Tucked beneath a staircase at Cevera Yoon Gallery, a small nude portrait resists both the quick glance and the closer look. From a few steps away, the body is easy enough to recognize. Move toward it, however, and the image begins to break apart. Flesh tones dissolve into square blocks, interrupted by flashes of blue, pink, yellow, and green. The figure remains visible, but clarity becomes harder to hold onto.

The work is Xxxxxxx Xxxx, a 2024 acrylic painting by Zengjie Chai, included in Latency, a group exhibition curated by Green Yoon and on view from June 14 through July 26, 2025. Featuring 20 artists, the exhibition takes its title from the interval between input and output, when a signal has been sent but not yet fully received. Across the show, fragmentation, distortion, and suspended meaning turn that delay into a visual condition.

Chai’s painting approaches the exhibition’s premise through the problem of legibility. Measuring 12 by 12 inches, Xxxxxxx Xxxx depicts the artist’s nude torso against a black background. One arm hangs at his side while the other covers the genital area. Enlarged square pixels construct the body, most of them in flesh tones, with scattered blocks of blue, pink, yellow, and green suggesting the presence of tattoos.

The image appears direct at first. Its basic shape can be recognized almost immediately, but the details that would normally make a portrait specific remain inaccessible. There is no clearly readable face, no continuous surface of skin, and no uninterrupted passage through the figure. The body registers before the person does.

Distance changes the image without fully resolving it. Up close, the painted squares dominate the surface. From farther away, they begin to collect into a body again. Proximity gives the viewer more visual information but not necessarily more understanding. That contradiction is one of the painting’s most effective formal choices because it makes uncertainty part of the act of looking.

Pixelation also carries a more specific personal history. Chai has described the work as drawing on his experience as a person with tattoos living in China, where tattooed bodies can be stigmatized and censored in mainstream media. In Xxxxxxx Xxxx, that visual language of concealment is absorbed into the painting itself.

The figure is not covered by an external blur or mask. Its body is constructed through the same device that makes it difficult to see. This gives the censorship reference more weight than a straightforward illustration would. Obstruction is built into the image at the level of form.

Chai’s figure remains exposed and central to the composition, yet the features that might make it more specific have been broken apart. The painting keeps visibility and obstruction in tension without resolving one into the other. Its strongest moments come from that refusal to turn the body into either a fully accessible portrait or a completely erased image.

The title sharpens the same problem. Xxxxxxx Xxxx reproduces the letter count of Chai’s romanized Chinese name, replacing each letter with an X. The body is pixelated in the image; the name is redacted in language. The parallel is simple, but it gives the painting a second register of withheld information. The viewer can identify the presence of a person without gaining full access to either his appearance or his name.

Within Latency, this makes delay more than a subject of the exhibition. It becomes part of the viewer’s encounter with the painting: information arrives, but not all at once.

Seen in this context, Xxxxxxx Xxxx is most convincing when its social implications remain embedded in the mechanics of looking. The painting does not need to explain censorship or identity at length because its formal structure already places the viewer inside a condition of partial access.

The body has arrived. The name has not.