Misheel Adams, Xingzheng Bao, Lauryn Casey, Xianghan Cheng, Chandra Fang, Sherly Fan, Michael Fried, Zekai Guo, Yichen Ji, Xianglong Li, Wyatt Lux, Ziyan Mei, Xiangni Song, Sid Zhang, Theresia Zhang, Nanxing Zheng
December 11, 2025 – January 24, 2026
VillageOneArt presented the group exhibition Embodiment, on view at the gallery from December 11, 2025, offering visitors insight into artists, both emerging and mid-career, working with bodies as an inflection point.
Whether depicting figures, interiors implying the presence of human bodies, bodies of water, or some other type of entity, the various compositions shown in Embodiment present dramatic, striking visions of embodiment, frequently demarcated against a homogeneity across the picture plane.
While the type of embodiment present in each artist’s work differs significantly, the exhibition captures a cohesive sense of investigation, of boundary-pushing, and a latent tension between expression and erasure, absence and presence. Where figures confront the viewer directly, the body serves as a central feature communicating a potent narrative, expressed through meticulous attention to tone, line, and compositional balance. Where multiple entities press forward in heterogeneous expression, the concept of embodiment extends to become the focal point of intermingling and intrinsic interrelationship, approximating the many complex structures that today’s most formative artists are navigating in real time as their careers develop. The many rising stars in this exhibition drew from their unique styles of artistic expression to define a range of painting styles that foreground the trajectory of tomorrow’s brightest artistic talents. On view through January 24, 2026, Embodiment drew from the formative presence of different ‘bodies’ to speak to an emerging trend of painters and sculptors depicting the seen, the unseen, and the imagined.
In Xiangni Song’s Untitled, a young seated figure leans uncomfortably against their own body. With blue hair draped across their face and a teal duck peeking out from behind them, an earthen red background encircles them, presenting the lone figure leaping out from a contrasted ground. Song’s painting exemplifies the exhibition’s sense of rugged individualism: figures challenging the gaze, with artists Chandra Fang, Sid Zhang, Theresia Zhang, and Wyatt Lux presenting figurative scenes charged with heightened suspense.
Michael Fried presents mysterious tableaux, juxtaposing familiar fruits, such as bananas, into unfamiliar scenarios in which these elements seem to perform a choreography across a stage to form bizarre still-life scenes. Lauryn Casey’s emblematic paintings of furniture imply the figure in their presence, while Edmund (Xingzheng) Bao’s Migrating Eaves evokes the inhabitants of a dwelling in a feature presented within the gallery space. Yichen Ji’s sensual bodies of water permeate the picture plane in silkscreens such as Liquid 002 – Periwinkle, while Xianghan Cheng’s Blue Cover In seemingly shields scenes—and potentially the bodies located within them—just out of view of the gallery-goer.
Works in the Exhibition
Embodiment was on view at VillageOneArt, 150 West 25th Street, Suite 403, New York, from December 11, 2025 through January 24, 2026. For inquiries regarding available works, please contact info@villageoneart.com.