Temporary Storage

ETA Gallery is pleased to present “Temporary Storage”, a duo exhibition featuring new works by Mi Chen and Yan Wang. Working through ceramic and language, both artists create objects that demand to be seen before they are read, deliberately keeping meaning in suspension. Where Wang stores memory and the absent body, Chen stores language itself—holding and slowing text before it settles into sense. Together, they arrive at a shared refusal to resolve, approaching the concept from distinct directions.

Mi Chen’s practice centers on typography and the structural systems that carry it. In her new works, punctuation loosens from language to become shape, rhythm, furniture, or a wall to look at rather than through. By intentionally slowing the eye, Chen keeps text half-visible, allowing form to precede meaning. Working iteratively across two- and three-dimensional surfaces, she creates conditions where familiar patterns shift, break, or loop—a sustained process of locating herself in relation to what she makes.

Yan Wang addresses what the body leaves behind. In the exhibition space, porcelain pillows rest in a dim circle accompanied by a low-humming recording, framing history not as surviving names, but as the bodies that dreamed and vanished. Across ink, paper, and clay, Wang’s objects carry the thickness of time, the debris of a hometown, and the ghost of a head on a pillow. She works toward release rather than a definitive statement, offering an invitation to dream together rather than inherit a singular narrative.

“Temporary Storage” highlights what an object can sustain without resolving: forms that simultaneously hold presence and loss, store what cannot be surrendered, and remain open as long as they are observed.

About the Artists

Mi Chen is a graphic designer and visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and New Haven, CT. She is currently pursuing an MFA at Yale School of Art. Her practice centers around the idea of reframing the familiar: taking everyday objects, forms of language, and visual systems, and repositioning them to reveal new relationships and meanings. She is particularly interested in how forms act as structures that shape perception, memory, and interpretation. Through iterative processes, patterns begin to shift, break, or loop, creating spaces where meaning becomes unstable. As a graphic designer, she engages text and glyphs as both carriers of meaning and formal elements. Across her projects, she moves between two-dimensional and three-dimensional surfaces, often questioning where a surface begins or ends, and how meaning shifts as language transitions from page to space.

Yan Wang is a Beijing-born visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY, and Chicago, IL. Rooted in a background of printmaking and book art, Yan blends the tactile qualities of print with diverse mediums such as animation and ceramics. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Yan’s experience encompasses a wide range of print techniques, including silkscreen, monotype, lithograph, relief, aquatint, and drypoint. Beyond traditional printmaking, she is skilled in craft disciplines like ceramics and bookbinding. Currently, she is expanding her interdisciplinary exploration through clay sculptures, engaging with themes of social and political feminism as well as her cultural and immigrant identity.

Curated by ETA Ariel He and Cicy Hu, with support from CAAC.