04/26/2026
“Once Again, Many Times More” brings together Lexi Hide, Ivo Nagel, Kyla Liang, Hang Yu in a playful conversation about the way in which a gesture, object, or routine, given sustained attention and pressed on long enough, can begin to loosen from its original meaning and drift toward the absurd. What was once unremarkable might become, through sheer insistence, a little ridiculous.
In her “End of Slide” series, Kyla Liang revisits the memory of childhood play, where the physical immediacy of playground slides has largely disappeared, replaced by the frictionless continuity of the scrolling interface. Echoing this sense of repetition and displacement, Lexi Hide repeatedly positioned skunks within human-centered urban environments, staging subtle disruptions in seemingly familiar places that, through repetition, appear somewhat estranged and constructed. In Hang Yu’s objects, the artist photographed fantastical characters at Times Square and paired them with Green Card mock-ups, which combined, reveal the disjunction between projected identity and immigrant experience. Intervening directly in the image, Ivo Nagel sourced a discarded photograph from his university and subjected it to cycles of handling and reprinting. Through both physical and digital interventions of the original photograph, he poses questions about what constitutes the taxonomy of a ‘photograph’ and an ‘image’.
Across these works, gestures and narratives recur and multiply through their displacement, reflecting an image culture defined by duplicity and circulation. In doing so, the exhibition considers how distinctions between direct experience and its mediated counterparts become increasingly indistinguishable.
– Ivo Nagel
7hang
