What You See Is Already Shifting - Curated by Gin Lin

What You See Is Already Shifting. Curated by Gin Lin. Featuring Olivia Jeeyun Joung, Bo Kim, Sam King, Silvia Muleo, Maya Silverberg. March 14 to April 25, 2026. Cub_ism_ Artspace. Photo courtesy of Cub_ism_ Artspace 

CLARE GEMIMA April 6th, 2026

In What You See Is Already Shifting, curated by Gin Lin, perception is treated not as a fixed faculty but as something continuously renegotiated in real time. Lin brings together artists whose practices resist immediacy and rigidity, positioning instability as a condition of seeing itself. Across painting, sculpture, video, and installation, the exhibition rejects the idea that distortion follows perception, instead asserting vision as an unreliable sense from the outset.

Surfaces flicker between coherence and dispersal, forms gather only to fall back into indeterminacy, light alternates between obstructive and revelatory, and meanings across images hesitate to ever settle. The notion of instability does not announce itself dramatically across the works in What You See Is Already Shifting, but accumulates, informing a negotiation between what appears and what resists being fully seen.  

Silvia Muleo. Whispering in Low Tones & Let It In, 2024. Oil and oil pastels on white linen. 23 x 33cm ea. Photo courtesy of the artist

Working across painting, video, and installation, Silvia Muleo constructs images shaped by distortion and interruption that investigate perception at the threshold between digital and physical space. Coming of age with Web 2.0, her making is informed by a hybrid condition in which physical and digital realities overlap, resulting in a range of mixed-media pieces subject to repetitive reconstruction and infinite evolution. 

Muleo applies a similar sensibility while making her oil paint and pastel works which disturb distinctions between abstraction and realism. In a departure from the non-traditional substrates she uses such as screens, monitors, and light projections, fragmentation and erasure register on canvas, or, in works like Whispering in Low Tones, and Let It In (both 2024), on linen. Installed as a diptych, a loosely contoured hand emerges and dissolves within a softened field of diluted emerald-green. Appearing to resist or withhold revelation beneath an airbag-like silk, gestures of the hand—unclear whether forceful or soft—are focally highlighted by a surrounding reflective light that simultaneously expands and obscures any resolution. Rendered deliberately askew, the right canvas introduces a dislocated view reminiscent of the oblique optics of a rear-view mirror. Without spatial context nor emotional or narrative anchor, both paintings’, despite their opalescent optical effects, become increasingly unnerving.

[L-R] Sam King. And Down It Comes, 2025. Oil on linen. 140 x 100cm. Maya Silverberg. The Eye Beguiled, 2026. Wood, nails. 81.5 x 6cm. Photos courtesy of the artist

Sam King’s paintings seduce with foggy and mysterious deception. In works such as And Down It Comes, 2025, spiral, orb, and straw-like forms—at once attractive and estranged—tilt toward the bizarre, staging an otherworldly scene that unfolds like déjà vu in slow motion. Amid a heavy rainstorm, dripping umbrellas in You Make Your Own Way, 2025 tessellate only to echo, obscuring whether they’re in ascension or free fall, and beneath surgical, golden lights in Waiting Under Array, 2025, an expressionless, untrustworthy figure menacingly cropped into frame signals a Twin Peaks–like dystopia. In Gatekeepers, 2025, three elongated, cackling dolphin–alligator hybrids cohere into an elitist grotesque, and in Seeing Clearly, 2025, absinthe greens bleed into a saturated pink haze where warmly lit bottles and opportunistic hands stage a dive bar scene that slips between seduction and tipsiness.

In his other works not on view, a dolphin-duo cuts through kaleidoscopic oceans in The Water We Swim In, 2025 with a cuteness that thins into mere vacancy, while an ultraviolet, corroding surfboard pushes oil paint into an almost molecular register in Self Portrait with Surfboard, 2025 with speckles and dapples of brushmarks seeming to spore a viral filth. In Spettro, 2024, a mirrored ball caught in an intoxicating, extraterrestrial shock oscillates between disco and decay, yet somehow maintains a trashy, simulacral sex-appeal.

Informed by internet detritus and nostalgic residue, each composition is built through a densely cellular field of painted “pixels,” where every mark asserts its own visibility, as if calibrated through the buildup of DPI. Many paintings read as conté drawings on steroids with hurried, agitated marks that cut against the calm King’s figures initially project.

[L-R] Maya Silverberg. A Guide to the Stage, 2026. Screenprint on velvet with a hanging wire. 113 x 126.5cm. If a Play is Laid, 2026. Wood, paint, screenprinted handmade paper, wire, nails, and nylon. 39 x 54.5cm. Photo courtesy of the artist

Maya Silverberg’s sculptural works occupy a space between image and object where forms shift in relation to the viewers’ movement, and insist that perception is relational and embodied rather than stagnant. Moving between craft and fine art, Silverberg unapologetically trespasses inherent tensions found within each discipline, treating both as permeable and contested across all three of her works in the exhibition. 

A Guide to the Stage, 2026, a velvet screenprint in artificial blue devoid of yellow, theatrically suspends a subdued image of scaffolded facades. The Eye Beguiled, 2026, composed of wood and nails, reads as both ornament and fragment—at once architectural accent and raw construction. And, in If a Play is Laid, 2026, a grid-like maze of wood, paint, paper, wire, nails, and nylon compresses into a single plane, forming a netted, webbed support system. Other works like Once Again, at Night, 2025, Nadir, 2023, and Horseshoe Theory, 2025 extend Silverberg’s vocabulary across black velvet, waffle cotton, and veneered plywood, where fabrics and surfaces remain in constant negotiation.

Bo Kim. Aging 24, 2025. Hanji, sand, acrylic, and conte on canvas. 50 x 40cm. Aging 25, 2025. Hanji, sand, acrylic, and conte on canvas. 50 x 40cm. Photo courtesy of the artist

In Aging 24 and Aging 25, (both 2025), Bo Kim works with hanji, sand, acrylic, and conté on canvas to register time through accumulation and erosion. Kim treats painting as a form of temporal recording, akin to journaling a day that cannot be fully retained. Surfaces build and disperse, holding fleeting moments without fixing them, like cropped fragments of historic marble architecture, her paintings decoratively divulge indescribable detail in rose-petal and limestone hues.

Hanji, with its fibrous, absorbent structure, becomes central to her works instability. Rather than serving as a neutral ground, it holds and releases material unevenly, allowing pigment and sand to sink, stain, and feather at its edges. The surface does not present an image so much as register a process— tracings of moments that can't quite be recorded. Her practice rests on the understanding that relationships between human, nature, and object remain in flux. By working with organic materials that shift and absorb, Kim allows perception to unfold slowly in real time. Surfaces become sites of passage, where memory is not preserved but continually reconfigured—held between presence and disappearance, retention and release.

[L-R] Sam King. Large Umbrella, 2025. Oil on Linen. 190 x 155cm. Olivia Jeeyun Joung.  Nevertheless, 2025. Thread and wire. 50 x 50 x 200cm. Photo courtesy of the artist

Olivia Jeeyun Joung approaches perception through gestures of care, grounded in the Korean concept of jeong (정), a form of affection shaped through emotional and psychological bonds. It develops gradually through shared experience and mutual care, rooted in collective traditions that emphasise respect, endurance, and giving without expectation. Her work unfolds through touch, repetition, and material labour, where connection is built slowly over time. 

Using thread, traditional fabrics, and hand-applied marks, Joung records intimate gestures formed through repetition. In Nevertheless, 2025, vertical lengths of red thread act as both material and metaphor, and invoke the culturally charged, universal belief that destinies are finely bound. Found materials further ground her work in shared experience, where connection carries through sustained continuity. Working across her diasporic experience, Joung treats jeong as something enacted through repeated interaction where each mark carries the weight of prior contact, resulting in works that encapsulate a procession of caring and collective contribution. 

Across What You See Is Already Shifting, perception does not fail; it destabilizes at the point of encounter. Muleo, King, Silverberg, Kim, and Joung each sustain a state of continuous motion. Vision emerges as contingent and relational, never fully resolved. To see here is not to arrive but to remain within a charged instability, where images entice and elude, materials resist consolidation, and meanings hover on the brink of shift. WM

What You See Is Already Shifting

Curated by Gin Lin

Olivia Jeeyun Joung, Bo Kim, Sam King, Silvia Muleo, Maya Silverberg

March 14 to April 25, 2026.

Cub_ism_ Artspace

2nd Floor, No.33 Middle Sichuan Road, Huangpu District, Shanghai, China