Tussle Magazine/Projects

06/22/2026

A Waking Dream is a group show featuring three female multidisciplinary artists, Wendy Letven, Sascha Mallon, and Davina Hsu, currently on view at Fou Gallery, curated by Echo He. Through multiple mediums, ceramics, paintings, crochet, and sculpture, the works subtly conjure a poetic, fairy-tale wonderland, inviting us to encounter our essential selves, echoing the Buddhist concept of Avalokiteśvara (观自在), the one who perceives with liberated awareness.

Exhibition closes on Thursday!

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Wendy Letven

Sascha Mallon



FOU GALLERY

He Yu Echo

06/16/2026

I do not usually walk through an exhibition with the artist. When asked, I generally decline. I tell the artist or gallerist that I do not need a guide. On those occasions when I do agree, it is usually because I already know the artist and their work, and such a walk-through becomes something closer to a studio visit. In the case of Mitchell Charbonneau, I knew the work and had only briefly met him once before. Knowing the work led to an invitation to continue our earlier conversation. An hour spent talking in the gallery largely confirmed my initial reading. Yet it is precisely the points of divergence that matter. The ability to disagree with the artist is what distinguishes criticism from art writing.

My task as a critic is to substantiate my interpretation. The artist’s task is to manifest  their intentions both conceptual and subjective as fully as possible by whatever means available to them. My job is not to divine those intentions but to interpret what has become of them. These are distinct, though overlapping, forms of knowledge. The distance between them is productive. Neither the artist nor the work can opt out of the viewer’s comprehension. The exhibition’s title, Remain, signals this condition: remain as a verb indicates persistence; as a noun, what is left over. The title signals a refusal to choose between action and remnant. In Charbonneau’s case, that distance is marked by a recurring return to the relation between object, image, and re-presentation.

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06/13/2026

PAINTING AND
THE READYMADE
AND “PAINTING”

By Gwenaël Kerlidou

Ultimately, the outcome of a visit to the current Duchamp extravaganza at the Museum of Modern Art in New York may just be to raise in a viewer’s mind the question of the reason for it. As its timing neither seems to respond to a specific discussion within the art world nor to a significant scholarly discovery of new historical material, one may wonder why our particular moment deserved such an ambitious retrospective. Did Duchamp’s fading cult really need yet another institutional push ?

Similarly, but with more security guards per square foot than most museums in the world, the exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery uptown, timed with MoMA’s, with no new artifact nor different curatorial approach to the artist’s work, doesn’t seem to have any other purpose than the very pedestrian one to showcase the remaining readymade editions still available on the market. 

In any case, this may be as good an occasion as any, not necessarily to add anything to the already plethoric literature on Duchamp’s work, but possibly to reassess the relationship of abstract painting to the readymade. If the conflicted relationship of the readymade to “painting” has been thoroughly examined, perhaps it is now time to turn the tables around and look at the relationship of abstract painting to the readymade. 

What the MoMA show made clear, though, is the two parallel tracks, the two different speeds operating in Duchamp’s oeuvre: the instantaneous and the “delayed” (his own term). The immediacy of the gesture of provocation, the instant nominalism of the readymade, versus the slow maturation and the extended time frame of the more ambitious “literary” works. In a way, what really came through there is that the readymades were merely an epiphenomenon to Duchamp’s main body of work, a few brief flashes of intuition in a long dark night of obscurantism.

​Article by gwenael kerlidou studio

06/11/2026

On one of the hottest summer-in-spring days last month, I left the cool of my Bushwick apartment for Chelsea. Frieze Week was over but an exhibition I had yet to visit was calling me back to the west side of Manhattan. I trekked across the L to the C to 26th and 9th and up to the 9th floor of the 526 W26 building (thank god for that elevator!) to meet Daniel Wiener. His latest solo show Out in Front of the Back of Beyond, which just closed May 30th, was up at Satchel Projects and I was eager to see the latest from his Faces series on walls other than his studio’s. 

I arrived to find Daniel chatting in the back with the gallery director. In all of our meetings, Daniel is rarely, if ever, late - a trait of many artists from the old guard that I enviously admire. He also owns a suite of patterned shirts in varying geometric compositions and palettes that read like “hip artist”, and it’s actually cool; that day was small trompe-l'oeil cubes in white and shades of blue.

Since becoming acquainted with Daniel this year, we’ve had many discussions about his practice. He frets that he doesn’t speak well about his work but it's actually that he sometimes has more to say than he knows what to do with. He is, after all, speaking from 49 years of experience. Poetry and philosophy in particular weave their way into his artwork nearly like a medium itself, and throughout our conversation at the gallery I am reminded of this.

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satchelprojects

06/08/2026

06/07/2026

Robert Solomon in conversation with Jonathan Goodman

Robert Solomon looks at the world closely and with affection, impressionistically, finding beauty in rough shapes and blocks of color. For this reason the works are often memorable, and despite non objective motifs, relatively accessible.

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06/05/2026

Link in bio to read two reviews:

When “That’s OK” Becomes a Demand

Review of the group exhibition I'm a Cyborg, But That’s OK at Aunty's House, Providence, RI

by Xumeng Zhang

AND

To Fall Into Reverie, Without Reserve

——Art Review of 'I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK'

by Rachel Zheng

'I'm a Cyborg, but That's OK', on view at Aunty's House Studios in Providence, brings together five artists — Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, Sherly Fan, Silvia Muleo, Olivia Saporito, and Phoebe Quin Kong — curated by April Liu and Shuhan Zhang around what they describe as a "low-power and non-restorative mode of existence," a condition drawn from Park Chan-wook's film and Eunjung Kim's ethics of "Unbecoming Human." What holds the exhibition together is not a shared formal language but something felt before it is understood — pseudo-fairytale dream states, mild malfunction, the quiet sufficiency of simply continuing. We notice it in the way works don't resolve, the way materials sit with their own contradictions, the way the space itself seems to breathe at a lower register. In contexts where divergent forms of being are so often framed as problems awaiting correction, the exhibition refuses the logic of repair. It does not ask its subjects to be optimized or returned to normalcy; it asks only that they persist. And slowly, without announcement, it asks the same of us.

06/04/2026

Sometimes, my sense of the past does not return through any major event that clearly happened. More often, it arrives through very small things: the faint smell of leftovers when opening the refrigerator late at night, the dusty scent lingering inside cardboard boxes after moving apartments, the sound of cheap plastic packaging being crumpled, the reflection of kitchen light on a table surface, or the traces of someone’s daily life that remain in a room after they have already left. None of these fragments form a complete memory. In many cases, they can no longer even be connected to a specific person or moment. Yet the body recognizes them before consciousness does. For a brief instant, a strange hesitation emerges, as if I have somehow experienced all of this before.

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06/02/2026

Jonathan Goodman: You were educated in design in Korea and in the history of design in New York. How has this experience shaped your artistic outlook? 

Sooa Lim: My education in Korea and in the United States shaped my thinking in ways that feel quite different, but ultimately connected. In Korea, my training in design was grounded in discipline and attention to form, with a strong emphasis on precision and material. That way of seeing still stays with me.

When I studied at Parsons, the focus shifted. I became more interested in context, history, and the frameworks that surround art. It changed how I think about curating. I no longer see artworks as isolated objects, but as part of a broader conversation that unfolds across different systems. 

JG: You are currently working at an auction house in Connecticut. What does your position require, and how does it influence your curatorial work? 

SL: Working as a Head Cataloguer has significantly shaped how I think about artworks beyond exhibition contexts. My work involves detailed research, provenance tracking, and writing catalogue entries that place each object within both historical and market frameworks. In many ways, it feels like reconstructing a story. 

In several cases, this kind of research has influenced how works are received. By clarifying attribution or expanding historical context, I’ve seen how a more precise narrative can increase both institutional interest and collector confidence. 

At the same time, working in the U.S. auction environment has made me more aware of how artworks circulate. They move through networks of collectors, transactions, and market dynamics. I don’t see this as separate from curating, but as an extension of it. 

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05/23/2026

FRAUKE SCHLITZ &
LEONIE WEBER

Collage/Construction

at the Kentler International Drawing Space 
curated by Dara Meyers-Kingsley

​Two-person exhibitions are frequently built on contrast, deliberately framing artists as opposite voices in a shared conversation. In Collage/Construction at the Kentler International Drawing Space, curator Dara Meyers-Kingsley positions the work of artists Frauke Schlitz and Leonie Weber within these traditional binaries: internal cognition versus physical immediacy, and architectural abstraction versus material representation. Beyond these initial juxtapositions lies a shared engagement with materials that, while provisional or fragmented in origin, are selected and manipulated with intentionality, a way of addressing the anxieties and fractures of our current landscape.

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