February 20 – February 26, 2025
Flohaus Gallery, New York
Organized and curated by Flohaus Gallery
In White Fantasy, Yucen Liu presents his first solo exhibition in the United States, constructing a tightly controlled yet conceptually unstable environment where interfaces, measurement systems, and medical imaginaries intersect. Working across sculpture and image-based practices, Liu examines how contemporary technological systems reorganize life as something to be monitored, encoded, and sustained within institutional frameworks.
At the core of the exhibition is Jade UI Archive (2025), a series that translates digital interface symbols into carved jade reliefs. Icons such as “Enter” and “Delete,” typically experienced as fleeting gestures on screens, are rendered into a material associated with endurance, value, and cultural memory. This temporal collision—between the instantaneity of digital interaction and the geological permanence of jade—produces a compelling tension, suggesting an attempt to anchor digital language within a longer historical continuum.
Yet this gesture remains ambiguous. By materializing interface symbols, Liu risks aestheticizing the very systems he seeks to question. The icons, once tools of command, become objects of contemplation. Rather than dismantling the authority of the interface, the works may inadvertently monumentalize it. This tension between critique and complicity forms a central axis of the exhibition.
A similar logic unfolds in QR Instruments (2024), where traditional measuring tools are overlaid with dense QR codes, replacing human-readable scales with machine-readable data. Measurement is no longer transparent or stable, but mediated and dependent on technological translation. These objects not only represent this shift—they enact it. Without a device, they cannot be read, positioning the viewer within a condition of dependency and highlighting the growing opacity of contemporary systems.
In contrast, Non-performative Body (2025) introduces a more intimate dimension, drawing on the artist’s experiences with medical systems. Here, the body is presented as a site of accumulation, intervention, and regulation, shaped through overlapping medical and technological frameworks. The work gestures toward biopolitical conditions in which life is continuously evaluated and maintained, while resisting a purely oppositional stance—revealing care and control as deeply entangled.
The title White Fantasy encapsulates the exhibition’s conceptual core. “White” evokes the aesthetics of neutrality—clean interfaces, clinical environments, rational systems—while “fantasy” exposes their constructed nature. What appears transparent is, in fact, structured by layers of abstraction and power. Neutrality becomes not a given condition, but a carefully maintained illusion.
At times, the exhibition’s reliance on the visual language of systems risks being absorbed into the aesthetic frameworks it critiques. The works reveal structures of control, yet they also reproduce their forms, raising questions about the limits of critique within contemporary art.
Nevertheless, this tension is precisely where Liu’s work gains its relevance. Rather than offering resolution, White Fantasy articulates a condition: one in which systems are no longer external frameworks, but environments that shape perception, behavior, and survival itself. By rendering these systems material and perceptible, the exhibition invites viewers to confront the infrastructures that quietly govern
contemporary life.
Date: 02.26.2025
Edited by Jose Villarreal
