4C Exhibition 2025 Q4 Silent Currents · Hidden Threads
Between the Visible and the Hidden
The Pulse of Life and Memory
Words by Liuxuan Lyu
The group exhibition Silent Currents · Hidden Threads opened on September 20, 2025, at 4C Gallery in Los Angeles. Bringing together the latest practices of five contemporary artists, the show spans installation, photography, interactive media, and sensorial environments. The notion of “threads” points to forces that are both revealed and concealed—like silent currents weaving connections that sustain existence. From the microscopic textures of fruit surfaces to the material residues of urban decay, from the pulsing expansions of light to the oscillation between concealment and revelation, the participating works collectively examine how memory, perception, and relation are woven into the fabric of the world.
Ruoran Chen, Cens*
Ruoran Chen | CENS
Ruoran Chen’s CENS stages a subtle yet powerful interplay between concealment and revelation. On the gallery floor, projected imagery appears almost entirely consumed by a layer of black cement powder, creating a surface of dense opacity. At first, the work reads as a negation of visibility—a darkened field where nothing can be discerned. Yet as viewers move around the space, fragments of the image re-emerge at shifting angles, flickering between presence and absence.
This choreography of concealment transforms the act of looking into a restless pursuit. The cement powder both swallows and discloses, functioning simultaneously as barrier and screen. Each glimpse remains partial, deferred, and unstable, amplifying the tension between the seen and the unseen. In this sense, CENS is less about what is withheld than about the impossibility of full disclosure. Within Silent Currents · Hidden Threads, the work suggests that invisibility itself may hold greater weight than the visible—that concealment is not a closure but a generative condition.
Bing Fang | Ghost Echo
In Ghost Echo, Bing Fang repurposes everyday objects—notes, shoe insoles, hand-drawn fragments—into a constellation of fragile assemblages. Suspended on walls or attached to door handles, these small installations appear at once scattered and interconnected. At first glance, they suggest casual improvisation, yet the surfaces reveal repeated reworking: worn creases on insoles, scribbled notations, edges misaligned and layered.
The installations invite close looking, often requiring viewers to bend or shift perspective. With each change of angle, the works slip between registers: an accidental collage from one side, an incomplete archive from another. What emerges is a tension between rupture and continuity—objects that appear fragmentary yet insist on latent connection.
Fang embraces error and unpredictability as structuring principles. The fragments resist coherence but nonetheless generate a sense of order through their contingent alignments. Within the exhibition, Ghost Echo grounds the theme of hidden threads in the most tactile of registers, tracing how memory inscribes itself onto objects and how the residue of daily life reconfigures into tenuous yet enduring bonds.
Bing Fang, Ghost Echo
Cube Li, All in One
Cube Li | All in One (2023)
Cube Li’s photographic series All in One magnifies the surface textures of fruit skins until they eclipse their referents. Viewed closely, the ridges and pores read as uncanny landscapes of folds and fissures; viewed at a distance, they expand into terrains of mountain ranges, river valleys, or even cosmic nebulae. The images oscillate between micro and macro, collapsing the scale of the body into that of the universe.
The series resists categorization. Familiarity quickly gives way to disorientation, as references dissolve into a field of potential associations—cells dividing, tectonic plates shifting, galaxies unfolding. The photographs thus cease to function as documentation; instead, they generate a space of metamorphosis where meaning remains indeterminate yet resonant.
In their quiet expansiveness, these images recall Daoist thought, in which the smallest detail contains the seed of the vast. Within Silent Currents · Hidden Threads, All in One contributes a meditative counterpoint: the recognition that the cosmos may be glimpsed in the most minute surfaces, and that the threads of life reveal themselves through accidental detail.
Vivi | Between Enclosure & Expansion
Vivi’s Between Enclosure & Expansion transforms the gallery into a responsive environment animated by light and movement. Interactive sensors cause the light to expand and contract across surfaces, pulsing with the rhythm of breath or heartbeat. As viewers move, the environment shifts, enfolding them in a choreography of illumination.
The installation operates less as static architecture than as a membrane—flexible, permeable, and alive. Its shifting boundaries echo the dynamics of intimacy, where private and shared space must continually negotiate with one another. What appears fragile is also resilient; what seems enclosing also expands.
Within the exhibition, Between Enclosure & Expansion serves as a mirror for relational experience. It makes palpable the elastic and unstable edges of human connection, suggesting that the invisible threads binding us are never fixed but constantly recalibrated in response to the presence of others.
Vivi, Between Enclosure & Expansion
Lyra Yang, Fragments of the Decaying City
Lyra Yang | Fragments of the Decaying City (2023)
Lyra Yang’s Fragments of the Decaying City assembles architectural debris, dyed textiles, dried plants, and jars containing scents collected from Los Angeles’s Koreatown. The installation disperses across the gallery as a constellation of fragments: stained fabric surfaces bearing irregular marks, jars exhaling subtle aromas, pieces of stone and concrete carrying the erosion of time.
The work engages multiple senses at once. Visual disintegration is coupled with tactile roughness and olfactory immersion, drawing the viewer into an environment that feels simultaneously intimate and estranged. These materials, once residues of decay, are reassembled into poetic registers, where absence and disappearance become new forms of presence.
Yang’s installation reimagines urban memory not as a monumental narrative but as a collection of material traces. Within Silent Currents · Hidden Threads, Fragments of the Decaying City reminds us that the city’s pulse is not only mapped in its architecture but also inscribed in its residues, its scents, its fragments—those overlooked details that tether us to place and history.
Taken together, the works in Silent Currents · Hidden Threads weave a network of correspondences between the visible and the hidden. From intimate relations to collective memory, from bodily rhythms to urban decay, the exhibition underscores that the world’s fabric is never static but perpetually in flux. Here, viewers are not passive observers but active participants, drawn into the unfinished weave of connections that bind self and world, presence and absence, fragility and resilience.
Curated by Liuxuan Lyu, Adela Zhao
Art directed by Ash Wei
Presented at 4C Gallery
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