Exhibition Review - "Entangled" at Latitude Gallery

"Entangled" Exhibition Install View. Courtesy to Latitude Gallery and Curators Freya Xu and Eliza Xinping Tan

By SERENA HANZHI WANG November 18th, 2025

I walk into “Entangled” and it doesn’t feel like a declaration of anything. It feels like I entered the middle of a thought that has been looping for a long time before I arrived. They keep working—coagulating, thinning, remembering—in a register closer to climate than narrative. It’s nostalgia without sugary sentiment: the ache of knowing we inherit timelines we’ll never get to live, and matter still records them anyway. The press release calls it “temporal knots” and a “porous boundary between what is remembered and what continues to unfold.” On paper, that reads like surface theory. In the room, the paintings actually make that abstraction feel strangely literal.

Yanti Zhao’s solo at Latitude Gallery belongs to the popular spiritual-abstraction revival, but you can find something different here. You can still sense the youth in the surface decisions: the looseness, the hesitation, the way certain marks seem to be actively searching for structure rather than declaring one. The touch is not fully resolved yet and you can feel them still testing the limits of their own language. But instead of reading that as a lack, I read it as a deeply mythical system that takes time mutating.

Yanti Zhao, The Gate of Becoming, 2025, 40 x 30 in.

This is the show’s first gravitational field: a warm, irradiated orange that blooms from center while a milky spiral pushes outward like a slow exhale. Look at the two-o’clock quadrant—tiny raised beads pock the pale vortex; not decorative glitter, but literal sweat of the medium, a reaction the surface didn’t fully suppress. Along the outer ring, a soot-brown rind clots into irregular islets; they read as cauterized crust rather than frame, the painting repairing itself as it expands. From seven to nine o’clock, a thin umber seam flickers in and out, as if a thread keeps diving below the skin and resurfacing.None of this is spectacle.

The image is quiet, stubborn, almost medical: nebula scale refusing to let go of biopsy scale. The black crust around the edges pushes forward like soft tentacles reaching back toward the center, while the tiny beads inside the vortex insist on becoming literal 3D matter inside a 2D picture plane. This play between flatness and objecthood gives the work an almost Lovecraftian creature-feeling, like something forming before it fully decides what it is. They aren’t performing metaphor—they let the material speak for itself. The chemistry is the thesis.

Yanti Zhao, The Breeze, 2025. 36 x 24 in &10 x 8 in.

Across the room, the asymmetrical oval pair reads like fossil and echo: the larger oval a shield-sized bruise of green-gray with ash-violet undertone, the smaller a denser compression, hung just far enough to behave like memory’s afterimage. Specifics matter: in the large oval, a hairline incision spirals counter-clockwise, faint but persistent; it’s not an added mark so much as a subtraction that keeps declaring itself. At four o’clock, a chain of shallow scratches interrupts a smoother patch, giving the surface that “skipped-breath” rhythm you get after sanding and re-staining repeatedly. And then there are the yellow strokes—each surrounded by a faint watermark halo. You can see where the water-based ground refuses to fully absorb the oil-based mark layered on top. That subtle chemical incompatibility becomes the most beautiful part of the image.This is their cleanest refusal of identity-as-essence. The ovals aren’t portraits; they’re time-organs. They show how a thing remembers itself twice and neither version is the original. If Hilma diagrammed belief, they diagram persistence.

Yanti Zhao, Fall, 2025. 8 x 6 in.

Compared to the previous two, the color in this painting is noticeably softer. The blues and silvers and diluted rust feel almost washed by rainwater, not scorched. The composition is more organic too, like a botanical hallucination, less vortex logic. The background color reads like mineral, but the pale pink-white tendrils don’t attack it—they wrap, graze, circle, like algae or roots that evolve by touching. This painting feels like a calmer ecosystem, not a cosmic wound. The mood shifts from damage to tentative adaptation. When I spend time with it, it feels like the rare moment in “Entangled” where you stop trying to solve meaning and instead let competing forces coexist.

Yanti Zhao, Flame. 2025. 6 x 4 in, 4 x 6 in, & 9 x 12 in.

Flame series shifts scale again, but not toward resolution. The three small works feel like experiments in post-biofiction, where plant matter and organ tissue start mutating into new species without announcing themselves as such. The palette becomes brighter, almost mischievous, and the marks feel like they’re testing how far “entanglement” can stretch when it stops trying to mean anything and simply becomes generative behavior. After the heavier cosmologies of the earlier paintings, these three arrive as a quiet exit—not a conclusion, but a soft slip back into the world. They don’t need to summarize the exhibition. They simply keep evolving on their own terms, small, feral, and uninterested in closure.

Yanti Zhao, R. 2025. 16 x 16 in.

In this exhibition, you can feel Yanti Zhao still testing what abstraction can hold. They’re not settling one cosmology; they’re trying multiple ontologies on at once—microscopic reads (cells, scabs, filaments) sliding into cosmic ones (spiral arms, orbits, afterimages of exploded stars). Hilma af Klint is a ghost reference here, but their cosmology is not spiritual transcendence; it’s post-biotech, Gen-Z coded, suspicious of purity, aware of mutation as baseline condition.

 Artist Yanti Zhao in the Middle. Curators Freya Xu and Eliza Xinping Tan on the side. 

The curators told me over coffee that they installed the show almost like a timeline — not chronological in any literal sense, but a breathing map of Zhao’s shifting preoccupations. They pointed out how the earlier pieces still carry traces of figuration, the roots of Zhao’s fixation on time, red thread, and entanglement. Entangled, placed near the entrance, acts as an anchor before the exhibition dissolves into the more recent mineral-pigment works. Those smaller paintings aren’t hung by theme or argument; they’re spaced like breaths, arranged by rhythm rather than logic. Freya Xu and Eliza Xinping Tan described the final work Untitled #77 as a quiet offering — to Zhao themself, and to the memory of their grandfather, the calligrapher who first taught them how to breathe through a brushstroke. The exhibition ends the way a heartbeat fades: slow, personal, and still echoing.