Sangmin Lee's and Yixuan Wu's works share a quality of deceptiveness. In the two-person exhibition To Elongate, To Entwine at Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456, the artists' recent sculptures and drawings assert their own agency, tending to conceal their nature beneath a facade of appearances. You must scrutinize—almost stepping on the floor pieces or brushing against the hanging "flowers"—to recognize some familiar elements from the domestic: millet hulls, dried loofahs, or crumpled paper splattered with compound. The overall image of some works can also be misleading: the lotus stems coil and intertwine, resembling a tangle of tubular pipes (Yixuan Wu, Untitled, 2026); branches sprouting from the wall seem to be adorned with rime ice but are in fact residues of home improvement (Sangmin Lee, Untitled [Nostalgia without memory], 2023–2026).
The twist and treat of daily objects is itself a gesture of withholding, a resistance to full revelation. Materials estranged from their original usage invite being looked at closely and seen again. In the exhibition, what the works are imbued with is a sense of nostalgia meant to be spoken tenderly rather than aloud.
Wu applies dysfunctional qualities to facilities of the care system and furniture from home interiors: safety railings are elongated, a step stool is shaved off at one corner, a rocking chair sways in the wrong orientation. Pondering the dual usage of sensory boards, Wu also borrows their tactile elements—tiny pebbles, faux fur—and extends them onto the surfaces of her sculptures. These specific toys find similarity in both early-stage education and dementia prevention: care is designed, and the processes of learning and remembering slide into the same repetitive gestures.
Wu once mentioned a family member gradually losing memory. Loss is a process—a force that changes things faintly yet constantly, and quietly grows into shapes. You cannot recognize when the strangeness sneaks in until it has already transformed the texture of what was there. You forget which corner of the room you left your socks in, or accidentally drape one over the leg of a stool (Yixuan Wu, nearness, 2026); a piece of glass rolls under a chair; be careful not to crush it (Yixuan Wu, held in a lean, 2026). Wu's work attends to these barely distinguishable moments within a precisely arranged life—the tiny tentacles of distraction that find their way through, uninvited.
Yet the sculptures also capture the cunning side of altered memory. A bathtub safety rail becomes the peg for ring toys, but the rings happen to be locked onto it. The surfaces, bumpy or furry, evoke a longing to touch, and at the same time an unease—the feeling of encountering an environment that is sweetly uncanny. There is an instinct to construct order out of seemingly clumsy, humorous behavior—a desire to grasp things that may only exist in one's imagination, as the facts themselves are uncertain and subject to revision.
It is not uncommon to speak of nostalgia—of family, hometown, the touch of a person—and to find familiarity in the dailiness. But what the artists capture here is the vagueness and instability of remembering. Lee's works are in motion: each component made of joint compound is strung together with meandering wires, suspended from the ceiling, appearing to drip and fall. In the sculpture Etiolation (Nostalgia without memory) (2022–2026), though its main body touches the floor, there still seems to be the need of being supported by thin metal sticks to maintain balance. Traces of bending, breaking, and accumulating are also visible; each process points to a patched structure, rendering the work more precarious—a materialization of ambivalence.
Lee's work, in both form and color, carries a lightness inherent to things that are ephemeral: memories are fading, or they are altogether made up, and so are not weighted with the heaviness of certainty. If, as the artist says, "the past is something you keep remembering," then it is always being revised, metabolized, worn down by the act of return itself. And there is an impossibility of holding an intangible thing—it falls and eludes; you can only attach it, slightly, to an edge. To Elongate, To Entwine sets the tone: you enter a space without distinguishing memory from illusion, and they melt into a hazy image where color is fading, solid becomes soft, grounded turns floating—and what the exhibition gives form to is a fantasy of nostalgia.
