Breath in Collapse

About

New York - A Space is pleased to present Breath in Collapse, a group exhibition that explores transformation through disorder. In a moment marked by instability—of systems, perception, and meaning—the works on view ask how collapse might be not an end, but a shift. A rupture that opens space for reconstruction, ambiguity, and shared speculation.

The exhibition begins with fragmented vision. Observer Ver.03 by Isaac Kim stands as a posthuman entity—an insectoid machine whose holographic gaze glitches and reflects. It watches and is watched, a construct of both sentience and distortion. Akira SoHji’s Data_Satori invites viewers into a dystopian temple where identity is algorithmically flattened.

Surveillance, recognition, and selfhood collapse into real-time feedback, exposing the cost of digital immersion. This fractured introspection continues in When you look at me by Josh Chen, where memory erodes the self into shadow and surface, presenting identity as a porous interface between interior and exterior.

Tension and estrangement take physical form in Stay Away From My Dinner by Yiming Tang, where monstrous dogs tear into a floating banquet of excess and desire. Violence becomes a metaphor for isolation—an act of shared solitude in a weightless world. Seung Jae Park’s Prowler depicts a hybrid creature—human and panther, tentative and cautious—hovering between realism and abstraction, adapting to ambiguity without resolution.

Collapse becomes landscape in Imogen Aukland’s TJA-2, where photographic collages move between analog and digital, land and screen. Layers distort, repeat, and unravel—testing the limits of representation and medium. Victoria Shaheen’s Orb of the Emissary plays on nostalgia and speculation, placing a neon plasma globe in a shell-lined vessel—offering tactile magic at the edge of discomfort and wonder. A different speculative landscape unfolds in Alex Angel’s Radiation Sickness, a Boschian drawing tracing human life through myth, corruption, and collapse toward a chapel of death and rebirth. It maps symbolic order onto an unstable world—both grotesque and sacred.

Environmental and systemic feedback loops surface in Xihao Zheng’s Protocol: The Nature of Machina, where AI-generated skies affect a living microclimate of sand and water. The machine favors cold and cloud; the earth, warmth and clarity. Their tension creates artificial weather—a negotiation between organic and computational. Each system reshapes the other, subtly but perpetually.

Together, the works in Breath in Collapse form a cross-section of a world no longer whole. They suggest that in the breaking of systems—technological, ecological, personal—there are new ways of sensing, relating, and imagining. Collapse, here, is neither spectacle nor tragedy. It is the condition through which something else might begin.