When Blurry Memories Awaken 

Curated by Jinyi Freya Xu 

Nugyen Wahed Gallery, 504 E 12th St, New York, NY 10009 

March 22 - March 31, 2026 

We are pleased to present When Blurry Memories Awaken, an exhibition curated by Jinyi Freya Xu that brings together seven artists – Ruoyu Gong, Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, Xinzi Luo, Wandi Ni, Hafsa Nouman, Haidong Yang, Jingyi Zhang. Rather than treating memory as a fixed archive of the past, the exhibition approaches it as a process shaped by perception, materiality, and temporal distance, one that continuously oscillates between recollection and imagination. 

The physical presence are vessels of our own experiences, shaped and sustained by the totality of our memories. Every recollection constructs the architecture of our present self. Yet when we turn back toward the past, memory always appears in flux — both near and distant, shadow-like 

yet illusory. Blurry memory is not simply a residue of forgetting, but the inherent form through which memory exists. It reveals how our perception of the past is continuously defined by processes of layering, fading, and reconstruction. 

In remembering, the distinction between objectivity and subjectivity begins to dissolve. Memory no longer reproduces fact; it becomes an act of re-creation, woven from perception, emotion, and imagination. The exhibition resists medium-based categorisation in favour of perceptual proximity. Painting, photography, and object-based works are placed in dialogue through shared concerns with surface, transparency, repetition, and trace. 

Ruoyu Gong uses personal symbolism to explore psychological interiority and emotional perception. Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee works across photography, video, and installation, examining memory, historical rupture, and mediated vision through archival and cartographic approaches. Jingyi Zhang uses multi texure to explore perception through natural metaphors. Haidong Yang employs the photobook as a narrative and temporal structure to investigate alternative viewpoints and everyday power relations. Xinzi Luo works across painting, sculpture, and socially engaged practice, exploring utopian imagination and relational community structures. Hafsa Nouman examines memory, desire, and colonial histories through spatial thresholds, material surfaces, and embodied gestures in painting. Wandi Ni creates multi-panel paintings that reflect on shared memory between humans and non-humans, rooted in land, time, and ecological continuity. 

In an image-saturated present defined by speed and clarity, When Blurry Memories Awaken insists on the value of uncertainty. Blurriness functions as a critical space, which allows memory to remain active, porous, and unresolved, reminding us that what shapes subjectivity most deeply is often what cannot be fully fixed or confirmed. 

Presented by Symora Art

Curator: 

Jinyi Freya Xu 

Jinyi Freya Xu (b.2002) is a New York-based curator, artist, researcher, and the founder of Symora Art, a multidisciplinary curatorial collective. Her curation explores how individual experience and the encounter of being and time can be translated into visual and spatial forms, positioning art as a medium for critical inquiry and public dialogue. Xu’s work emphasizes conceptual clarity, emotional precision, and cross-disciplinary thinking across art, philosophy, AI technology, and astronomy, bridging curatorial methodology with market literacy and philosophical reflection. Xu holds an M.A. in Visual Arts Administration from New York University and a B.A. in Arts Management from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. 

She has curated exhibitions, including Inner Feast (Accent Sister, New York, 2025) and Entangled (Latitude Gallery, New York, 2025). Xu has contributed to exhibitions, publications, and institutional projects at the West Bund Museum × Center Pompidou, Matthew Liu Fine Art, and Latitude Gallery, with extensive experience in artist collaboration, narrative development, market strategy, and cross-cultural exchange.

Artists & Works: 

1. Ruoyu Gong 

Ruoyu Gong (b. 1999, Beijing, China) is a New York-based painter. His work delves into the complexity of the human psyche through figurative narrative in the theme of personal symbolism. Currently pursuing his MFA in painting at the esteemed New York Academy of Art, Ruoyu earned his BFA with honors in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023. In 2021, he received the certificate of Advanced Painting Seminar at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, China. 

His work has been featured in exhibitions internationally. Recent exhibitions include AXA Art Prize, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY (2024); Tribeca Ball, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY (2024); International Contest of Contemporary Art – YICCA 23/24, Matalon Foundation, Milan, Italy (2024); Deck the Walls, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY (2023); Why Do You Do It?, Boomer Gallery, London, UK (2023); Illustration Senior Invitational, ISB Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2023); No Longer Transparent, Gelman Gallery, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI (2022); OMNI Art Expo, XinTai Warehouse, Shanghai, China (2021). In addition, Ruoyu has won awards including the Patron’s Scholar Award, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY (2024-25); Merit Scholarship, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY (2024-25, 2023-24); 1st Place of the International Contest of Contemporary Art – YICCA 23/24, Milan, Italy (2023-24). 

Dreamy dream 

30 x 40” 

Oil on canvas 

2025

2. Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee 

Sharon Cheuk Wun LEE (b. 1992, Hong Kong) holds an MFA (2025) from Columbia University, as well as an MFA (2022) and a BFA (2016) from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has presented solo exhibitions at Kyoto Art Center as part of KG+ SELECT (Kyoto, 2023) and at Lumenvisum (Hong Kong, 2017). Her work has been shown at institutions and galleries including Galerie du Monde (Hong Kong, 2025); The LeRoy Neiman Gallery and Below Grand (New York, 2025); WMA and HART Haus (Hong Kong, 2024); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2022); and The Listening Biennial (Berlin, 2021). 

Lee won the WMA Masters Award (Hong Kong, 2019) and was a finalist for Kyotographie KG+ SELECT and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize (2023). She has been awarded scholarships for academic exchanges at Yale University and the University of Vienna, as well as research grants from Columbia University (2025) and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council (2023). Her work has been featured in ArtAsiaPacific, Harvard Advocate, Artomity, and South China Morning Post. 

Moth at Noon 

13" x 16" x 0.75" 

Engraving on photo-porcelain, handmade zinc metal frame 

2024

Same River Twice 

Gelatin silver prints, 4x5 large format b/w negative films, 

3-channel b/w video, 3-channel colour video (sound), links to Google maps. 

2020 

Work statement by artist: 

It was 2014 when I left Hong Kong; after my return home, I became estranged from ‘us’. 

My absence from that year has left a crack in memory between me and the people of my time. With the hazy pictures imprinted on their mind, I strive to piece together the fragments of our collective landscape. For that I take on as a flaneur in time, trying to re-remember the moments at Harcourt Road and to re-photograph on film the “true views” on the satellite maps—only to be constantly reminded by the fractured street lamps and high-rises of that palpable crack in time. Virtual reality, ambitious as it claims to be in its project to re-duplicate the world, points ironically at its impotence to reconcile the pixels between the layers of my mediated memories. 

I re-constructed that disappearing landscape as an analogue-digital hybrid. What remains in the photographic prints through the process of darkroom solarization are silver linings radiating between shadows of total darkness. These prints were then transposed from the virtual Harcourt Road to six newspaper stalls situated at the teeming corner of Nathan Road. Here, they became a window, a mirror, an opening at this juncture of information overload. Here, seeing became relegated to some powerless gaze. 

The creative process took one year to finish. Yet each of the work’s re-appearances/re-iterations in various forms continues to challenge the way we see, remember, and forget. These moving images stride through the tangible/intangible streets in the public sphere and intervene the ever-expanding image receptacle on digital maps. Defying the temptation to define history, their partial views work to disrupt the metonymic operation of memory—for if histories are generic, memories are mobile. 

Our disappearing landscape re-emerges every time our people close their eyes to see. This remnant of the past as a mnemonic apparatus will continue to haunt those who write history. 

Sharon Lee Cheuk Wun, 2020

3. Xinzi Luo 

Luo Xinzi is an artist working in painting, sculpture, performance, and publicly engaged art. Interested in exploring the porous fluidity and multitude of relationships between individuals and communities, Luo Xinzi’s studio and social praxis engage with the idea and construction of utopia, seeking to decentralize and redefine preconceived hierarchical boundaries. 

Since 2020, Xinzi became a core member in art group Mephistofele, and played a pivotal role in organizing and initiating publicly engaged social performances. Initiatives revolve around creating fleeting ideal homes to offer people a temporary escape from reality. Her painting extracts scenes from the archive of her social performance and interweaves both real and imaginary spaces in the image. She also use diverse materials to condense feelings, intuition, and logic. Using everyday objects that reflect individual’s life trajectories to emphasizes the sanctity of everyday scenes. 

Egyptian room 

Oil, resin on wood panel 

8 x 12inch 

2025 

Piano strings 

Steel 

2025

4. Wandi Ni 

Wandi Ni (b. 2001, Beijing) is an artist working across oil painting, sculpture, and collage. Her work draws upon the cosmological philosophy of traditional Chinese medicine, a system she grew up with through her mother’s study of its classical texts. Building on this foundation, she explores the intertwined and symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. 

In her work, the body becomes an ecological terrain where roots, veins, memory, spirit, and matter coexist. Through hybrid human–plant forms, she evokes the healing and restorative power of plants, imagining bodies and landscapes as interconnected systems of growth and renewal. Wandi envisions regenerative beginnings in posthuman conditions, proposing transformation as both survival and becoming. Wandi Ni received her Bachelor of Arts with First Class Honours from the University of the Arts London and is currently pursuing her Master of Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts, New York. 

The Roots Remember  

Oil on Canvas Four-panel polyptych, each panel 39.4 H x 10.4 W in. 

Overall 39.4 × 47.6 in, including 2 inch gaps between panels 

2026 

Work statement by artist: 

The Roots Remember is a four-panel polyptych painting series that unfolds like a fragmented landscape. The work reflects on shared memory between humans and non-humans rooted in the land, shaped over time through embodied processes of growth and environmental response. Living forms emerge, continuously evolving through coexistence.

5. Hafsa Nouman 

Hafsa Nouman (b.1998) is a Pakistani visual artist based in New Haven, CT. She graduated with a distinction in Painting from the National College of Arts (2022) and is currently pursuing an MFA in Painting/Printmaking at the Yale School of Art. Hafsa’s practice focuses on the deconstruction of colonial hierarchies embedded in patriarchal spaces- both monumental and domestic. Her critical focus is rooted in the relationship between ‘object’ and ‘desire’ which often results in visual excavations of architectural thresholds, such as doors, walls, and wrought iron patterns. Through those thresholds, Nouman creates a spatial logic that brings attention to the painted object’s histories, and material realities in a way that they can be re-embodied in the gallery space. 

Currently, Hafsa is investigating the urgency for decolonisation in the present moment by creating reflective, transparent paintings. She is devising a different logic of representation through the material language of painting that reflects the immaterial desire to touch and hold. It is an exploration not just of the object onto which the desire is projected, but of the object that reveals the desire – the hand. The hand is the medium through which we touch, hold, make, and retain—capturing its gesture of touching, feeling, and holding in their relationality. Making one's touch through representation as the point of contact, the blind spot, the lived experience of a sensation. This conceptual play that exists alongside the embodied experience of touch, when represented by the strangeness of how it is painted and gets read as abstraction, is what Hafsa is invested in. 

Willow to Blatchley 

Acrylic and oil on canvas 

52 x 36 x 4 inches triptych 

2025

6. Haidong Yang 

Haidong Yang (b.2001) is a photographic artist and curator based in New York. He graduated from the Beijing Film Academy with a degree in Photography and is currently developing a practice that explores the narrative boundaries of the medium and the power dynamics of the everyday. 

Alternative Patrol 

Photobook 

216 × 143 mm (8.50 × 5.63 in) 

48 pages 

Inkjet print on 128 gsm coated paper 

Saddle stitching 

Work statement by artist: 

The presentation primarily consists of two parts. The first is a fully completed project titled "The Night Watch" which includes a photobook and a selection of curated images that I believe resonate deeply with the theme of this exhibition. The second part is an ongoing project currently in the structural development phase. At the core of my practice, I have always sought to unveil cultural landscapes through both man-made and naturally occurring installations or vistas. Entwined within these landscapes are elements of collective consciousness—specifically the symbolic significance of icons like the Elephant or the Dragon within our cultural heritage. 

Furthermore, I am particularly invested in photography as a medium of "The Strange". I view it as a form of translation of our reality. In this translative process, while a degree of "authenticity" is inevitably lost, the act of translation itself possesses its own expressive power, ultimately leading to an alienation of reality. For many viewers, this creates an aesthetic experience where the boundaries between truth and fiction become blurred—a state of "true yet false, false yet true." In these projects, my persistent objective has been to play with this oscillation between the authentic and the illusory. This is why I have always felt my work aligns so closely with the notion of being "simultaneously true and false, near and remote, tangible and spectral."

7. Jingyi Zhang 

Jingyi Zhang is a New York– and Beijing-based artist who earned her M.A. in Film and Media Studies (Emergent Media track) from Columbia University. Her practice spans photography, moving images, and interactive design, with a particular focus on metaphors embedded in natural objects. 

Her work has been exhibited internationally in the United States, China, Japan, and Brazil, at venues including Yachang Art Center, Yan Art Gallery, Moon Gallery & Studio, Brooklyn Art Cave, The Peripheral Experiment, and Flowing Space Gallery. Zhang has received multiple honors, including the Young Talent Award at the 5th International Photo Festival Olten (IPFO), Photoville4600, Award Winner in YPF PHOTO AWARD 2025(YAKUSHIMA Photo Festival 屋久 島国際写真祭), shortlisted for the Visual Art Open 2025 (VAO), the Third Place in the All About Photo Contest and AAP Magazine #50 “Shapes”, and the Merit Prize in the “Abstract” Photography Competition organized by the National Photographic Society. 

Soft Form 

Ceramic, white clay 

7 × 7 × 3 in (L × W × H)