Review Space — Arte Realizzata

Su-Mei Tse: This is (not) a love song, installation view, Peter Blum Gallery (November 21, 2025 – January 24, 2026)

There are exhibitions that announce an artist’s intentions almost immediately: through a repeated motif, a consistent material vocabulary, a familiar chromatic register, or a method that has come to define a practice over time. Su-Mei Tse’s exhibition at Peter Blum Gallery does not operate in this way. Instead, it unfolds as a series of propositions—quiet, precise, and resistant to summary—reaffirming the artist not as a stylist, but as a maker in the fullest sense of the word.

Upon entering the second floor of Peter Blum’s downtown gallery, the viewer encounters two seemingly distant elements that nonetheless belong together: a perfectly round earthen dorodango—a Japanese practice of polishing soil into a sphere—flanked by a relief text that reads, “God sleeps in stone / breathes in plants / dreams in animals / and awakens in man.” Like much of Tse’s work, this pairing moves fluidly between the empirical and the poetic. The statement feels at once factual and mythic, hovering between cosmology, theology, and intuition.

In the main gallery, where the exhibition’s core is installed, Tse achieves something close to a contemporary Gesamtkunstwerk. A trained classical cellist as well as a conceptual artist, she brings an acute sensitivity to rhythm, balance, and duration, using materials not to illustrate ideas but to test them. In Survival (shell) (2024/2025), a cluster of seashells is held together by magnets around a metal core, forming a small, gnome-like monolith. The mechanism is as important as the form: magnetism—an invisible force—questions notions of permanence, while the organic shells, destined to erode, quietly undermine the promise of longevity that sculpture traditionally implies. Nature, here, is not aestheticized but granted agency.

Nearby, a ball of pine needles rests inside a museum-style vitrine, its presentation echoing systems of display typically reserved for rare or precious artifacts. The gesture is wry but not cynical. By isolating something so ordinary, Tse exposes the arbitrary hierarchies through which value is assigned, while also offering a subdued reminder of our own impermanence within natural cycles. The object feels suspended—less preserved than momentarily paused.

The exhibition is anchored by Sealed (2024), a triptych of brass plates obscured by thin, skin-like layers of silicone, bound with red string. Silicone, long associated with bodily reference and vulnerability in the work of artists such as Eva Hesse and Heidi Bucher, softens the industrial severity of the metal beneath it. Its translucent surface suggests porosity and decay, while the red binding recalls Japanese wrapping traditions in which the act of tying is both functional and expressive. Touch is evoked but withheld; the works remain physically closed, conceptually open.

Su-Mei Tse, The End of the World, 2025, Color photograph mounted on Dibond, text on paper, both framed, 47 3/8 x 92 3/4 inches (120.3 x 235.6 cm), overall Edition of 5. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

Time, throughout the exhibition, is present but non-linear. In The End of the World (2025), a photographic seascape—placeless and undated—is paired with a typewritten text that reads: “I can’t remember how long I’d been walking… I turned away, leaving it behind, and gazed into the distance.” The accompanying provenance, “On the trail of the Gates of Hades,” gestures toward Caesarea Philippi, whose cave dedicated to Pan was once believed to mark an entrance to the underworld, later absorbed into Christian narratives of death and resurrection. The reference may also extend to Cape Tainaron in Greece, another mythological threshold. Tse does not illustrate these sites; rather, she allows their symbolic weight to linger, folding spiritual struggle and transcendence into an otherwise restrained composition.

The back gallery opens onto a different register. A larger dorodango, made of wood and soil, loosely evokes the Earth itself—a hybrid body in which hard and soft materials coexist. Tse allows the grain of the wood to remain visible, granting soil equal presence rather than treating it as residue. Behind it, an almost-abstract triptych of snow landscapes introduces repetition and pattern as natural phenomena shaped by wind and time. While visually serene, these works feel less materially charged than others in the exhibition, their restraint verging on reticence.

The exhibition culminates in its most expansive gesture: a fine art print imagining the moon’s far side. Constructed digitally from existing images of lunar craters, the work invites speculation rather than documentation. Tse subtly questions the technologies through which knowledge is produced—scientific imaging, photographic evidence—while returning to a recurring theme of pattern and recurrence in nature. The result is unexpectedly romantic: an invitation to contemplate what lies beyond direct perception, and to recognize, once again, the interconnectedness of all things.

The exhibition has been on view since November 21, 2025. There was an opening reception on November 21 from 6–8 pm, and the exhibition will run through January 24, 2026, at 176 Grand Street, New York, NY. For more information about Su-Mei Tse’s exhibition and others at the Peter Blum Gallery, please visit the site here. The magazine featured the exhibition, which can be found here.

Su-Mei Tse’s Poetics of Matter