Entangled Skin: Where does the Dust Alight?: Trio show featuring Heng Yi, Daniel Touff and Kyoko Takenaka | a poco art, Culver City, CA

本來無一物,何處惹塵埃
Originally there is not a single thing; where could dust arise?

— Huineng, 7th century

[Culver City, CA] — Entangled Skin: Where does the Dust Alight? brings together works by Kyoko Takenaka, Daniel Touff, and Heng Yi, in a monochrome exhibition that considers dust as both origin and residue—material, cosmic, and philosophical. The exhibition opens Saturday, February 28, 2026 and is on view through April 26.

Drawing from Taoist philosophy, Zen kōan logic, and contemporary understandings of quantum entanglement, the exhibition approaches landscape and the body not as separate subjects but as interdependent conditions formed through contact, pressure, and time. Dust is treated not as waste or decay, but as elemental matter: atoms shared by bodies, mountains, and images alike.

At the quantum level, matter is fundamentally relational rather than isolated. Particles remain entangled across distance, shaping one another even when separated. Entangled Skin extends this insight into visual and material language. Skin becomes a porous threshold rather than a fixed boundary; landscape emerges as an extension of
bodily experience. What appears distinct—body and terrain, self and world—is revealed as structurally connected.

Monochrome plays a central role in this inquiry. Through black, white, and gradations of grey, the artists suspend color to slow perception and loosen habitual readings of difference. Across ink wash, drawing, photography, and video, form emerges through accumulation rather than declaration—echoing Taoist principles of restraint, emptiness, and non-assertion. The absence of color does not negate meaning; it reveals how meaning gathers, settles, and disperses, much like dust itself.

Heng Yi 珩一
Heng Yi is a Buddhist lay practitioner for whom art is meditation and ritual. They approach painting as a daily discipline of refinement and inward cultivation. Rooted in the lineage of classical Chinese ink painting, they extend the tradition through a broad inquiry that integrates Western light and spatial structure, classical aesthetics, and tectonic foundations into a contemplative contemporary language.

Guided by the concept of Three Thousand Great Thousand Worlds (三千大千世界), his ink wash shift mountains, mist, and void into a cosmic register beyond human scale. Layered ink and pigments move beyond material technique; line, stroke, and surface operate as lightnings, as natural phenomena in flux. Taking “One” (一) as both name and principle, they advance a philosophy of “the ten thousand dharmas returning to one” (萬法歸一). Line returns to one. Ink returns to one. Multiplicity resolves into unity.

From tectonic structure to atmospheric dissolution, from rational construction to intuitive awakening, his works traverse the space between earth and starfield, matter and vast emptiness. Does the brush arrive first, or the mind? Brush, mind, and presence converge without resolution, leaving perception open and suspended in the viewer’s gaze.

Kyoko Takenaka 竹中 響子
Working across butoh dance, photography and video, Takenaka situates the human body within animal and elemental environments. Their work translates the human body’s instinct to become one with nature—capturing the ethereal sensation of embodying its wondrous, intangible qualities; connecting human’s nature to nature itself.

This work invites us to resist fixed orientations and, instead, to attune to our elemental and aimai (曖昧; subtle, vague, inexpressably palpable) feelings that emerge through true communion with nature.

Their latest works, presented here, were created on Yakushima Island and other islands in Japan, where Kyoko spent many months healing in nature after undergoing intensive chemotherapy treatment. During this period, the landscape became both witness and collaborator in their recovery.

Through interdisciplinary mixed media and performance, the artist embodies a monster wandering an island in search of itself. Emerging from a dark cave, the creature crawls bare-skinned across changing terrain towards the ocean’s edge, pursuing the first light of dawn. Overcome by the sun’s beauty, the monster finally heals and transforms back into Amaterasu, the sun goddess.

These works present nature not as something to be merely observed, but as something to be conversed with—engaging our bodies, our eyes, and inviting the full embodiment of all our senses.

Daniel Touff 陶丹
Touff’s almost photorealistic drawings dissolve boundaries between the natural world and imagination with surrealist inference. Rooted in Western painting traditions and shaped by sustained engagement with Chinese calligraphy and aesthetics, his landscapes and objects treat natural forms not as fixed depictions but as moments of perception. With a monochromatic palette, his gestural precision in each line is both an exploration of the material and metaphysical processes of formation; Forms shift between mineral and botanical, where a single pinecone, leaf, or stone carries the density of an entire world.

一花一世界，一葉一如來
Within each fragment, a complete cosmos quietly unfolds.

The exhibition title references a Zen kōan that questions attachment to form. Rather than offering resolution, Entangled Skin dwells in relational structure. If quantum entanglement demonstrates that no particle exists in isolation, then relation—not separation—becomes the ground of being.

一即一切，一切即一

One is all, all is one

— Avatamsaka Sūtra (also known as the Flower Adornment Sutra) 華嚴經