Partial Views, a group exhibition conceived and organized by independent curator Deng Si, brings together eight artistic practices to explore fragmentation, perception and the unexpected agency of objects.
Inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke’s celebrated poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” the exhibition considers how something incomplete can still possess a compelling sense of presence. In the poem, a headless ancient Greek torso exerts extraordinary power over its observer. Despite its missing parts, the sculpture seems to radiate an inner brilliance, culminating in the poem’s closing command: “You must change your life.” Partial Views asks how meaning emerges not only from what an object presents, but from what it withholds. A fragment may suggest a whole that is no longer there, and incompleteness becomes an invitation for the viewer to participate in the work’s meaning through memory, imagination and sustained attention.
The exhibition presents work by Soomin Kang, Iris Wu, Mika Obayashi, Dominik Tarabański, Asalaus, Ming Fay, Mark Manders and Gregory Hodge, whose individual approaches reveal the many ways in which an object’s identity can be unsettled, reimagined or extended beyond its physical form.
Kang, Wu and Obayashi test the boundaries of objecthood through the misalignment of material functions, the hyphen between object-image, and the merging of different fibers into new paper forms. Their practices probe whether an object’s identity holds when its function, category or material composition is disturbed.
Tarabański, Asalaus and Fay evoke worlds beyond what is immediately present. Tarabański’s botanical photographs are intimate gestures of remembrance, dedicated to places his mother never had the chance to visit. Asalaus’s sound sculptures connect physical objects with the volcanic landscape of the artist’s Icelandic hometown. Fay reimagines the Chinese money tree, a symbol of enduring fortune, through the enlarged form of the silver dollar plant, a familiar household plant in the West. Each work offers a partial glimpse of a larger world.
Manders and Hodge explore the conditions under which perception becomes unstable. Manders’s figurative sculptures appear caught between formation and disintegration, their seemingly clay-like surfaces revealed to be bronze. Hodge’s compositions shift with the viewer’s distance, what first reads as a still life dissolves into gestural marks up close. In both practices, looking is not passive but unfolds through movement, distance and time.
In a culture of fast looking and constant distraction, Partial Views offers an opportunity to pause, look again and spend time with what may not be immediately comprehensible. Ultimately, the exhibition suggests that incompleteness need not be understood as a deficiency to be overcome. What is missing may be precisely what draws us in, challenging viewers to consider not only what an artwork reveals, but also what it asks of the person standing before it.
Opening Reception: March 11, 2027, 6–8pm
Exhibition Hours: March 11–15, 2027, 11–6 pm
Location: 39 West 14th, #308, New York, NY 10011
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