To Elongate, To Entwine

To elongate: to stretch indefinitely, to arrive nowhere;
To entwine: to tangle ceaselessly, to resolve nothing.

FanFlus and CAAC(Chinese American Art Council | Gallery 456) are pleased to present a duo exhibition featuring Sangmin Lee and Yixuan Wu. Their practices bring together through a shared attunement: to gravitate toward what slips just behind. Their works hold and fail simultaneously, structures that coil and unsettle, materials that carry meaning that thins at the edges. Nostalgia haunts here: the stronger the longing, the emptier the memory it draws from; like the more Odysseus yearns, the more he forgets. These two artists’ works inhabit an interval between elongation and entwinement, depicting the stretch that remains held and entangled.

Sangmin Lee’s practice begins where systems fall apart—along fraying edges, makeshift supports, and acts of repair. Working with peripheral materials such as joint compound, window screen mesh, and rebar tie-wire, he cultivates forms that gradually depart their narratives: self-entangling, interdependent, teetering at the threshold between collapse and continuation. His sculpture grows in interlaced configurations, reaching with a compulsive persistence, as if stretching without end. Images extend this logic across surfaces, as memory landscapes dissolve at their borders. What remains is a faint structural residue: traces of something that thinned too far to hold itself. Here, to elongate is to extend against the inevitable drift of untethering.

Yixuan Wu approaches the same threshold through domestic care infrastructures. She reconstructs “questioned comforts” with deformed support structures functional in appearance, destabilized in effect. Working from sensory-derived material vocabularies, Yixuan embeds assistive gestures into everyday, domestic objects, where soft resistance and bodily negotiation reiterate acts of care. What holds also withholds. In these familiar domestic structures, she introduces irregular glass orbs that lock onto the sculptures’ joints. Soothing yet disquieting, they carry the sensual charge of bodily gestures: the in-between gestures of care and dependency.

In dialogue with Sangmin’s interlaced sculptures, Yixuan’s works occupy the margins of the space, where attachment is felt. To entwine is never to resolve: it binds without stabilizing, holds without settling, remaining in contact with what cannot be reconciled: care and doubt, support and unease, dwelling together.

What Sangmin and Yixuan share is a refusal of arrival. Neither seeks to dwell in the fully recovered past, as in Proust’s madeleine, where memory is momentarily restored. Instead, they sustain the presence of elongation and entwinement itself. For what nostalgia reaches toward is perhaps not the past itself, but the sensation of having once been nearer to it. Their work remains within that reach: suspended, persistent, pending, attuned to the ephemerality of memories, where proximity is felt but fails to be retained.