Transcendence
Fou Gallery is pleased to present Transcendence, a group exhibition featuring Tianshu Zhang (张天舒), Tao Xian(陶显), and Gloria Fan Duan(樊段晓春), on view from July 11 through September 5, 2026.
As in the philosophy of the I-Ching [易经], the world is not an empty abstraction, but a living structure of patterns through which all things transform. At a moment when attention is increasingly pulled outward by speed, image, and instability, Transcendence turns inward, inviting viewers to explore within for the subtle flow of energy that connects body, mind, and the natural world.
Bringing together painting and sculpture, the exhibition considers abstraction not as a rejection of form, but as a way of approaching what cannot be fully represented: spirit, dream, memory, and the quiet forces that shape both human and natural existence. Through bodies, imagined organisms, and reconstructed botanical forms, Transcendence explores the traces of inner energy moving between consciousness and the unconscious, creating a path for viewers to enter a realm of inner light, meditation, and spiritual perception.
For Tianshu Zhang, painting emerges from the threshold between dream and embodiment. Drawing inspiration from the imperceptible yet constant flow of Qi, her paintings seek a balance between silhouette-like structures and fluid movement. Through layered brushwork, Zhang evokes the body in abstraction, where flesh, spine, and inner currents appear only partially, as if sensing the presence of energy moving within. The body becomes a vessel through which consciousness moves between memory, desire, vulnerability, and transformation.
Tao Xian approaches this spiritual interiority through the imagined life of nature. Drawing from Daoist thought, Jungian psychology, and organic forms, she creates luminous semi-abstract paintings that occupy a space between organism and inner landscape. In works inspired by deep-sea plants and imagined botanical forms, Tao allows imagination to become a mode of perception, suggesting a silent energy shared between the individual soul and the larger universe. The visible traces of nature become vessels for psychic and spiritual life, where the boundary between self and world remains fluid.
Gloria Fan Duan extends the exhibition’s inquiry into nature, perception, and unseen forces through a practice situated at the intersection of art, science, and technology. Conceived during NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, New York), An And Foundation (Wassaic, New York) and Fou Gallery’s Tulum Residency (Mexico), the series presented in this exhibition combines cast resin and glass flowers, leaves, and stems with handmade vessels, assembling them into sculptural installations inspired by Japanese ikebana. Through mediation, preservation, and deliberate arrangement, Duan reconstructs nature in translucent botanical forms that hover between specimen and offering, garden and laboratory, occupying a threshold between existence and non-existence. No longer living plants yet still carrying the trace of organic life, these works offer a material counterpart to Zhang’s bodily energies and Tao’s imagined spiritual organisms. The processes of preservation, reproduction, and arrangement become forms of meditation, suggesting that the artificial may also serve as a vessel for care, ecological memory, and spiritual attention.
Through the body, the imagined organism, and the reconstructed garden, form becomes a threshold through which inner energy, memory, and spiritual perception may appear. Rather than presenting transcendence as escape, the exhibition understands it as a process of attunement, a way of sensing what exists beneath the visible. Installed as a quiet and immersive environment, Transcendence invites viewers to move through the works as they might move through a breath cycle, a dream, or a moment of meditation, entering a space where the visible world opens onto its unseen dimensions. In this suspended space, transcendence becomes a quiet practice of returning to the energies that bind the self to the world.