Upcoming 2025-07-10 - 2025-08-22
Alisan Fine Arts New York is excited to present Post-Natural Oasis, an exhibition featuring the work of Shuyi Cao, Fu Xiaotong, KKD, Leah Ying Lin, Andrew Luk, Man Fung-yi, Anna Danyang Song, and Yi Xin Tong. The exhibition brings together a collection of sculpture, wall reliefs, and other forms of object-based art that reflect upon humanity’s relationship with the natural world. How might this post-natural world look in the future, or along an alternate geological timeline? Although many of the artists employ objects from nature, none of the works in this exhibition are ‘natural’; rather, they examine the innate human drive to infer cultural meaning from our natural environment.
Shuyi Cao’s sculptures utilize preserved shells, recycled materials, ceramics, and borosilicate glass. Her works evoke an alternate geological timeline: appearing as shed skins or eroded landscapes, the indefinable stoneware bodies of Pabulite (fin) (2024) render the unsettling poetics of deep ecology. With forms that evoke preconscious memories of primordial microscopic organisms, Core (2024) is hand-crafted with borosilicate glass, and the intermediate materiality of glass alludes to the transitional state across the threshold between the world of organic and inorganic. The Nectar of Perpetuity (2025) blends organic elements with synthetic materials—from rocks, driftwood, seashell fragments to recycled plastic waste—resembling natural growth patterns such as barnacles, coral reefs, or mineral formations. Shapeshifting without a hierarchy of natural or man-made, such juxtaposition reflects the disrupted orders of matter in the contemporary world.
Yi Xin Tong’s work also imagines an alternate timeline, a parallel civilization to our own that is only now being unearthed. Observatory II (2025) brings together a flint nodule and a steel air tank, forming a sculptural composition drawn from different geological times and material densities. The flint, discovered along the shore of Staten Island, NYC, bears a white oxidized skin—hand-engraved with a pattern central to Tong’s current sculptural vocabulary. Once used by early humans to spark fire and shape tools, the stone is now secured and slightly lifted by a small copper sphere that seals the tank with the air of 2025. Observatory is an ongoing series of instruments for seeing: they investigate sculptural processes of excavation and burial while compositionally engaging circularity, color interplay, structural tension, and asymmetry.
Fu Xiaotong, well known for her pinprick works on paper, has long been fascinated with ancient religions and their effect on humanity’s relationship with nature—this is a theme that she explores through her sculpture practice. Invoking the ancient Egyptian deity “NUN,” she probes the obscure ties between the myths, history, and beliefs of antiquity and their resonance in modern society. The resulting forms recall ancient relics, or deities from an imagined history; they reflect her interest in the clandestine interplay between human spirituality and the intricate tapestry of contemporary life. Man Fung-yi’s work also references the spiritual, but at a more personal level. Her steel sculptures are meant to evoke the idea of companionship. Her gourd-shaped pair of sculptures are diametrically opposed—one is forged with interwoven steel wires (“void”), the other is forged with steel plates (“solid”), representing ‘merging in the vast universe, two becoming one, without distinction, without beginning or end…’.
Andrew Luk’s Thale Cress is a sculptural series named after a humble plant favored by space agencies for agricultural experiments due to its sensitivity to radiation. As a test subject, the plant becomes a symbol of extraterrestrial colonization. The series incorporates Martian Regolith Simulant, a soil analogue used by scientists attempting to grow food on Mars. Also included is “liquified carbon,” a tongue-in-cheek replacement for Chinese calligraphy ink—an intentional code-switch: a material might read as “traditional” or “technical” depending on the cultural lens. Science fiction stories printed on white office paper—Ted Chiang’s Tower of Babylon, Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas, and Ray Bradbury’s There Will Come Soft Rains—serve as conceptual anchors. Like the materials that structure each object, the stories carry frameworks of inquiry into history, ethics, and metaphysical limits. The text is not an afterthought but a material in its own right.
Firmly positioned within science fiction, although in a completely different manner, is KKD, an artist duo comprised of Vancouver-based Lam Tung Pang and Hong Kong-based Lambert Law. Storytellers at heart, they present their character T.S.N.F. (Think Slow, Not Fast) in the form of a toy figurine. The character was created from the desire for a universal toy—although existing in another reality, it nevertheless fills the same purpose, as a comfort object that recalls one’s childhood memories. As artists who describe themselves as having ‘grown up with trauma in the post-human period,’ T.S.N.F. is an object that embodies playfulness against the pain.
Leah Ying Lin and Anna Danyang Song are both fascinated by the interwoven relationship between human, nature, and machine, but their approaches are distinct from one another. Lin delves into the human desire for conquest and the fragility of life; her chrome and glass flowers are created to examine the tension between destruction and resurrection—the endless cycle of rebirth in nature, but not true of human technology. Lin’s interest in the contrast between the transient and the eternal is evident in her fascination with the ephemeral nature of life and her investigation of cyclical and perpetual karma. In contrast, Song attempts to visualize the mystery of human connection in society through various ceramic and glass techniques: hand-building, blowing, and ceramic 3D printing. She combines and stresses the material in an attempt to ‘capture the resistance and embrace the outcome’ via the making and remaking of a specific object. Her ceramics are hybrid vessels, populated by tiny spherical forms that seem to coalesce into a miniature societal structure.
Simultaneously poetic and critical, the works in this exhibition invoke both the fragility and absurdity of our collective aspirations. The sculptures oscillate between sincerity and satire. They are crafted to appear humble, even charming, while probing the violent legacies of exploration. This layered ambiguity mirrors the hybridities of diaspora—where meanings shift, materials translate, and contradiction becomes generative.
