Be Right Back
Aug 1, 2025 - Aug 14, 2025
13 Grattan St, #402, Brooklyn, NY, 11206
Artists
Boo Koch
Di Tran
Fangzi Luo
Keming Chang
Leo Velleu
Serena Hanzhi Wang
Yaning Xing
Yining Lee
Yin Ming Wong
Yooyeon Nam
Zhishen Li
Curators
Keming Chang
Reena Zhang
Jinghe Lin
New York, NY — A Space is pleased to present Be Right Back, a group exhibition that explores the creative lives unfolding in the margins—between shifts, between clock-ins and clock-outs. At its core lies the question: what does it mean to hold on to one’s creative self when time is no longer one’s own?
Another day rushes in as we open our eyes, and dreams are put on hold once again. We do not aim to romanticize hustle or glorify burnout. We’re here to honor those who, despite the pressures of real life, still make room for creativity. From convenience store counters to late-night sidewalks, this exhibition sheds light on the quiet persistence of artists who carve out slivers of space for their truest selves within fragmented lives. Together, they form a collective portrait of creative endurance that quietly asserts: I’m still here. I’m still holding on.
Yin Ming Wong’s Faster swish swish move move turns miscommunication into a visual language of emotional tension and isolation. Boo Koch’s fairy circle, crocheted with charms and wire, constructs a tender dream-space shaped by queer intimacy, memory, and care.
Yaning Xing’s Glass Factory draws from Ouyang Jianghe’s poem of the same name. By transforming a playground swing into fragile glass, it highlights the precarity of childhood lost to hidden labor.
Yooyeon Nam’s One at a Night captures nine small paintings made in nine late-night bursts—unfiltered expressions from in-between hours, catching fleeting daydreams before they disappear.
Zhishen Li’s Baku visualizes a creature that devours human dreams, giving form to emotions that exist just before vanishing. Leo Velleu’s Gutworks explores how raw feeling shapes our identities, using expansive gesture to map the inward turned outward.
Serena Hanzhi Wang’s Lifebuoy, This sculpture is a quiet anchor for grief and memory, holding what remains of a promise I made to my grandmother before leaving China— “I’ll be right back.
” She passed away before I returned, and now only these small objects—her sock, a hair tie, a lifebuoy—remain. Suspended in resin, they trace intimacy, loss, and the parts of presence that don’t survive departure. This work preserves softness in hardened form—not to hold on, but to mark what cannot be held, a gesture toward an unfinished conversation.
Yining Lee’s works reflect creativity in the pauses between everything else: her hazy cityscapes, painted in pandemic
stillness, echo both fragmented reality and the mental haze of exhaustion and longing. Her ceramic sushi pieces
recall moments where food became a silent language of care, transforming fleeting gestures into lasting forms.
Di Tran’s In My Own Garden assembles paper fragments into layered collages, reflecting on identity, growth, and the complexity of becoming. Keming Chang’s Today’s Entry, shaped like a mini fridge, stores more than food—it preserves leftover emotions and squeezed-out warmth, held in the cracks of a packed day.
Together, the artists in Be Right Back reclaim overlooked hours and exhausted spaces, asserting that even in life’s most fragmented moments, creativity persists. They make space for expression in the in-between: stitching together days, identities, and images before the next shift begins. These works—born in transit, between shifts, or just after midnight—remind us that in the quiet margins of life, there is still room to make, to feel, and to come back to
ourselves.
Installation View
