Alum Duo Alchemyverse Presents ‘Networks of Kisses’ at Nunu Fine Art

Alum duo Alchemyverse (Visual Arts alum Bicheng Liang ’21 and Sound Arts alum Yixuan Shao ’21) recently opened their third solo exhibition, Networks of Kisses, at Nunu Fine Art New York. The show will inaugurate the gallery’s PROJECT SPACE: ASIAN VOICES, a new initiative that will serve as a dedicated platform in New York City to showcase and elevate experimental artistic expressions from Asia and the Asian diaspora.

The duo began their collaboration in 2020 at the School of the Arts where Liang's and Shao’s respective skills in printmaking and sound studies complemented the duos shared affinity for intensive field research. In the minute textures of Liang’s landscape-inspired prints, Shao saw—or, rather, heard—potential for a musical score, and, as they say, the rest is history. Their collective name calls to the alchemy-like process of the earth’s elements breaking down and transmuting one another—not unlike the process of art-making as a collaborative entity. Having liberated themselves from medium restrictions, their sole discipline is a commitment to permeability, entanglement, and transgression in the face of undifferentiated technologization and environmental catastrophe.

In Networks of Kisses, the duo reimagines the gallery as a space of active collaboration, infusing the installation with the dynamism of their studio practice. A lesson in interdisciplinarity, the exhibition features handmade prints, drawings on copper plates, photographs by the artists, and in the center, a multisensory field unfolding on a raised platform blanketed in dirt. Vibrations drawn from field recordings tremble through the earth and cascade from the copper plates suspended above. The boundaries between sonic and haptic experience are muddied, as the textures of the artists’ materials morph into audible vibrations and sound becomes spatialized. While the work is texturally expansive, it is united through the warm tones of the copper plates, photographs, and layers of earthen material collected during the artists’ field research.    

While the duo’s field research is expansive, ranging countries and continents, an artistic vision emerges through their attention to climate, geology, and tectonic forces. Networks of Kisses features material specimens from the Atacama Desert of Chile, a pristine island in Lake Superior, China's Hainan Island, and the Sierra Nevada Mountain range—places that are connected through their profound environmental transformations. Liang and Shao are interested in environments in flux—both geologically and culturally—and the way that these shifts often occur simultaneously on oscillating temporal scales. 

In Networks of Kisses, Alchemyverse makes the terrestrial personal, inviting viewers to locate themselves in deep geologic time. Their interweaving of sonic and haptic elements throughout the spatial field of the gallery expands the surface area of perception. Through the materiality of our shared physical world, Alchemyverse offers a doorway to a space beyond it. 

Networks of Kisses is on view at Nunu’s 381 Broome Street gallery through February 8, 2025, when they will activate their site-specific installation in a closing performance.