Inside Xinyun Chen's "Echo Chamber," Symbols Refuse to Stay Still

Echo Chamber, Xinyun Chen’s solo exhibition at ASPACE Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn, was on view from August 4 to 5, 2026. The show brought together paintings from her ongoing Echo Chamber Project, including works from the Shadow Puppet series. Across the exhibition, Chen focused on a basic question: how does a familiar image begin to carry symbolic meaning?

Chen’s project treats symbols as unstable rather than fixed. Their meaning changes with context, repetition, and the images around them. This idea gives the exhibition its structure. Hands, shadows, animals, and repeated objects return across different paintings, but they do not function the same way each time.

REFRAIN (2024) makes this shift easy to see. The same wine glass appears several times across the canvas. In the foreground, repeated glasses become flat and graphic. Darker versions of the same form appear less fixed in space. The object stays recognizable, but repetition changes the way it functions inside the painting.

Shadow Puppet 07: Deer (2026) extends that idea through association. A deer-shaped hand shadow appears with antlers, branches, roads, and a map. Some links come from visual resemblance. Another comes from language: the Mandarin words for “deer” (鹿, lù) and “road” (路, lù) are homophones. Chen uses both kinds of connection without turning the painting into a single narrative.

Shadow Puppet 03: Man (2025) is more crowded with possible readings. Hands, silhouettes, a veiled profile, foliage, and a vessel share the same space. Chen has written that some interpretations of this work came from viewers rather than from meanings she planned in advance. That openness matters to the exhibition. The paintings set up relationships, then leave room for the viewer to decide how far those relationships go.

Shadow Puppet 02: Rabbit (2025) brings several systems of time into one image. Lunar phases, a calendar grid, and the Chinese temporal marker Mao (卯时) appear with a rabbit-shaped hand shadow. The painting does not force these systems into one timeline. Instead, they remain visible as different ways of measuring and imagining time.

Seen together, these works make the exhibition stronger than a sequence of separate symbol studies. Repetition creates continuity, while differences in scale, density, and surface keep the paintings from feeling formulaic. A hand shadow in one work changes how a hand shadow is read in another. The same is true of animals, moons, and repeated objects. The series builds meaning across paintings without fixing one definition for each motif.

ASPACE’s white walls, concrete floor, large windows, and exposed ceiling gave the paintings enough space to read as a group. The raw linen used throughout Chen’s work also sat naturally against the unfinished character of the room. During the opening reception, visitors moved between the two walls and discussed recurring motifs, possible meanings, and potential inspirations for individual pieces.

As an exhibition, Echo Chamber works best when its ideas are carried by visible formal choices before any explanation is needed. Repetition, exposed linen, flatness, shadow, and shifts in depth make the instability of Chen’s symbols apparent on the surface. Some works ask for more background than others, but the show does not depend on a single reading. Its strongest moments come from the way one painting changes the next, turning the gallery into a place where recognition stays active rather than final.