Featuring: Constance Braden, Nancy Evans, Flora Kao, Sandeep Mukherjee, Relational, Stella Zhang
Presented by a poco art collective｜Curated by Ann Shi
Gateless Gate continues its westward drift — moving from the quiet suspension of Houston’s Ritual of Holding into the intimate interiority of Los Angeles.
Act II, Ritual of Returning, is both sequel and contraction: a breath released, a pulse turning toward its source. If the first chapter asked what constitutes a gate, this chapter asks what it means to step through without leaving. As Wumen writes, “the gate is shut”, only to reveal: “It is shut because you think there is a gate.”
Set inside the studio-altar of a poco art archive — a living room, a ritual ground, a shamanic site, a womb-space — the exhibition softens the hard edges of perception. A gate dissolves into skin; a threshold becomes a membrane. Works do not sit beside one another. They breathe with one another, echoing the koan: The oak tree in the courtyard. Nothing symbolic, nothing hidden. Just this moment, unadorned.
Visitors are asked to remove their shoes before entering. Putuan cushions and a tatami mattress offer a place to sit, recline, and return — an invitation to lower the body into the space and meet it without armor.
At the heart of this chapter lies a simple koan:
When the Buddha held up a flower, Mahākāśyapa smiled.
No sermon. No doctrine. Only brainwave transmission through presence — conversation without words.
The return begins here — not through answers, but through being. It’s a long exhale after a held breath.
The Gateless Gate
The gateless gate (無門關) is a paradox disguised as a doorway. Compiled in the 13th century by Zen master Wumen Huikai, The Gateless Gate is a collection of 48 koans: brief, enigmatic encounters meant to puncture habitual thinking. A koan is not a riddle to be solved but a device to unmoor the mind from logic.
「不思善,不思惡」or “Think neither good nor evil.” A cut through illusion.
The “gate” in the title is not a physical barrier. It is the boundary we believe separates self from world, here from there, sacred from ordinary. Wumen teaches that the moment one tries to step through, the gate disappears — 「參須透過無字關」or “To pass, you must break through the wordless barrier.”
This exhibition approaches the gateless gate not as metaphor nor philosophy, but as matter, sensuality, and a site of origin: breath pulled thin across Dura-Lene, aluminum forms and thin-film apertures constellated across space, cyanotype butterflies rising out of light, immersive landscapes farmed from “hope,” and sound carried in from the tides and the moon. Lose yourself in a realm where words, riddles, and koans dissolve; the line between object and viewer falls away, leaving only presence — the synchrony and collision of cosmic atoms and drifting debris... art and body, interior and exterior, gates and non-gates. 「非心、非佛、非物」— “Not mind, not Buddha, not a thing.”
Culture, like spirit, is porous — never fixed, never owned. This exhibition rejects binaries like authentic vs. appropriated, sacred vs. profane, center vs. periphery, because these categories function like imaginary gates: maintained through habit, fear, and institutional authority.
Instead, the work stays with contradiction, taking the stance of the fox in Case 2:
「不落因果,不昧因果」— “Not beyond cause and effect, not blind to cause and effect.”
An ethics of perception arises — one in which the body becomes the gate, and intimacy becomes a form of knowledge.
FEATURED ARTISTS
Sandeep Mukherjee (b. 1965, Pune, India; works in Los Angeles)
Mukherjee’s practice emerges from the eternal dance of elemental matter — a cosmology shaped by physics, movement, and the sensory inheritance of childhood. His mother’s saris shifting in layered light, his blind grandmother reading the world through touch, and the cosmic radiation maps of the COBE satellite all inform a worldview where form is never fixed, only vibrating, collapsing, and reconstituting. His surfaces behave like weather: a choreography of breath, pressure, viscosity, and intention.
In Parallax No. 8 as featured in the flyer, pigment is sprayed over the surface in geometric sections. It falls like rain, then flows and evaporates across the topography of the skin. The surface records this encounter and behaves like a moving atmosphere — an optic tremor, a skin remembering the body that touched it. His Suddenly Everywhere aluminum reliefs continue this dance: thin aluminum sheets are pressed and molded on trees, rocks and roots. The irregular skins that seem to breathe and read like residues of an encounter — the imprint between body and world — each panel a sculptural pulse of color and movement, luminous as sari fabric, porous as bark, scattered like a night sky.
Nancy Evans (b. 1949, Los Angeles; works in Los Angeles)
Evans draws from cosmic eroticism and feminist myth to shape forms that feel at once votive and mischievously alive. Her visual vocabulary carries the imprint of her long engagement with Asian spiritual traditions — travels through India and Japan, years of yoga practice, and lived encounters with devotional iconography that thread themselves through her sculptures and paintings. As a white artist, she navigates the complex terrain of cross-cultural inspiration with awareness; rather than sidestepping this tension, her work holds it openly. The Lingam and Yoni paintings hover between homage and interrogation, soft airbrushed silhouettes suspended between organ and icon. Her Arrangement Game assemblages place ceramic pieces on hand-painted burlap like coded constellations — part ritual diagram, part Jungian sand tray. Intended as a tactile, hand-led meditation, the work invites viewers to rearrange the pieces, entering a state of conscious dreaming where shapes emerge, dissolve, and re-form through touch.
Flora Kao (b. 1979, Madison, Wisconsin; works in Los Angeles)
Kao works across installation, cyanotype, drawing, and sculptural paper forms to explore the poetics of our relationship with environment — how ancestral memory, grief, architecture, and the body inhabit one another. Her practice transforms everyday structures and organic fragments into systems of quiet beauty, tracing the psychological terrain between loss and transcendence. Rooted in Asian-American aesthetics and environmental sensibility, her installations read like spatial drawings — delicate membranes where longing, decay, and rebirth coexist.
For Ritual of Returning, Kao offers a quartet of works that form a soft ecology of passage: Lotus, a tender paper origami unfurling like breath; Hope, crotcheted from Taiwanese packaging twine and ginkgo leaves; Remembrance, a cyanotype on chiffon where light stains grief into blue; and Am I a butterfly? Or is the butterfly dreaming of me?, a flock of 108 cyanotype origami butterflies — each a tiny koan on the porous boundary between dreaming and being seen.
Relational (Dana Berman Duff & Shirley Tse), with sound composition by Douglas Farrand
Shirley Tse (b. 1968, Hong Kong; works in California)
Dana Berman Duff (b. 1955, Wisconsin; works in Los Angeles and rural Mexico)
A former professor–student duo, their works is where material intelligence meets conceptual resonance, operating at the threshold between perception, interdependence, and sonic–spatial attunement. Originating from their summer 2025 Reykjavík project The Universe Breathes Us, their contribution extends this meditation on how bodies, atmospheres, and planetary rhythms shape one another.
Moonlight Moonbeam turns a window into a lunar membrane—blue gels and a cut aperture forming a shifting threshold of light that “breathes” with the viewer’s movement. hearing as distance, created with sound artist Douglas Farrand, is a durational composition structured on Reykjavík’s tidal cycles, six to nine hours of sine tones and field recordings unfolding with the sea’s rhythm. Listening becomes an act of surrender: time stretches, collapses, and returns. In a breathe, the works propose a simple, radical idea: the body makes the space; the universe fills it. Placed among cushions and mats, we invite audiences to breathe with the tidal sound and merge with the unique womb-space of a poco art archive.
Stella Zhang (b. 1965, Beijing, China; works in San Francisco, CA)
Zhang is an internationally exhibited artist whose practice transforms fabric, mesh, worn women’s clothing, and punctured surfaces into visceral architectures of tension, desire, and vulnerability. Born to a lineage of Chinese ink artist, then shaped by years of study in Japan and the material philosophies of Gutai and Mono-ha, her work centers the female body—its pressures, its soft armors, its quiet rebellions—and the memories carried in cloth and skin. Across museums, galleries, and public installations in Asia and the United States, Zhang has cultivated a sculptural language that is both tender and unflinching, revealing the interior weather of gendered experience.
For Ritual of Returning, a charcoal vulvic drawing, The Door — a raw, intimate threshold — declares the body itself as gate. Neither symbol nor provocation, it operates like a koan—direct, wordless, a passage into the womb-space of a poco art archive. Infinite Cage (2023) stretches fabric to the point of rupture, bristling with toothpicks like a body both defending and exposing itself. 0-Viewpoint-2 and Transparent (2020) explore permeability through mesh and void, their contours hovering between concealment and breath.
Constance Braden (b. 1954, White Plains, NY; works in Houston, Texas)
A mystic-minimalist, Zen practitioner, yogi, and dreamworker, Braden arrived at drawing later in life, beginning her practice at the age of 50. Before any formal training, her true art education unfolded during seven formative years working as a guard and bookseller at the Walker Art Center — a period of deep, sustained looking that continues to shape her visual vocabulary. Her contribution to Ritual of Returning includes the complete Six Chakras pastel series, six luminous thresholds rendered on black Arches paper, alongside BLACK LOVE, a hand-drawn book combining charcoal, pastel, and photographs into a quietly devotional cosmology.
THE GATELESS GATE TRILOGY
Episode I — Ritual of Holding (Houston, Nov 2025)
A breath, an inhale taken. A field of suspended paradoxes.
Episode II — Ritual of Returning (Los Angeles, Dec 2025)
The breath released, an exhale. The body reclaimed.
A return to relation, to intimacy, to the space where meaning forms before language.
Episode III — Ritual of Dissolving (New York, 2026)
The breath dissolved. Thresholds undone.
A meditation on disappearance and the luminous residue of experience.
