NEW YORK, NY.- CHINCHINART and A&B Lab are pleased to present Losing Ghosts, a group exhibition examining how memory, perception, and temporality become unstable, deferred, and spectral in contemporary experience. As part of CHINCHINART’s ongoing overseas exhibition initiative, the project explores the lingering presence of images, sensations, and afterimages that resist disappearance.

On view from January 28 through January 31, 2026, with an opening reception on Wednesday, January 28, from 6–8 PM, the exhibition is curated by Luman Jiang, Xinying Wang, Shuhan Zhang, and Yvonne Yitian Xu, and features artists Hongyu Zhang, Jiwon Rhie, Sona Lee, Xuemeng Li, and Ziqi (Tree) Xu.


Sona Lee, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2024, courtesy of CHINCHINART

Rooted in the untranslatable ambiguity of the Chinese word Youling (幽灵), Losing Ghosts approaches the ghost not as a symbol of death or the supernatural, but as a lingering residue of memory, something neither fully present nor fully absent. Drifting between visibility and disappearance, the ghost becomes a figure of deferred presence, inhabiting the threshold between dream and consciousness, recall and erasure. Drawing conceptual resonance from Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx (1993), the exhibition understands the spectral as a condition through which suppressed, delayed, or obscured histories continue to reverberate within the present.


Hongyu Zhang, Undrowning Tears, 2024, courtesy of CHINCHINART

The exhibition brings together moving image, sound, and installation to construct environments where images hesitate, sounds linger, and spatial experience feels subtly out of sync. Memory here is not archival or linear, but elastic, looping, delayed, and half-awake. Rather than offering clear narratives, the works sustain states of perceptual suspension, moments in which recognition falters and attention drifts. Each piece operates like a quiet séance of perception, inviting viewers to encounter what is already in the process of fading.

Ziqi (Tree) Xu transforms cinematic fiction into lived memory by tracing the moment when a mediated ghost image quietly crosses into personal geography and embodied experience. His work emerges from the uncanny overlap between mass culture and private recollection, where fictional narratives unexpectedly anchor themselves in everyday space. Jiwon Rhie, by contrast, approaches identity as a fragile system of boundaries, conceptual, cultural, and spatial, that are continuously shaped and eroded through participation. Through the gradual disruption of these boundaries, belonging is revealed not as a stable position but as a spectral condition, perpetually reconfigured through movement and encounter.


Jiwon Rhie, Rice Set Theory, 2021, courtesy of CHINCHINART


Ziqi (Tree) Xu, A Chinese Ghost Story, 2022, courtesy of CHINCHINART

Hongyu Zhang dissolves stable identity through drifting images that suspend figures in a state of indeterminacy, where social markers fade, and presence lingers without narrative resolution. Sona Lee constructs dreamlike visual spaces in which perception drifts between memory and imagination, allowing time, recognition, and spatial logic to remain fluid and unsettled. Xuemeng Li explores stillness as a form of temporal deferral, creating environments that invite viewers to dwell within moments where movement, duration, and presence quietly resist completion. Together, these practices articulate a shared sensitivity to suspension, delay, and perceptual instability, positioning the ghost as a mode of experience rather than a metaphor.


Xuemeng Li, Eye, Illuminated Dreams Series, 2024, courtesy of CHINCHINART

Losing Ghosts is not concerned with loss as an endpoint, but with the persistence of traces, the subtle ways memory continues to glow within disappearance. The exhibition foregrounds moments of suspension, where time folds, images dissolve, and perception drifts. In this floating interval, memory is neither fully remembered nor entirely forgotten, but held in a state of quiet vibration.

Curators

Luman Jiang

Luman Jiang is a curator and researcher working across contemporary art, curatorial practice, and cultural mediation. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University. She has participated in cross-regional projects with institutions including the Long Museum, Yuelai Art Museum, and The Parrot Art & Culture Development Foundation, contributing to exhibitions, research initiatives, and institutional collaboration. Her research and curatorial practice explore the affective and translational functions of art in contemporary culture, with particular attention to spirituality, identity, and narrative.

Xinying Wang

Xinying Wang focuses on how contemporary art constructs new forms of publicness and experiential pathways. Her research centers on accessibility in art and the psychological dimensions of audience experience, examining how individuals reestablish perceptual and emotional connections with the world through images, space, and materiality. Through cross-cultural research and exhibition practice, she has developed a methodology grounded in spatial narrative, sensory engagement, and participatory curating. Building on this foundation, her work further extends into the roles of visual art in emotional regulation, self-narration, and social connection, advocating for art spaces that are more inclusive, caring, and emotionally resonant. In parallel, she has long been involved in the development of art derivatives and cultural creative products, applying design thinking to reconsider how art circulates within consumer contexts and everyday life. She explores the reproduction of visual symbols, material languages, and narrative structures within creative product systems, enabling art to enter daily life in lighter, more intimate, and culturally meaningful ways — positioning art as a subtle yet connective force between lived experience and imagination.

Yvonne Yitian Xu

Yvonne Yitian Xu is a New York–based arts professional with an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University and a BA in Arts Management from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her work focuses on the contemporary art market, collecting practices, and curatorial engagement, with particular attention to how artworks circulate within market and social contexts. She has gained professional experience at international galleries and art market institutions, including Lisson Gallery, Eli Klein Gallery, China Guardian Auctions, and Cohart, where she has worked across artist and collector relations, institutional collaboration, and art valuation. Her practice sits at the intersection of curatorial thinking and market strategy, with a strong emphasis on contextualizing artistic value within broader cultural and economic frameworks. Yvonne is the founder of A&B Lab, an independent platform dedicated to fostering dialogue between art and the market. Her research interests underscore the role of artistic language in contemporary expression.

Shuhan Zhang

Shuhan Zhang is a New York–based arts professional and researcher. She holds an MA in Visual Arts Administration from New York University and a BA in Art Theory from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. Her work focuses on digital art, cultural platforms, and the contemporary art market, examining how technology reshapes viewing practices, value production, and artistic circulation. She has worked with institutions including UCCA Center for Contemporary Art, Tank Shanghai, Eli Klein Gallery, and RAINRAIN Gallery. Her curatorial practice emphasizes experimental exhibition formats and fostering critical dialogue between artists, institutions, and audiences.

Artists

Hongyu Zhang

Hongyu Zhang (b. 1996, Sichuan, China) graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2023 and lives and works between Chengdu and Chongqing. His practice explores the instability of existence through drifting, unsettled imagery that reflects contradiction and compassion. Rejecting fixed meanings, Zhang focuses on life as an open, evolving process. Using a subtractive visual language of dissolution and concealment, he places forms between appearance and disappearance, cultivating emotional sensitivity and quiet tenderness within states of fragility and uncertainty.

Sona Lee

Sona Lee is a Korean artist currently based in New York City. Working primarily in painting and drawing, she explores the intersection of dreams, memory, and everyday experience. Her layered imagery reflects a deep interest in psychological space, often blurring the boundary between the real and the imagined. Lee received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Konkuk University in 2021 and her Master of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in 2025. She was the recipient of the Lin Wang Endowed Scholarship Fund in both 2023 and 2024. Selected recent exhibitions include solo and group presentations at C24 Gallery (2025), Visionary Projects (2025), The Blanc (2025), On the Fringe NYC (2024), and 25 East Gallery (2023) in New York City; Paris Koh Fine Arts (2024) in New Jersey; and Raum Art Center (2023), Gallery LVS (2022), and Gallery Imazoo (2021) in Seoul. In 2025, she is an artist-in-residence at the Long Meadow Art Residency in New Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Jiwon Rhie

Jiwon Rhie is a Korean multidisciplinary artist based in New York. Her work deals with diverse subject matter across installations, sculptures, and video, exploring ideas of boundaries, human relationships, cultural identities, and communication. She holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BFA from Hannam University and Hongik University. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Bombay Beach Biennale, Mana Contemporary, Transmitter Gallery, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Hannam University Museum, Home Gallery, Daejeon Museum of Art, and Spring Break Art Show. She is a recipient of the New York State Council on the Arts Support for Artists Grant, The Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, AHL–T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award, Monira Foundation Artist Residency, Queens Art Fund Award, and a NARS Foundation Fellowship. She has had solo exhibitions at La MaMa Galleria and Transmitter Gallery.

Xuemeng Li

Xuemeng Li (b. 2000, Yueyang, China) works across photography, video installation, and documentary film. His practice takes shape through the act of looking and explores non-dual relationships, including those between humans and water, dreams and memories, and nature and the self. Through his experimental image-making and moving-image practice, Li gives form to the intangible and unspeakable and responds to real-world concerns such as urban transformation and environmental change. Li’s recent solo exhibitions include The Still Flow (theBlanc Gallery, New York, 2024), Wandering Through (Banshan Gallery, Tokyo, 2023), and Finding (Banshan Gallery, Tokyo, 2022). His works have also been shown internationally at the 2024 Shanghai International Photography Festival, Times Art Gallery (New York), Three Shadows Photography Art Center (Xiamen), and Xie Zilong Photography Museum (Changsha), among others.

Ziqi (Tree) Xu

Tree (Ziqi) Xu is an art practitioner working between China and the United Kingdom. His practice involves installation, moving image, and performance, investigating the entanglement between technological systems, ideological structures, and systemic violence. Through the appropriation of industrial materials and technological objects—such as surveillance devices, pipelines, and urban infrastructures—he constructs immersive environments that evoke a mechanical logic embedded within contemporary life. The creation of these mixtures was his path to reaching the Inhuman Horizon, intended to stir up primitive desires of meat in the nowadays audience's consciousness.Influenced by speculative memory and cinematic language, Tree seeks to create experiential fields where sensation becomes a site of resistance against the smoothness of ideological automation. His practice explores how affect, movement, and visual friction can challenge dominant representations shaped by technological modernity.