Borders of Paradise: Liminal Creatures in the Floating World: SPRING/BREAK Art Show NYC 2025

“大荒之中，多有异人。”
 “In the Great Wilderness, there dwell countless beings unlike any other.”

– The Classic of Mountains and Seas  山海经

The Classic of Mountains and Seas speaks of beings born of wilderness—those with divine heads, serpentine bodies, eyes like stars. These creatures exist between gods and mortals, unclaimed by heaven, unwanted by earth. They are the forgotten, yet persist in image. Paradise has never been neutral. In myth, it is earned or denied. In policy, it is granted or revoked.

Borders of Paradise: Liminal Creatures in the Floating World is an exhibition that inhabits the shifting edge between sanctuary and exile. Rooted in ancient Asian cosmologies and diasporic visions, it explores who belongs within imagined heavens, and who is cast into their shadow. The "floating world" (ukiyo, 浮世) — once describing the ephemeral pleasures of Edo-period life — here becomes a space of suspension: between paradise and punishment, visibility and invisibility, self and system. Paradise is not a destination—it is a mirage. And hell, perhaps, is not punishment but the wait. The logic of the gateless gate (無門之關)—a gate with no hinges, no keeper, no lock, rooted our asks:

If paradise has a gate, who decides who may cross it?
And if hell is the waiting room, who are the monsters—and who are the gods?

Curated by Ann Shi and presented by a poco art collective, this duo-artist exhibition features the work of Liu Tianlianand Tiger Chengliang Cai, two contemporary Asian artists who transform migration into mythology, via traditional medium and digital worldbuilding respectively.

Liu Tianlian uses traditional gongbi techniques on silk to conjure haunted domesticities and personal cosmologies. In Laundromat (2024), a spinning machine beca,e a portal through which ghosts from realms of various cultures leak into everyday life. A Major Client (2023) unveils a many-eyed jellyfish—an oracle of exploitation in immigrant labor and gendered survival.

Tiger Cai builds speculative digital terrains populated by extraterrestrial migrants traversing his conceptual “donut universe.” These alien figures embody the bureaucratic estrangement of the "resident alien"—the legal limbo between belonging and expulsion, arrival and erasure. 

Spring/Break Art Show NYC 2025

Borders of Paradise: Liminal Creatures in the Floating World

Dates May 6–12, 2025

Opening Reception May 6, 5–8 PM

75 Varick Street, Hudson Square, NYC