Easter Still Life
Come Rot in My Bedroom, Accent Sisters, New York
By Rui Jiang
Come Root in My Bedroom, installation view. Featuring Gabrielle Benak, Fool Me Twice; Alison Long, bed installation; Zengyuan Ma, Mom and Me. Photo: Ahzel.
One of the curators, Alison Long, had just moved the day before installation. Come Rot in My Bedroom—keeping her promise, she transported her temporarily displaced, battle-worn bed into Accent Sisters. A Baroque still life stripped of its frame. Only here there are no ripe grapes or hunted game, only half-open takeout boxes, wrinkled sheets, an overheated phone, a floor clinging to dust. Takeout becomes the offering, grease replacing anointing oil; the screen light becomes holy light, a cold white illuminating a fatigued face; DMs become prayers, private messages rising and falling beneath the algorithmic dome.
On opening night Alison lay in the bedding, replying to DMs projected onto a large screen, occasionally taking a bite of takeout fed to her by the audience. Within the limited space of the bed she managed the smallest cycle of modern life: eating, scrolling, waiting, replying. Basic physiology overlapped with digital sociality into a new daily liturgy. This most private mechanism of loss was offered up to public view—watching, guarding, awaiting the next notification pop-up. Why did she pause so long before replying to that message? Is she hungry? Will she like this food? The absurd trespass of privacy through communal keeping-watch felt like the audience projecting care onto themselves, a distant witnessing tinged with reluctance—hardly mistimed, rather a modern spasm.
Installation view. Featuring Huang Ziyue黄子玥, Miss Guanyin, I’ll take you home. Photo: Ahzel.
Megann Lawlor’s transparent Dirty Laundry Chair (Phase 1) seals up the uneasy shame of self-maintenance, yet in the shape of a charming, graceful chair invites guests to sit. Beyond expectation and propriety, amid self-deprecating laughter from countless visitors, the sagging plastic—unable to truly support a spine—wanders in companionship with dirty clothes, overburdened under harsh gazes and temporary unsustainability. Sierra Linton’s The Tooth Fairy I Remember embeds resin teeth into fabric, a willful mouth bearing a mysterious contract; childhood myth carries the sting of substitution and loss. Even after growing up, when the pillow lies empty beside you, you wait for an unfinished promise—do you and the fairy both have healthy teeth? Zengyuan Ma’s Mom and Me lets you hear the tearing fibers as a child’s hair is pulled tight; mom, will you still help me tie up my ponytail that pulls at my eyebrows? Acrylic pigment seeps at the joints of mother and daughter’s outlines, sweat and tears shared through time; both bodies stream downward in thin liquid lines.
Christina Yuna Ko’s angel’s revenge carries a sacred resentment, compressing “revenge” from theatrical action into a soaked daily residue. After the score of curses dries, remember to practice; the bow and arrow—essential tools of revenge—must also be hung out to dry. Anger rises with people from the bedside to dress and groom, fury reused again and again in the act of wiping. Devon Chen’s Everything Metal In My Life gathers, in sleep, every metal object of a lifetime to construct a sharp, silver, merciless world—yet its tone tenderly leads toward a silent whistle. Gabrielle Benak’s Fool Me Twice crackles with static in multiple exposures and negatives of the body, hair in a disco tangled, twisted, overlapping, grasping at untouchable foreign matter. Xirong Wang’s pneumatic device I see fine bears a chilling sweet smile, pink latex air bladders pulsing before the eyes, confronting viewers with enforced social engorgement.
Installation view. Featuring Huang Ziyue黄子玥, Miss Guanyin, I’ll take you home. Photo: Ahzel.
In Luyi Wang’s video work Ibuprofen, the image is split by an almost cruel structure: the background shows the tragedy of war and street resistance; at the center hangs, like an analgesic device, a stream of random short videos—one after another—as a powerless defense mechanism, mixing lowered perception with dispersed guilt and temporary escape. We are catastrophically connected to the world’s disasters; only the finger keeps moving, history keeps unfolding, pain is relegated to the background, and scrolling becomes the only rhythm we can control.
This still life does not belong only to flesh. Long Live! by Ahzel 杨臻 resembles a cooling core, quietly redirecting the bodily fatigue of bed-rotting toward nonhuman fragility and the paradox of immortality. Entering through the blessing of “long live,” the work dismantles the definition of “living”: layered images, flickering interfaces, audio feedback—then cache overflow, signal delay, image distortion—the fatigue textures of digital existence. We are used to imagining the internet as an immortal archive, yet so-called “eternity” is merely continuous operation, the extension of energy, hardware, and memory through silent wear. Thus “Long Live” becomes a curse-like prolongation of life—within endless preservation, we lose the right to natural decay and forgetting.
Echoing this is Huang Ziyue 黄子玥’s Miss Guanyin, I’ll take you home. A Guanyin statue is found abandoned on the street, transported, installed, then “brought home,” eventually enshrined in a real temple. This process functions like an unstable metonymy, narrating the drifting and rupture of sacred imagery between reality and social context. The ongoing intimacy of video calls within the work forms a peculiar tension with compilations of “rustic” internet videos, bringing the deity into an immediate yet discontinuous state of connection—on one side a gaze attempting genuine contact, on the other a decentralized, fragmented network collectivity. Traditionally, “Guanyin,” as a symbol of compassion and salvation, signifies eternal listening and rescue—“Guanshiyin (观世音),” the one who perceives the sounds of the world, responding with boundless mercy. But in Huang’s narrative, Miss Guanyin stands alongside traffic logic; compassion and entertainment algorithms share the same interface. These image languages intersect, sharing the same overheated screen.
Kyla Liang’s Flood House uses endoscopic imagery to drift into flood-submerged, disordered domestic interiors, where once-assumed structures of familial femininity drown together with the original meaning of the flood, beneath swollen gazes.
Easter once promised the moment when the stone door is pushed open, the body rises, light enters the cave. But in this bedroom transported into the gallery, the stone has not moved, and the audience, too, finds it difficult to rise.