Yuhan Hu, Daedalus Guoning Li, Weihui Lu: Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling

Accent Sisters is pleased to announce the opening of Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling, featuring recent works of Yuhan Hu, Daedalus Guoning Li, and Weihui Lu, curated by Siyu Chen. The title draws from the act of improvisation as meandering between infinite possibilities, spiraling and folding in on itself, until the final form, image, assemblage, or action is unraveled through a state of gradual realization (渐悟 jian wu) or sudden awakening (顿悟 dun wu). This exhibition focuses on improvisation as an embodiment practice, in lieu of the extractivism, which appropriates nature and human beings as resources for technical and institutional operations. Grounded in critical self-knowledge, each artist offers a non-calculative and non-instrumentalizing relationship to hegemonic narratives on image production, natural landscape and cultural identity through their creative processes.

Inserting a bodily touch upon the narrative time within camera apparatus, Yuhan Hu’s assemblage of photographs, poems and found objects speaks to an ephemeral sensation of the present moment, one that disappears in the next. Contrasting from the production and consumption of satellite footage of nature, Weihui Lu embodies the bodily labor of relief carving and lino-cut cutting in restoring and healing human relationship to landscapes. In a similar vein, Daedalus Guoning Li’s prints and performance intertwine hands-on and digital mark-making, somatic writing, and libido energy through the act of layering and engraving, revealing a material metaphor to the inherent diasporic queerness of Chinese cultural identities.

By highlighting the profound significance of improvisation, Meandering, Spiraling, Unraveling emphasizes that it is not technology or institution in conflict with humans, but its prevailing narratives in reducing and erasing bodily experiences.

Along with the opening reception, Daedalus will perform their latest durational piece, which interweaves Chinese paper lamination and somatic writing, on opening day (9/14) from 1-7 pm.

About the Artists

Yuhan Hu was born in Beijing, China in 1999. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts in 2021 and is currently a MFA candidate at Hunter College. Yuhan combines her background in photography and video with sculptures. She extracts frames from videos and transfers them onto a chosen surface. The difference between each frame is so insignificant that it is barely detectable just by a glance. The easily neglected insignificance is like the pot of gradually boiling water that kills the frog without it being alerted. Instead of altering or manipulating the materials, Yuhan amplifies the quality of the materials. Her works are assembled in a delicate and precarious way. Yuhan’s work has been exhibited in Tutu Gallery, iidrr Gallery, and featured in F-Stop Magazine.

Daedalus Guoning Li is a Chinese interdisciplinary designer and artist who works and lives in Queens, New York. They have worked and collaborated with artists, scholars, designers, and cultural and academic institutions. They have worked with Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Rose Art Museum, Princeton University, Yale University, and more. Daedalus’ practice focuses on the misuse and appropriation of language, material, image, and body through design, printed media, performance, moving images, and site-specific intervention. Their research-driven works often illuminate the immanent diasporic queerness of Chinese cultural identities through engaging cultural materials and techniques under foreign contexts. Their current works engage with the connotations, expansion, and depth of surface, its association, and residues articulated between the ghostly present and the ideal, imagined past.

Weihui Lu was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Queens, New York. Moving between installation, printmaking, painting and performance, she is interested in creating embodied experiences as a mode of restoration and healing, and using landscape as a narrative medium. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Tiger Strikes Asteroid NY, Studio 9D, and Tutu Gallery, among others, and she has participated in residencies at Marble House Project (VT), Santa Fe Art Institute (NM), and Byrdcliffe Arts Colony (NY). As an independent curator, she co-directs Bob’s Gallery, an experimental project space in Bushwick, Brooklyn.

About the Curator

Siyu Chen is a Chinese-born visual artist who lives and works in New York. Her drawing, video and experimental autofiction center around themes of migration, language, longing and losses. Her work has been exhibited at tutu Gallery (New York), FJORD (Philadelphia, upcoming), Arts Letters and Number (Upstate New York), am art space (Shanghai), Studio Gallery (Shanghai), Bumpodo Gallery (Tokyo), and more. She holds a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a MFA from Parsons focusing on digital media and creative writing. This exhibition is her first curation project.