Braided Stream

Artists: Alice Wang, Cao Shuyi, Carolina Caycedo, Chang Yuchen, Ching Ho Cheng, Michael Najjar, Pao Houa Her, Sky Hopinka, Timur Si-Qin and Zhang Yibei

Curator: Yuan Fuca

Braided streams carve ever-shifting channels, splitting and merging in continuous motion—veins of water weaving through the landscape, diverging, converging, drifting apart, folding back, and flowing forward.

This exhibition embraces that fluidity, bringing together artists whose works explore deep interconnections between body, land, the cosmos, rituals of care and remembrance, kinship across time and geography, and poetic expressions of environmental concerns. Like braided streams, these works resist linear narratives, instead weaving and converging, flowing through cycles of transformation, displacement, and resilience.

Movement—across borders, traditions, and ecological shifts—becomes a way of inscribing experience, negotiating between self and world, and exploring what it means to belong in spaces of flux. In Pictures of Paradise (2024), Pao Houa Her traces personal histories of migration, capturing the aspirations and tensions of Hmong diasporic life. This image documents a journey with her father as he retraces the path of their family’s escape through the jungle, leading to the Mekong River crossing into Thailand when she was an infant. Sky Hopinka’s Hocekjįra (2024) layers hand-scratched poetry over UV-treated photographs of a water landscape, drawing from native ledger art to subvert traditional documentation and reclaim storytelling, while his images act as mnemonic vessels, embedding memory into place through presence, movement, and ancestral ties to the land of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

In this continual flux, the relationships and entanglements woven through chosen families, cultural inheritances, and shared struggles shape how the world is understood. Chang Yuchen’s latest entries in Coral Dictionary extend her ongoing practice of translating the intricate structures of coral into fictional fabrications, questioning language and interconnection. Shuyi Cao’s sculptural installations—utilizing preserved shells and recycled materials—become altars to transcorporeal ecologies, evoking both everyday and geological time, as well as forces of transformation. Inspired by the protective mechanisms of marine animals, Zhang Yibei’s Helmet (2024) explores impermanence and the cycles of adaptation and decay. Carolina Caycedo’s water portrait of the San Gabriel River treats bodies of water as living entities and political agents, underscoring the entanglement of ecology and sovereignty. Whether through acts of preservation, adaptation, or ritual, these works acknowledge the fragility of both human and non-human ecosystems—and the necessity of their care.

Movements, such as crossing, serve as passages between worlds, carrying the imprints of belief and symbolism, linking the body to the celestial, the familiar to the unknown. Timur Siqin’s Embedded Kora (2024) references the ritual of kora—the circumambulation of a sacred mountain—framing a view through rhododendron flowers, whose genetic epicenter lies in the Hengduan Mountains of China. Ching Ho Cheng’s Stardust (1975) positions the Milky Way as both a cosmic home and a metaphor for unity, reflecting on the infinite movement of celestial bodies and the boundless nature of time. In contrast, Michael Najjar maps the eerie accumulation of defunct satellites and space debris orbiting Earth, confronting the unintended consequences of technological expansion beyond the planet. Meanwhile, Alice Wang’s microscopic images of meteorites evoke distant landscapes, blurring the lines between science and myth. Their perceptual qualities distort familiar perspectives, reshaping the experience of materiality within a non-linear, quantum world.

Braided Stream moves as a persistent force of connection, flowing across bodies, places, and histories, recognizing entanglement not as a constraint but as a way of being in the world—a continuous process of shaping and reshaping relationships to land, memory, and one another.

About the Curator

Yuan Fuca is a writer and curator, currently serving as the Associate Program Director for China at KADIST. She is a 2023 grantee of the Asian Cultural Council and the inaugural curatorial fellow of the De Ying Foundation. From 2019 to 2022, Yuan was the founding artistic director of the Macalline Art Center in Beijing. Prior to that, from 2016 to 2019, she co-founded and managed Salt Projects, a non-profit art space in Beijing. She is also a founding editor of Heichi Magazine, a bilingual online publishing platform. Her writing has appeared in platforms such as Artforum, Artnews, BOMB, Flash Art, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, The New York Times T Magazine, and Yishu.