Xinran Guan & Sophy Chang: Between Worlds: The Intangible Thread

To imagine is to resist. To tell stories is to keep alternatives open. In Between Worlds: the Intangible Thread, Sophy and Xinran Guan create realms where collective memory and personal creations intersect, offering visions that resist settling into a single truth. In this show, two artists imagine places, beings, and experiences suspended between myth and invention. Not bound to a single narrative, geography, or reality; instead, they open portals where memory, folktale, and pure imagination converge.

At the center of both artists’ practices lies a shared methodology: form as storytelling. Drawing from cultural archetypes and personal mythologies, they create creatures, landscapes, and symbols that invite interpretations but resist single resolutions. The body of works operates in the space of suggestion—half-remembered, half-dreamed—where myth is less a source than a method of transformation.

For Sophy Chang, the process of imagining in-betweens manifests in colorful sculptural figures, hybrid beings, or vibrant imagined ecologies. For Xinran Guan, it unfolds through narrative-driven paintings, delicate visual fragments, or cinematic scenes of alternative realities. While portraying individual self-contained worlds, all the works return to certain repeated motifs, recurring colors, and visual rhythms that signal the persistence of the story across time and places.

When placed together, their works form into dialogues. Literally speaking from the show, the dialogue can be traced when a figure in one painting echoes a form in another; patterns across canvases dynamically mirror a texture on the sculpture; colors migrate between artists. But more importantly, the formed visual dialogue is the embodiment on the spiritual level, rejecting conversations that happened over coffee breaks across their neighboring studios, shared dinner over long discussions about art and life, and random thoughts they texted each other when they think of another. The exhibition becomes less a juxtaposition than lines of interwoven stories, where the boundaries between two practices dissolve into a shared language.

In a time shaped by instability and uncertainty, the act of imagining new worlds carries contemporary relevance. In that sense, Between Worlds: the Intangible Thread is two artists expanding reality by holding open alternatives. It is through these alternatives that dialogue occurs—across practices, across stories, and across the ephemeral yet vivid spaces between what was, what is, and what might be.

Artist Bio

Xinran Guan, born in Beijing and currently based in Brooklyn, Xinran Guan creates paintings that construct imaginary and mythical spaces, weaving abstraction and symbolism. Drawing inspiration from Chinese art and Taoist philosophy, her work embodies the interplay between the tangible and the formless, revealing subtle emotional transformations. She holds an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA from Bard College. Her works have been exhibited internationally and are included in the collection of the Tianjin Museum of Art, China.

Sophy Chang, originally from South Korea and now based in New York, Sophy Chang’s practice spans sculpture, drawing, and installation. Her works explore hybridity, vulnerability, and resilience, drawing upon personal experiences of migration and adaptation. Through her biomorphic forms, she articulates the emotional and spiritual labor of coexistence, crafting environments where fragility transforms into strength.

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Gallery 456
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Chinese American Arts Council’s Gallery 456 Visual Arts Exhibition Series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Gove¬¬¬rnor and the New York State Legislature.