By: Chenyang Nie
Gold from the Gaze: Inside The Alchemy of Perception
This June, Artistry Edge presents “The Alchemy of Perception,” a group exhibition featuring eight emerging artists whose practices explore the transformation of inner experience into tangible form. Curated by Chenyang Nie, founder of Artistry Edge, the exhibition is a reflection on how artists function as alchemists—transmuting fleeting perception, memory, and emotion into enduring artistic statements.
Through sculpture, painting, installation, and mixed media, these artists explore personal mythologies, psychological landscapes, and social archetypes. The audience is invited to become an active participant in this alchemical process—digging, reflecting, and confronting what lies beneath the surface.
Photo Courtesy: Yuqiao Zhang
Hannah Huntley – Slow Start 1–4, Gossip Garden
Huntley’s paintings were born out of a period of physical confinement, following a severe health crisis. With delicate brushwork and quiet intensity, Slow Start honors the mundane acts that became monumental. Gossip Garden takes a more whimsical turn—domestic objects become personified, carrying gossip, judgment, and humor. Through both series, Huntley elevates everyday life into a site of drama, beauty, and transformation.
Sophie G Stark – Thinking rosary, Candy bar burial, Moonpie stratigraphy
Stark’s silicone sculptures provoke both fascination and unease. Drawing inspiration from religion, horror films, and bio-archaeology, her fleshy, hybrid forms resist categorization. These works embody the grotesque and the sacred, inviting open interpretation and intense curiosity. Audiences have been struck by their originality and poetic complexity—Stark’s practice is as dreamlike as it is intellectually potent.
Photo Courtesy: Yuqiao Zhang
Songer Yang – Spoons
Yang’s poetic sculpture series centers on the domestic and the deeply personal. Crafted partly with his grandfather using salvaged parts from a broken rice cooker, and continued through a daily spoon-making ritual, the works act as tender vessels for memory and longing. Each spoon becomes a silent conversation—between generations, between time and touch, between the artist and his younger self.
Lucy Black – Untitled, Cuddling Swans #2
Black’s work hovers in the space between movement and stillness. Her soft sculptures and motorized dolls are often recontextualized through performance and photography, creating uncanny, intimate worlds. In Cuddling Swans #2, tenderness meets quiet tension, reflecting on how human-animal relationships embody both vulnerability and power. Her practice is theatrical yet deeply introspective, revealing emotional truths in staged stillness.
Susie Luo – Rebirth
Luo’s haunting textile installation stages a visceral encounter with emotional memory. Fabric, stretched and torn, is transformed through ritual acts—cutting, knotting, burning, and piercing—to create sculptural scars. Representing the human body as both vulnerable and resilient, the work explores cycles of trauma, repair, and regeneration. “Rebirth” offers a multi-layered reflection on personal healing, historical wounds, and collective resilience. Morgan Moto – I Love Myself II, from the series Seven Albums Moto, a Los Angeles-based eco-surrealist, creates with materials that hold history—recycled, found, and often personally significant. Their work is an emotional excavation of the physical and metaphysical, where every object contains a whisper of its past life. I Love Myself II invites viewers into an intimate universe where discarded items become sacred artifacts, weaving together identity, ecology, and memory with tenderness and surrealist lyricism.
Photo Courtesy: Yuqiao Zhang
Weiyi Li – Negotiation
In a striking figurative painting, Li juxtaposes beauty with fragility, illusion with violence. A porcelain-patterned girl, naked and weeping, is seated on what appears to be a negotiation table—her body commodified, her fate undecided. With candy bowls and wine glasses acting as symbols of deception and desire, Li offers a haunting metaphor for power dynamics, objectification, and societal expectations placed on femininity.
Chinning Liu – Peel
In Peel, Liu manipulates fabric and latex—materials commonly used in dancewear—to simulate the sensation of inhabiting a second skin. Through burning, weaving, and binding, she recreates the heat, pressure, and discomfort of performance. The resulting form is a tactile map of transformation—a ruptured but resilient skin that embodies both struggle and grace.
“The Alchemy of Perception” invites viewers to consider not just what is seen, but how we see—and how artists intervene in that act of seeing. Whether rooted in ritual, memory, humor, or trauma, each work opens a portal to a deeper truth. This exhibition celebrates the invisible labor of turning experience into expression, and the power of art to transmute the intangible into gold.
