Ryan Lee is pleased to present go to the limits of your longing. Taking its title from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, this exhibition focuses on the idea of passages—moving towards something or somewhere, through both time and space. This theme can encompass transformation, migration, spiritual rituals, aging, and family history, among others. Voyages of this kind take place in a liminal space in between origin and destination, a place with fuzzy, slippery borders. Many of the works in this show lean into the playful side of the concept, finding child-like joy in the messiness of the journey.

A Chinese-born artist who lived in the United States, Hung Liu’s painting Unit cohesion (1993) touches on rituals of childhood but also references the military concept of “unit cohesion”, which refers to the ways in which soldiers build trust in order to achieve their goals. In depicting children who are participating in grown-up military activities, Liu also explores her own dual identity. She said, “I am not really Chinese anymore but I am not one hundred percent American. I cannot get close to my own history, but I cannot get rid of it”.

Kathia St. Hilaire’s work portrays tender images of family gatherings, children at play, celestial bodies, scenes of death, and distinct Haitian iconography. St. Hilaire grapples with histories that have been forgotten or actively suppressed. In recounting them, she blends established facts with the larger-than-life legends of Haiti’s leaders in a manner she describes as “magical realist”. Contained within these vibrant, dreamlike pictures are the past, present, and suggestions of possible futures.

Some of the artists in this show focus on migration, a difficult yet familiar journey that many families embark upon. The “migrants” in Stephanie Syjuco’s passport-style photos have covered their faces with fabric, perhaps afraid that exposing their identities might be dangerous. This gesture, while potentially protecting those pictured, also serves to render them part of a faceless mass, which is how migrants and refugees are often seen, rather than as individual human beings.

Tiffany Chung’s map paintings layer different periods in the history of devastated topographies, reflecting the impossibility of accurately creating cartographic representations of most places. Transgressing space and time, these works unveil the connection between imperialist ideologies and visions of modernity. Her maps interweave historical and geologic events—and spatial and sociopolitical changes—with future predictions, revealing cartography as a discipline that draws on the realms of perception and fantasy as much as geography.

Masako Miki’s exploration of fluid identities is rooted in the Shinto animism of yōkai, or “shapeshifters”,—a pantheon of millions of deities that define a world of shifting boundaries and identities. Miki says, “I want to emphasize that things are interrelated rather than disconnected. Shapeshifters manifest the idea of fluidity and transitional space. They are both animate and inanimate beings, and also they can cross boundaries of both material and spiritual realms”.

Libby Heaney’s Jellyfish out of water (2022) focuses on uncanny similarities between glass and quantum particles, such as electrons. The sculpture explores a state of in-between, where the glass assumes a slimy quality, becoming a tactile, ever-changing intervention in the gallery space. Slime is a recurring motif in Heaney’s practice symbolizing the unstable nature of reality and the monstrous nature of self.

Challenging the construction of binaries through the blurring of their borders, Martine Gutierrez insists that gender, like all things, is entangled—and argues against the linear framework of oppositional thinking. Her malleable, ever-evolving self-image catalogs the confluence of seemingly disparate modes, conveying limitless potential for reinvention and reinterpretation. Gutierrez says, “My authenticity has never been to exist singularly, whether in regard to my gender, my ethnicity, or my sexual orientation. My truth thrives in the grey area”.

Rooted in the material culture of the Northern Andes, Andrés Monzón-Aguirre fuses traditional methods with modern elements and regional iconography, creating culturally specific artworks that invite viewers to engage with narratives of memory and representation. The space between these cultural histories and the artist’s scattered lineage suggests a rupture of relations, in which wandering yields fruitful possibilities of self-determining one’s own relationship to complex systems and histories.

Vian Sora’s painting process reflects a search for harmony and transcendence. While her canvases begin in a chaotic swirl of spray paint, acrylics and pigments covering the canvas, Sora wrests control creating specific forms and balance from the visual confusion. Though Sora’s paintings are largely abstract, upon closer inspection, they reveal half-hidden figures and suggest landscapes of lush fertility and terrible decay, cycles of life and death, yet infused with hope.

Katy Stone’s work balances a sense of monumentality and durability with motion and fragility. Each layered, cascading work consists of scores of drawn and hand-painted gestures that seem frozen in a moment of falling, fluttering, waving, crashing or exhaling. Over her career, she has developed an intricate vocabulary of line, shape, form and mark-making that blurs the boundaries between traditional techniques of drawing, painting and sculpture.

Annie Lapin is known for her genre-bending paintings that draw from art history to examine a world overwhelmed by data, divergent histories, and conflicting truths. Drawing from a wide range of visual sources, including the artist’s own photo archive, online visual media, and well-known paintings and photographs from throughout art history, Lapin’s paintings merge fragmented cultural allusions with a gestural painterly intuition.

Sadie Benning incorporates sculptural elements into their paintings; often, wood is cut into pieces, coated with colored resin, sanded, then fit back together like a jigsaw puzzle. Unlike a jigsaw puzzle in which pieces fit perfectly together, there is a gap between the pieces in Benning’s work—the original line becomes a space between the pieces where the blade has cut. The line is there and also not there; a space for light to move that speaks to the body and its continual state of flux.

Sadie Benning (b. 1973) has spent the last thirty years investigating cultural influences, specifically in relation to identity, language and memory. Benning has been creating experimental videos since their youth in the late 1980s and has expanded their rigorous practice in a fusion of painting, sculpture, installation, and photography, formed with both found and original objects. Concurrent layers exist within their sculptural paintings as transparencies, analogue photos, digital prints, resin, enamel, and spray paint, coated on wall-based panels.

Tiffany Chung (b. 1969) is noted for her cartographic drawings, sculptures, videos, photographs, and theater performances that examine conflict, migration, displacement, urban progress and transformation in relation to history and cultural memory. Chung’s interest in imposed political borders and their traumatic impacts on different groups of human populations has underpinned her commitment to conducting an ongoing comparative study of forced migration—through both the current Syrian humanitarian crisis and the post-1975 mass exodus of Vietnamese refugees, of which she herself was a part.

Martine Gutierrez (b. 1989) is a transdisciplinary artist, utilizing photography and video to subvert various performances of pop-cultural tropes in the exploration of identity—both personally and collectively intersectional to the ideologies of power, beauty, and heritage. Her amass of media— ranging from billboards to episodic films, music videos and renowned magazine, Indigenous Woman—produce the very conduits of advertising that sell the identities she disassembles.

Libby Heaney is an artist with a PhD and a professional research background in quantum information science. She is widely known as the first artist to work with quantum computing as a functioning artistic medium. Heaney’s practice explores inherently magical, queer, non-local and hybrid concepts from quantum science to disrupt binary categories and hierarchies and foster radical interconnectedness.

Annie Lapin (b. 1978) creates paintings that reside in a world of multiplicities; digital histories and analog mark making come together to form landscapes that abide neither to the rules of the virtual nor to the physical. Initiating each painting with generous pours of paint and liquid graphite, Lapin’s abstract marks become the armature around which pictorial space is built. Punched with trompe l’oeil forms, photographic blur, and references to the sublime imagery of Western landscape painting and photography, the polyvalent scenes conjure a sense of mystery and fervor.

Hung Liu (b. 1948 - d. 2021) was a groundbreaking contemporary artist known for her powerful paintings based primarily on historical Chinese photographs, and her installations addressing the racial and cultural complexities she witnessed upon immigrating to the United States at the age of 36. Interested in the political tensions between the so-called objective truths reflected in a photograph versus the mediated vision in a painting, Liu began using photography in her painting practice in the mid-1980s.

Masako Miki (b. 1973) is a multimedia artist whose work ranges from installation and largescale sculpture to printmaking, watercolor and felting. She bases her narrative on her own experiences of becoming bicultural in the United States at the age of eighteen. The artist frequently delves into the psychological aspects of how one processes new environments and cultures; ultimately her work merges two existing cultures into a new one.

Andrés Monzón-Aguirre (b. 1987) is an artist working between New York City and Medellín who translates displacement and ancestral memory into ceramics, sculpture and painting. Referencing specific indigenous iconographies of Colombia, Monzón-Aguirre abstracts personal and collective imagery as an act of remembrance and an opportunity for healing.

Vian Sora (b. 1976) creates intensely autobiographical paintings filled with emotional complexity and tension, bustling with a dynamic energy and struggle that reflect the artist’s personal journey to move beyond the collective trauma of violence and destruction that she experienced firsthand during decades of conflicts in Iraq.

Informed by her experience growing up in Caribbean and African American neighborhoods in South Florida, Kathia St. Hilaire (b. 1995) seeks to memorialize the communities that she has been a part of through innovative techniques and nontraditional materials. Through an interdisciplinary process, her work affirms and memorializes historic and political issues that deal with both marginalized and privileged communities of neo-diaspora.

Katy Stone (b. 1969) is best known for her large-scale installations and wall sculptures. Working primarily in aluminum, Dura-Lar and plexiglass, Stone creates hybrids of sculpture and painting that combine the visual language of organic forms with synthetic materials. From the cellular to the cosmic, the artist draws from a wide range of natural bodies and conceptual source material that frequently lead to an artistic mediation on transience and permanence, nature and artifice.

Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974) is known for her investigative, research-based practice encompassing photography, sculpture, and installation. Progressing from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations, her work employs open-source systems, shareware logic, and capital flows to scrutinize issues related to economies and empire. Syjuco’s multimedia social practice ties pedagogy and research to study and highlight the tension between the authentic and the counterfeit across a wide range of media, thus problematizing long-held assumptions about history, race, and labor.