Installation view of The Overslept Mayfly. Artist: Ailyn Lee, Tianshu Zhang. Curated by Shuang Cai. Latitude Gallery, New York. Photo: Fanfan Yuxuan Fan.