TaThaTa: "Suchness" at 191 Henry Street

Installation view, For Lack of a Better Word. Artists: Shuai Yang, Anonymous Thangka Painter; Chengtao Yi, Jee Eun Lee. Curated by Xiao Liu. TaThaTa Gallery, New York, NY, 2026.

By DAVID JAGER March 13th, 2026

191 Henry street, a boutique sized viewing room, currently houses a show that attempts to leave no trace. Called the TaThaTa gallery, it features modest, finely tuned contemporary works that are thoughtfully conceived and highly conceptual. Thought, or rather ‘non-thought as thought’, is an overarching theme of the show, as if the tiny space were attempting to be a cosmic resonance chamber for vast Buddhistic themes.

Fittingly, the gallery is called “TaThaTa”.  Tathata is short for Tathataga, a Sanskrit and Pali word that roughly translates to ‘suchness’. It is also the honorific of the original Buddha, also meaning ‘awakened one’, but actually signifying something much subtler. Without diving headlong into the sutras, it represents the paradoxical state of being in which one is both fully present and also non-locally connected, a ‘being' that is at one with the great radiant emptiness at the heart of everything. Some call it ‘suchness’. Given that the concept is so thorny to define, and harder to experience directly, the name of the show is simply “For Lack of a Better Word”.

Installation view, For Lack of a Better Word. Artists: Jee Eun Lee, Xi Song. Curated by Xiao Liu. TaThaTa Gallery, New York, NY, 2026.

This is a group exhibition curated by Xiao Liu, featuring Chengtao Yi, Jee Eun Lee, Shuai Yang, and Xi Song. Along with these artists we also have two traditional Buddhist Thangkas whose authors, true to tradition, remain anonymous. Each work, in the paradoxical spirit of the subject matter, feels exceedingly modest and light, as if the imposition of too much substance would counterbalance the no-thingness surrounding it.

Xi Song, Belly, 2026. PLA, wheatgrass, water 7 1/2 × 7 × 2 1/2 in.

Belly, by Xi Song, is a 3d printed scan of a belly, or human abdomen, which we assume to be the artists. It is pocked with airholes and seeded underneath with bean sprouts. It sits in the gallery window in direct sunlight. The metaphors converging in this one tiny sculpture are immediately crowded. The belly as digestive nexus, as landscape, not to mention the body as earth. Also the belly as a luck Buddha's distinguishing feature. Ultimately, however, it brings to mind our inevitable decay and return to nature, to grass. One thinks of Tibetan Llamas whose bodies are reverently  left on mountain rocks for vultures, or of the burning ghats in Varanasi. This simulated belly in the window will also slowly distend and burst as the bean sprouts beneath it grow. It is a small model of growth and decay, which I imagine is the point.

Installation view, For Lack of a Better Word. Artists: Shuai Yang, Anonymous Thangka Painter. TaThaTa Gallery, New York, NY, 2026.

 

Jee Eun Lee, Gathering 2, 2025. Paper box, plaster bandage, and found objects collected from Plumb Beach, New York. 18.4 × 13.5 × 2.2 in.
 

Jee Eun Lee presents scavenged objects from New York’s Plumb beach in ‘Gathering 2”. The gathered objects are mounted in a compartmentalized display shelf made from paper and plaster bandages. They are exceddingly modest in themselves: runelled, pocked and smoothed by wind and water, calling to mind the intimacy of something picked up on a walk and further worried with blind fingers rummaging in a pocket. There is a piece of driftwood rounded into a oval, a thin spiral shell, a chunk of concrete worn pebble smooth, a crusty sand dollar. It is hard to know if they have been made remarkable merely through their grouping. Collectively they amplify the enigma of what makes a thing, and by extension a person, unique. Is it relational, is it aesthetic? Is it purely contextual?

Exterior view, For Lack of a Better Word. TaThaTa Gallery, New York, NY, 2026.
 

Stepmother No. 3, by Shui Yang, is steps across the space. It is a plain fabricated box serving as a plinth for a piece of found wood, which in turn props up a ruler. It is a strange trifecta of industrial object, wild found object and measuring device. Some odd epistemological trialogue is taking place, no doubt with deep ontological undertones. Look too fast, however, and you’ll miss it. The contrast isn’t served by it being placed on the floor, almost absently, in a corner, but perhaps that’s the point.

Shuai Yang, Stepmother 3. Section of ruler, driftwood, found wood, MDF. 35 × 17 × 9 1/4 in.

Chengtao Yi, Ellipsis of the World, 2025. Video on loop; Cessna 172 aircraft with nylon ripstop banner.

Anonymous Thangka Painter, Tibetan Medical Thangka, 2020s. Paint on Tibetan paper. 22 1/2 × 28 1/2 in.
 

Chengtao Yi, Standard Eye Chart, 2026. Plastic palm tree, print on PVC, print on paper, C-stand. Size variable.
 

Standard Eye Chart by Chentao Yi fills a corner with plastic palm trees and pictures of a forest interior mounted on metal rods. The forest pictures are then printed with the Standard eye chart E, found at the top of every vision test, but ‘tumbled’ as it is-upright, on its side, upside down- as is done to test for visual flexibility and acuity. I wonder if Yi knows that this E is also a symbol that filled the notebooks of James Joyce as a siglum for HC Earwicker, the protagonist for Finnegan’s Wake. In horizontal position, Joyce also thought it recalled the Chinese character for mountain. All in all, it’s a play on vision as it is tested and standardized, and vision as it enfolds untrammeled in both the wilderness of nature and the mind. With its real and artifical forests, it might even be a reference to the Zen adage of ‘mountains becoming mountains’, the returning of things to themselves that occurs upon reaching enlightenment.

Yi has also placed an accompanying video of the sky, projected onto the ceiling next to it. The clear blue square of the projection is barely punctuated by an airplane towing a clear acrylic banner, printed with the same E, turned in all of its different positionalities. Perhaps Yi has been reading Joyce, after all.
 

Anonymous Thangka Painter, Nine Stages of Meditation, 2020s. Paint on Tibetan paper. 22 1/2 × 28 1/2 in.

Last are the two anonymous Thangkas, in a timeless style that is always part storybook, part religious manual. They illustrate two processes of gestation: one inside the womb and one in meditation. The first gives us views of a baby coming into being, a serene homunculus in the womb already seated perfectly in different meditative postures. He is undergoing some version of embryonic yoga, with Sanskrit subtitles.

The other Thangka illustrates a time honored allegory of elephant, an illustration of how the mind is tamed through meditation. The meditator is the elephant minder and his mind is the elephant (also along for the journey is a mischievous looking monkey). Once up the mountain the unruly elephant turns sedate, pacing calmly along their meditator, who has mastered them. Near the mountain’s summit, the elephant turns white, signifying wisdom, and the pesky monkey vanishes entirely. At the top we see a waiting lotus seat, where the meditator, having achieved bodhisattva status, can take up residence and receive the title of Tathataga.

If only the stages of meditation were so clearly delineated, and if only ultimate understanding of one’s suchness  arrived with such cleanly delineated clarity. Until then, it seems, we continue to wrestle with our impermanence and our imperfect understanding through art. WM