NEW YORK, NY.- Nguyen Wahed Gallery and FanFlus are delighted to present the group exhibition, Threshold in Relations in New York City. Curated by Fanfan Yuxuan FAN, the show features materially diverse works by five artists and examines how these practices generate relations at the very limits of perception, reevaluating the assumptions of scripted engagement in the context of aesthetic experience. “Threshold phenomena” describe sudden shifts in which minimal changes in sensory input precipitate a disproportionate transformation of experience. Relations are most powerfully formed at perceptual thresholds—moments of visual, emotional, or multisensory saturation in which vision, attention, or affect destabilize and must reorganize, pressing us against a limit and compelling a recalibration of our engagement with the work.

Thresholds function as zones of emergence—fragile, volatile, and generative. High-saturation color drives the visual system toward overload, producing afterimages that bleed beyond the object; fragmented structures destabilize spatial orientation; poetic imagery oscillates between clarity and elusiveness, tracing thresholds where meaning flickers; mirrored self-portraits fracture psychic coherence and unsettle self-perception; suspended mechanized figures interrupt embodied perception, defining thresholds where material presence becomes uncertain. At such thresholds, various conceptual and visual relations and paradigm shifts arise through negotiating one’s own sensory and cognitive limits, as instability demands the continual recalibration of perceptual and emotional engagement.

Each artist articulates a distinct form of perceptual and experiential thresholds, generating encounters that operate at the limits of perception, affect, and spatial coherence. Zihan Cui’s paintings employ highly saturated hues to probe the threshold between optical and spatial perception, exhausting the eye’s cones. His works capture a state of perpetual becoming, turning seeing into a pursuit rather than possession—a threshold where the image is sought but never fully claimed. Yuyu He’s sculptural practice, rooted in architectural curvature, explores coherence within fragmentation, tracing how perception and memory navigate shifting realities. Her spatial interventions create thresholds in which uncertainty becomes insight, and relations emerge through the instability of space. Through allegorical imagery, Xiaohan Jiang constructs a spiritual realm where poetry acts as a vessel of transformation, chasing moments of identity, redemption, and belonging amid the interplay of personal memory and cultural dualities—thresholds where connection is sensed rather than defined. Aubrey LaDuke engages in self-portraiture at the threshold of perception and psyche, observing her own face in a mirror intuitively and obsessively. Her works manipulate, tear, mend, and reconstruct the self, activating relational tensions between hyper-recognition and estrangement, and embodying an unending process of becoming. Zhaochen Chen’s The Remains of Nothing mimics the human body through mechanical and mythical forms; its suspended figures hover between presence and absence, poised between pursuit and evasion, and reveal the fragility of identity within unstable relational states.


Installation view of Threshold in Relations, Zihan Cui, Zhaochen Chen, Yuyu He, Xiaohan Jiang, courtesy of Christy Wang and FanFlus

In the thresholds within these relations, perception trembles and connection flickers, revealing a site where meaning is never fixed but continuously unfolding. The works presented here do not merely depict thresholds; they engineer them, creating encounters at their most charged and transformative. At the threshold between coherence and fragmentation, familiarity and disorientation, sensation has not yet consolidated into emotion, and perception has not yet stabilized. These suspended moments dissolve into intensity, saturation, and uncertainty, where relationality emerges through active negotiation of sensory and cognitive limits. Thresholds are experienced not as passive states but as charged sites where spatial and emotional registers converge, enacting connections that are continually formed, unsettled, and renewed.

Curator: Fanfan Yuxuan FAN

Fanfan holds dual bachelor’s degrees in Arts Administration from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and KEDGE Business School, and is currently pursuing her M.A. in Visual Arts Administration at New York University. She has worked for Asia NOW Paris Art Fair in Paris as well as Eli Klein Gallery and Marc Straus Gallery in New York. Based in New York, her curatorial approach is grounded in artist-practice–driven methodology, spotlighting emerging post-90s artists and examining the shared challenges and aspirations of her generation through nomadic, site-responsive projects.


Curator Fanfan Yuxuan FAN, courtesy of Christy Wang and FanFlus

Artists:

Zhaochen Chen

Zhaochen Chen (b. 1998, China) is an artist working across installation, kinetic elements, and mixed media. Her practice explores the fragile relationship between the body, technology, and institutional or social control. Rooted in sculpture and extending into sound, motion, and interaction, her work visualizes emotional dissonance, discomfort, and the unstable edges of human presence. Rather than constructing complete narratives, her installations function like imaginary organs—sensitive, reactive structures between flesh and device, trauma and memory. She holds an M.F.A. in Computational Arts from Goldsmiths and an M.F.A. and B.A. in Sculpture from the Central Academy of Fine Arts.

Zihan Cui

Zihan Cui (b. 2000, China) received his BFA from the Central Academy of Fine Arts and will receive an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2026. His work utilizes color as a physical mechanism rather than a symbolic or narrative device, drawing viewers into a short-term photoreceptor trance in which afterimages reconfigure the surrounding space and provoke sensory uncertainty. Vision becomes unstable—chromatic fields slip beyond the canvas, diffusing into the environment and folding into perception. The hues are not emblems of passion or violence; they establish a physiological—almost visceral—dialogue between viewer and painting. In this suspension of the boundary between vision and space, looking itself becomes an unstable experience.


Installation view of Threshold in Relations, Zihan Cui and Zhaochen Chen, courtesy of Christy Wang and FanFlus

Yuyu He

Yuyu He is an artist and architect, currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia University, having previously received a diploma from the Architectural Association School of Architecture in 2017. Working across painting, sculpture, and collage, Yuyu explores the instability of space and perception. Centered on the disordered rhythms of urban life, her practice gravitates toward outliers—forms that protrude, fragment, or appear out of place. Often broken or marked by time, these elements are central to her investigation of how lived space is felt and misremembered. Her work resists resolution, employing layered and transparent processes that embrace the unfinished. Each piece becomes a site of tension between construction and collapse, inviting viewers into a space where meaning remains in flux.

Xiaohan Jiang

Xiaohan Jiang (b. 1998, China) is a painter and poet based in Chicago. Born in Hebei, she moved to Suzhou at age nine. Her work explores the intersection of painting and poetry, drawing from the pastoral landscapes of her Northern childhood. Through allegorical imagery, she creates a spiritual realm where birds and horses become poetic symbols, and text intertwines with visual forms. Her work engages themes of transformation and identity, shaped by the tension between personal history and cultural dualities. Xiaohan received her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022 and her MFA in Painting and Drawing there in 2025. Her work has been shown at Patient Info Gallery (Chicago), Riverside Art Center (Chicago), Art Clvb (Detroit), Unveil Gallery (Irvine), 4C Gallery (Los Angeles), and Bonian Space (Beijing).

Aubrey LaDuke

Aubrey LaDuke is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting & Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her oil portraits on aluminum are created while studying her own reflection in a mirror, merging observation with invention and imagination. She is deeply concerned with perception: how attention and care can expand, distort, or contort reality. The faces she paints invite viewers into an interior psychological space, pressing outward while staring back blankly from the surface. LaDuke’s intuitive and obsessive process involves reworking each piece until it provokes a moment of recognition. She explores the interplay between lived experience and the subconscious, representing what feels “real” as an entwinement of subjective and objective perception, with fleeting intuition exposing the subconscious yet remaining difficult to capture.

Curator: Fanfan Yuxuan FAN
Artists: Zhaochen Chen, Zihan Cui, Yuyu He, Xiaohan Jiang, Aubrey LaDuke
December 13-17, 2025 | Opening Reception: December 12, 2025, 6-8 pm
Nguyen Wahed | 504E 12th St, New York, New York 10009