Hard Play
Amanda Atria, Hyoju Cheon, and Yixuan Wu
Opening: June 4, 6-8 pm
Show dates: June 5-July 11
This exhibition brings together sculptural practices that treat the object as a site of psychological and social projection rather than stable function. Toys, therapeutic devices, domestic tools, industrial fragments are displaced from utility and reconfigured as unstable protagonists — forms that hover between the familiar and the estranged.
Across these works, sculpture operates through anthropomorphic suggestion rather than representation. A pipe reads like a limb; a support becomes a spine; a discarded appliance acquires the vulnerability of a body. These are not symbolic substitutions, but material negotiations between care and control, maintenance and failure, intimacy and standardization.
Play appears here less as leisure than as a system of repetition and discipline: learning through touch, memory through gesture, resilience through rehearsal. Care is approached with similar complexity — not as sentiment, but as labor, repair, and the management of fragility. The domestic becomes a political space, where design, gender, and bodily experience are continuously organized and contested.
Working between Minimalism and Surrealism, these artists refuse the autonomy of the sculptural object. Their forms lean, sag, depend, and threaten collapse. They remain deliberately unresolved — part machine, part organism, part stage prop — insisting that vulnerability is not a weakness of form, but its condition. In this space, sculpture does not describe the body; it performs its instability.