Show Me How to Fly Away

THE BLANC partners with Shanghai-based Nan Ke Gallery to present Show Me How to Fly Away, a group exhibition featuring nine defining artists from Nan Ke’s roster.

Co-curated by Leo Yuan and Otto Neu, the exhibition assembles over twenty works spanning painting, sculpture, video, and installation. The title’s whimsical, escapist undertones evoke the transformative power of art to transport the viewer toward more fantastical horizons.

The desire to seek an “elsewhere” is a persistent, recurring instinct. When reality feels a bit too static, we find ourselves drifting toward distant geographies, reimagined worlds, or the cherished people and moments that linger in memory. These various modes of departure provide the vantage point through which to encounter the artists in this exhibition.

In his recent paintings, Killion Huang (b. 1999) offers a close look at queer identity and intimacy in contemporary China. Emotional connections within queer relationships in contemporary China become the site where identity takes shape—not as something defined by labels, but continuously formed through relational dynamics. The paintings provide a window into these tender moments of connection.

Joyce Chonghui Wu (b.1994) explores overlooked fragments of urban life and uses textiles and stitching to reassemble a personal archive of collected images, fragments, and memories. Her work weaves these disparate elements into layered narratives that explore the heterogeneity of everyday life and the nuances of multicultural experience.

The metaphor of “migration” takes a more tangible form in Liu Xuan’s (b. 1991) installation Sound is Fact, Music is Fiction #3. This site-specific version of the work features a bundle of black balloons ensnared in wires and held down by a retired manhole cover sourced from Shanghai. The audience can step on the cover, which produces an ambient sound.

Yang Di’s (b. 1990) video, Safe Word, is based on a journey to Mars, projecting individual experience into a speculative future, allowing reality to be re-perceived through constructed scenarios.

Having lived in New York for several years, Bai Mengfan (b. 1994) brings two works that continue her depiction of the complex entanglement of urban flows, financial circulation, and architectural structures. Her refined surfaces, containing traces of human impact on the surrounding environment, capture moments of quiet intensity and poetic intrigue.

Xie Lingrou (b. 1999) presents interior scenes that juxtapose portraiture with delicate objects such as flowers and glass. Her dark-toned oil compositions present an ephemeral, surreal quality that summons memories layered over the passage of time.

Likewise, Yu Wenjie (b. 1997) layers painting into a palimpsest of mixed media that incorporates paint, fabric, sand and varieties of paper to create pastel-toned compositions that explore the tension between fragility and structure.

Zhou Meng’s (b. 1992) small-scale ink works on paper, depicting layered characters, are reminiscent of Chinese inkwash paintings. The works on paper are presented next to compact-size sculptures made from fossil materials, situating Zhou’s work within an expanded anthropological and mythological context, where image and material together carry traces of time and cultural imagination.

Wu Muhan (b. 1997), by contrast, employs a restrained minimalist sculptural language, combining industrial components with everyday objects to produce forms charged with perceptual tension, negotiating between systemic logic and individual experience.

Show Me How to Fly Away will be on view May 15 through June 27, 2026, in THE BLANC’s ground floor gallery. The exhibition presents the inaugural installment of THE BLANC Exchange, a new initiative in which THE BLANC partners with international galleries to co-present exhibitions in its New York spaces, bridging the distance between global art capitals.