CONTINGENT BEINGS / GROUP EXHIBITION / 09.27 – 10.4.2025
Group Exhibition
September 27-October 4, 2025
Contingent Beings
Camila Giraldo, Ching-Wei Wang (Way), Lu Gao
An exhibition that embraces shadow as performance, as image, as relation. A brush passed from one hand to another, a book reflecting its surroundings, a poem emerging at the edge of light and dark.
/about
The Chinese idiom 如影随形 (“as the shadow follows the form”) names shadow as inseparable from the world. Taoist philosophy expands this view – Zhuang Zi describes shadows as contingent beings existing only in relation to others – resembling, but never identical. As Plato writes, they depart from truth.
Yet, in this distance, shadows open possibilities – the freedom to reflect the world without replicating it, and generate new truths that invite reflection and contemplation.
This exhibition embraces shadow as performance, as image, as relation. A brush passed from one hand to another, a book reflecting its surroundings, a poem emerging at the edge of light and dark – all affirming shadow as both trace and divergence, merging, dissolving, and expanding our understanding of the world.
Opening Events
September 27
Opening: 2:00 PM – 6:00 PM Behind the house
Performance: 2:00 PM Behind the house
Tea Ceremony: 4:00 PM Platform on the hill
Poetry Reading: 8:00 PM Barn
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Exhibition Poster
#Downloadable Material
Press Release
#Downloadable Material
/artists
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Camila Giraldo is a Colombian artist, designer, and book-maker based in New York. In her work, she combines printed and living matter to capture the subtle aspects of our surroundings that often go unnoticed. Through analog and digital processes, she invites viewers to understand their environment and consider their place within it. Giraldo earned her BFA in Communication Design from Parsons School of Design. After her first series of artist books she received Printed Matter's Shannon Michael Cane Award. The recognition led to her participation in the 2024 New York Art Book Fair. Her work has since been collected and exhibited in Asia, Europe, and North America.
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Ching-Wei Wang (Way) is a Taiwanese artist and writer working across photography, performance, poetry, translation, and bookmaking. Her practice engages with the layered ambiguities of Taiwan’s political condition through poetic constructions of language, memory, and collective inheritance. Her recent project, Maintain Status Quo Indefinitely (2023–2025), a performance series rooted in ritual and physical labor, draws on the gestures of gendered housework and has been staged and presented in New York.
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Lu Gao (China) is an artist working with photographic installation based in New York. She focuses on reclaiming a contemplative way of life in a contemporary society where attention is constantly dissipated. Utilizing photography, architecture, and meditation to deconstruct and reshape perceptions of the relationship between human existence and the environment. Gao graduated with Honors in Architecture from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2020. Following her studies, she spent two years at a Forest Zen monastery in Hunan, China, where she delved into Eastern philosophy alongside her studio practice. She earned her MFA in Photography with departmental honors from Parsons School of Design in August 2024. Gao's work has been exhibited at the CAFA Art Museum (Beijing), Alliance Française de Pékin (Beijing), and Black Brick Project (New York), among others. She has also conducted multiple lectures and workshops on Zen and contemporary art at the Chan Meditation Center and Parsons The New School, both in New York.
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