In July 2025, ArtOrb, A Space Gallery, and Pink Gallery co-presented a dual-city group exhibition titled Stay with the Murmur, featuring contemporary works in installation, video, sculpture, painting, and photography by 29 artists whose practices remain fluid, cross-disciplinary, and resistant to categorization. The exhibition was held simultaneously at A Space Gallery (New York) and Pink Gallery (Manchester) from July 3 to 9, 2025.
Foregrounding that which resists full articulation, Stay with the Murmur centers on perceptual states where meaning remains suspended and relation is held in flux. Wind rhythms, machine delays, plant signals, sensory glitches, and ephemeral spatial shifts form the sonic and visual vocabulary of the exhibition. These gestures emerge in the moments before form settles into recognition, operating not as symbols but as presences in formation.
The curatorial field operates as a site of intra-active emergence, where forms do not pre-exist their entanglements. Drawing on philosopher Karen Barad’s concept of intra-action, which proposes that entities are not fixed beforehand but come into being through their relations, the exhibition challenges the notion of individuality as prior and self-contained. Every element—light, sound, object, viewer—is approached as a temporary articulation within a shifting relational field.
Works unfold without linear progression or thematic closure. Sound, light, and material traces circulate throughout the curatorial field, producing a porous continuity between artworks, space, and viewers. Some pieces rely on algorithmic processes or biological inputs, while others remain fragmentary, composed of unresolved texts, residual arrangements, or temporal interruptions.
Connection, in this context, becomes less an outcome than a condition. Rather than guiding viewers toward interpretation, the exhibition opens space for attunement. What murmurs extends beyond sound; it resonates through sensation, memory, movement, and material. To stay with the murmur is to remain within the field of unfolding, where language has not yet settled and attention takes the place of understanding.
Staged across two cities on separate continents, Stay with the Murmur also engages with the spatial and temporal disjunctions inherent in dual-site exhibitions. Rather than attempting to unify or mirror the two locations, the curatorial approach embraces asymmetry, latency, and partiality. The exhibition’s structure does not rely on physical cohesion. Instead, it is shaped by a shared logic of unfolding: distributed presence, resonant difference, and relational attunement. In this sense, the dual-city format becomes more than a logistical arrangement; it acts as a curatorial gesture aligned with the exhibition’s commitment to multiplicity, fragmentation, and generative ambiguity.
Featured Artists
Pink Gallery
Chaoming Zheng, Chun Ding, Iris Jingyi Zeng, Jialin Wu, Jichi Zhang, Jingchen Han, Jiwon Jang, Lexiong Ying, Millie Chen, Mingzhuo Zheng, Savannah Snead, Yi-Han (Audrey) Chou, Yihao Zhang, Yixin Liu, Yvette Yujie Yang, Yuxin Wang
A Space Gallery
Shibo Chan, Fu Hsuan Wang, Carolina Trinker, Jiatong Han, EJ Lee, Manlin Zhang, Yuqi Cao, Minhan Lin, Di Cao, Lin Cheng, Mo Cheng, Lexiong Ying, Zhengwei Fan, Xiaohan Luo
Art Director: Xianglong Li
Curators: Ciro Wang, Yichen Ji
