Growth Postures
Curated by Amy Yuanchen Qian
Tutu Galley
January 23 - March 6, 2025
Artists: Linda Dong, Maggie Cunai Fan, Yuyu He, Alice Ningci Jiang, Yixuan Li, darylina powderface,
Chutian Shu, Shumin Tan, Jasphy Zheng
For the inaugural Tutu exhibition at its new location, Growth Postures brings together new and recent works by 9 artists and their evolving postures in moments of change, internally, spatially and relationally. Postures of undeterred exclamation, measured unveiling, pensive observation, childlike creation and mediated reconstruction emerge through practices of photography, painting, bookmaking, and video. These works bear witness to the process of becoming, one that holds much hesitation, agony, invisibility, and fragile, tentative reckoning.
Several works consider how the act of utterance—the primitive response to external shifts—can reveal or erode meaning. Maggie Cunai Fan reenacts a childhood memory of falling off a bike with her lens. By framing the wounded legs, the bicycle and bloody remnants on the ground with the phrase “IT HURTS” she reflects on how pain can paradoxically hide the cause of inflictions, and how language loses meaning through repetition. In a similar thread, Linda Dong brings together AI-generated faces and elements of her own body in a sequence of portrait images, unfolding as a slideshow. Through ingenious humor, the video meditates on naming as a symbolic act. Choreographing voices, breaths, rhythms, and perception, Jasphy Zheng collaborates with eight participants during improvisational workshops, asking each to simultaneously play their own sounds and respond to others.
Meanwhile, other stances turn toward revealing oneself in the face of love. Yixuan Li transcribes withheld confessions into handwritten apology notes addressed to fabricated recipients. Written in invisible ink, they can only be discerned under specific lighting angles or felt by touch, much like truths that only unfold at synchronized timing. In Vein, Yixuan Li returns to her intuitive reception of music scores before learning to play the piano, imagining notes as living plants that take root, intertwine, and blossom. Shumin Tan' s letter to her sister was drafted at various moments during her time in Abu Dhabi. Referencing poetry, she honestly discusses the sibling relationship, their homeland Malaysia, and her upbringing in Shanghai. Stamping multiple points of the siblings’ travels, together and separately, the letter passes on warm admonitions carefully crafted by Tan. Jasphy Zheng mounts Untitled (sword 1) that is inspired by a friend’s reminder of the artist’s strengths and flaws being the same thing. The sword, thrusting into the wooden panel yet holding it from dropping, becomes a metaphor of the artist’s balanced mechanisms of vulnerability and defense.
With a touch of innocence, other works examine how a sense of belonging takes shape in transience, particularly under geographical mobility and displacement. Alice Ningci Jiang grafts Chinese ink techniques into her oil painting practice, nimbly dodging constraints by imagining a soothing double reality that promises alternatives in a boundless cosmos. darylina powderface makes up characters and animates a homecoming in the winter forest, second to second and frame by frame.
Artists also visit familiar sceneries from a distance and with retrospection. Yuyu He transposes urban snapshots of clothing hangers protruding from Shanghai balconies onto clear window film, layering them against the backdrop of a New York neighborhood. In doing so, she exemplifies how places linger and interfere in the eyes of a sojourner. Chutian Shu spends years searching for the enduring greenness in memory, something she dearly remembers from her childhood home in Xianjia New Village. In a world of stagnation, expulsion, concealment, narrow pathways and daily interferences, Growth Postures brings to you a web of silhouettes as responses—they offer thoughts on what can be learned from forming shape and getting taller in time.
Several works consider how the act of utterance—the primitive response to external shifts—can reveal or erode meaning. Maggie Cunai Fan reenacts a childhood memory of falling off a bike with her lens. By framing the wounded legs, the bicycle and bloody remnants on the ground with the phrase “IT HURTS” she reflects on how pain can paradoxically hide the cause of inflictions, and how language loses meaning through repetition. In a similar thread, Linda Dong brings together AI-generated faces and elements of her own body in a sequence of portrait images, unfolding as a slideshow. Through ingenious humor, the video meditates on naming as a symbolic act. Choreographing voices, breaths, rhythms, and perception, Jasphy Zheng collaborates with eight participants during improvisational workshops, asking each to simultaneously play their own sounds and respond to others.
Meanwhile, other stances turn toward revealing oneself in the face of love. Yixuan Li transcribes withheld confessions into handwritten apology notes addressed to fabricated recipients. Written in invisible ink, they can only be discerned under specific lighting angles or felt by touch, much like truths that only unfold at synchronized timing. In Vein, Yixuan Li returns to her intuitive reception of music scores before learning to play the piano, imagining notes as living plants that take root, intertwine, and blossom. Shumin Tan' s letter to her sister was drafted at various moments during her time in Abu Dhabi. Referencing poetry, she honestly discusses the sibling relationship, their homeland Malaysia, and her upbringing in Shanghai. Stamping multiple points of the siblings’ travels, together and separately, the letter passes on warm admonitions carefully crafted by Tan. Jasphy Zheng mounts Untitled (sword 1) that is inspired by a friend’s reminder of the artist’s strengths and flaws being the same thing. The sword, thrusting into the wooden panel yet holding it from dropping, becomes a metaphor of the artist’s balanced mechanisms of vulnerability and defense.
With a touch of innocence, other works examine how a sense of belonging takes shape in transience, particularly under geographical mobility and displacement. Alice Ningci Jiang grafts Chinese ink techniques into her oil painting practice, nimbly dodging constraints by imagining a soothing double reality that promises alternatives in a boundless cosmos. darylina powderface makes up characters and animates a homecoming in the winter forest, second to second and frame by frame.
Artists also visit familiar sceneries from a distance and with retrospection. Yuyu He transposes urban snapshots of clothing hangers protruding from Shanghai balconies onto clear window film, layering them against the backdrop of a New York neighborhood. In doing so, she exemplifies how places linger and interfere in the eyes of a sojourner. Chutian Shu spends years searching for the enduring greenness in memory, something she dearly remembers from her childhood home in Xianjia New Village. In a world of stagnation, expulsion, concealment, narrow pathways and daily interferences, Growth Postures brings to you a web of silhouettes as responses—they offer thoughts on what can be learned from forming shape and getting taller in time.
Amy Yuanchen Qian
2026.01.16
2026.01.16