Floating Coordinates: Self in Transit
Curated by Hongjin Zhou
Artists: Claudia Shi, Loane Tran Colatruglio, Rainy Yuchen Wei, Tori Liu
November 7 - 11, 2025
CP Projects Space at the School of Visual Arts is pleased to present Floating Coordinates: Self in Transit, curated by MA Curatorial Practice student Hongjin Zhou. The exhibition highlights the adaptable identities of transnational people, whose remarkable lives are characterized by cultural loss, the fragmentation of memory, and creative actions.
The exhibition features four artists from diverse cultural backgrounds, including Canada, Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, emphasizing the potential for art as a collaborative medium in the globalized world to reveal the fragility and changeable nature of identity in our time of contested and constant migration. From concrete to abstract visual narrative modes, these works, including photographs, paintings, and a video, explore the dispensability of memory and the persistence of identity in today’s circumstances of immigration.
Loane Tran Colatruglio utilizes the camera and photographic techniques, deconstructing fixed narratives by reconstructing images via projection and archival re-photography, embodying the theme of “fluid identity and memory reshaping” through material fragility. Tori Liu takes masterful advantage of the monochrome color pink to symbolize the deepest, geographically transcendent, emotional bond between her and her beloved dog, distilling the unbreakable spiritual connection between her and her homeland in the Chinese mainland, and anchoring fragmented memory. With the combination of painting, video installations, and interactive sound-visual technologies, Claudia Shi translates diverse internal visions and emotional intensity into sound and image, bridging different cultural fragments and accomplishing concrete expressions of fluid self-identity. Floating Coordinates: Self in Transit ends with thick-layered abstract paintings by Rainy Yuchen Wei, who explores the reconstruction of identity in a “third space” based on the idea of natural symbiosis.
The circulation of memory across borders, as a consequence of transnationalism, and the experience of generational inheritance, present the state of identity in continuous construction, so urgent for our times.
