Embodiment 2025

VillageOneArt is pleased to present a group exhibition “Embodiment” on view at the gallery from December 11th, 2025, offers visitors insights into artists, both emerging and mid-career, working with bodies as an inflection point.

“Embodiment”, a group exhibition at VillageOneArt on view from December 11th, offers visitors insights into artists, both emerging and mid-career, working with bodies as an inflection point. Whether depicting figures, interiors implying the presence of human bodies, bodies of water or some other type of entity, the various compositions shown in Embodiment present dramatic, striking visions of embodiment frequently demarcated against a homogeneity across the picture plane. In Xiangni Song’s “Untitled,” a young seated figure leans uncomfortably against their own body. With blue hair draped across their face and a teal duck peeking out from behind them, an earthen red background encircles them: presenting the lone figure leaping out from a contrasted background. Song’s painting exemplifies this exhibit’s sense of rugged individualism: figures challenging the gaze, with artists Chandra Fang, Sid Zhang, Theresia Zhang and Wyatt Lux presenting figurative scenes with an element of heightened suspense. Michael Fried presents mysterious tableaux juxtaposing familiar fruits, such as bananas, into unfamiliar scenarios in which these elements seemingly present choreography across a stage to form bizarre still life scenes. Lauryn Casey’s emblematic paintings of furniture imply the figure in their presence, while Edmund (Xingzheng) Bao’s “Migrating Eaves” evokes the inhabitants of a dwelling in this feature presented within the gallery space. Yichen Ji’s sensual bodies of water permeate the picture plane in silkscreens such as “Liquid 002-Periwinkle,” while Xianghan Chen’s “Blue Cover In” seemingly shields scenes – and potentially the bodies located within them–just out of view of the gallery-goer.

While the type of embodiment present in each artists’ work differs significantly, the exhibition captures a cohesive sense of investigation, of boundary-pushing and a latent tension present between expression and erasure, absence and presence. Where figures confront the viewer directly, the body serves as a central feature communicating a potent narrative, expressed through meticulous attention to tone, line and compositional balance. Where multiple entities press forward in heterogeneous expression, the concept of embodiment extends to become focal point of intermingling and intrinsic interrelationship, approximating the many complex structures that today’s most formative artists are navigating in real time as their careers develop. The many rising stars in this exhibition draw from their unique styles of artistic expression to define a range of painting styles that foreground the trajectory of tomorrow’s brightest artistic talents. Up through January 17, 2026, Embodiment draws from the formative presence of different ‘bodies’ to speak to an emerging trend of painters and sculptors depicting the seen, the unseen and the imagined.