Whitehot Picks: Echoes and Returns - On Memory, Myth, and the Recursive Life of the Past

On view from January 18 to 22, 2026, at On The Fringe NYC Gallery, Echoes and Returns brings together six individual artists and two artist collectives whose practices examine memory, history, myth, and cultural inheritance as dynamic and unstable processes. Organized by Didots and co-organized by UnderlineArtSpace, the exhibition is curated by Sen Kwok.

Rather than treating the past as a fixed archive, Echoes and Returns considers how historical narratives, personal memories, and symbolic traditions persist through repetition, reinterpretation, and return—continuously reshaping contemporary experience. Across diverse media including sound, video, performance, installation, painting, and photography, the exhibition proposes memory as an active, generative force rather than an act of preservation.

Several works in the exhibition engage myth and ritual as living structures that continue to inform contemporary subjectivity. Jingjing Xu’s Sisyphus revisits the classical myth through the framework of absurdism, transforming repetitive labor into an inquiry into endurance and resistance. Flesh, Bones, and Magic’s Seeking Delphi, foregrounds sound as a mode of transmission, layering site-specific recordings from the ancient ruins of Delphi with spoken texts to reactivate oral traditions of prophecy.

Other works approach memory through intimate and embodied registers. Songer Yang’s Good Kid draws from childhood experiences of reward and discipline, revealing how early systems of evaluation leave lasting emotional traces. Yuran Lin’s Drama Dream translates a dream memory into a video-based performance, exploring cycles of disappearance and renewal through ritualized imagery and the body as both witness and participant.

Questions of belief, technology, and cultural continuity are addressed in Blessed Market by Viola Liang and May Li, which introduces A.MEI—an AI-driven, ritualized character derived from Chinese folklore. Situated within the gallery context, the work examines how intimacy, spirituality, and belief are renegotiated through technological embodiment. In Home Is a Dwelling Path, Yunzhi Li constructs an immersive environment shaped by experiences of displacement and cultural hybridity, treating “home” as a psychologically assembled and continually shifting space.

Economic and historical belief systems are examined in Chloe Ying’s We Are the Ones Who Are Truly Wealthy, a series of mixed-media photographic collages referencing recurring global financial crises from the eighteenth century to the present. The work employs gold leaf as both material and metaphor, exposing the fragile faith underlying notions of prosperity and value. Photography also anchors Zhenghan Huang’s The Waves Return, which revisits personal and familial archives to reconstruct memories of coastal landscapes across different temporal and geographic contexts, treating memory as generative rather than documentary.

Presented within a physical gallery space in New York, Echoes and Returns invites viewers to consider remembrance not as a backward glance, but as an active practice—one that shapes how histories are inhabited, how identities are negotiated, and how futures are imagined. By tracing echoes and returns across bodies, materials, and symbols, the exhibition asks what persists, what transforms, and what becomes possible when the past is allowed to speak—again, and differently.

Exhibition Information

Exhibition Dates: January 18–22, 2026

Venue: On The Fringe NYC Gallery, New York, USA

Organiser: Didots

Co-organiser: UnderlineArtSpace

Curator: Sen Kwok