Opening Reception

Friday, 08.14.2026
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.

CLOSING RECEPTION

Friday, 09.11.2026
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.

GALLERY HOURS

Thursday – Saturday
1:00 – 4:00 p.m.

AREA 405 presents Soft Water, featuring New-York-based artists and couple Qiuyu Wu and Yuhan Shen. Weaving the 5000-square-feet gallery with 6-mm PVC hoses connected to kinetic sculptures, their collaborative installation renders three states of water (solid, liquid, and gas) mirroring the water cycle in nature. The resulting movements produce a soundscape that flows throughout the gallery, proposing that varied forms of resilience can create collective transformation within social ecosystems. The exhibition opens with a soundscape experience on August 14, 2026 from 5:00 – 9:00 p.m. as part of the Station North Second Friday Art Walk. It also collaborates with First Flush, a tea-centric electronic music listening event, on August 23, 2026 from 10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

The title of the exhibition draws inspiration from the New Museum’s 2021 Triennial Soft Water Hard Stone, curated by Jamillah James and Margot Norton. Paraphrasing a Brazilian proverb, “Água mole em pedra dura, tanto bate até que fura” ("Soft water on hard stone hits until it bores a hole"), the title finds a similar form in the Chinese idiom “水滴石穿.” The proverb speaks of the unexpectedly penetrative impact of accumulated subtle resilience on an object seemingly permanent. Continuing this pondering, Soft Water at AREA 405 moves beyond the microscopic focus on water itself and zooms out to its nuanced interaction with stone.

The erosion of stone by water happens in extraordinarily diverse ways. The most familiar include flowing water smoothing jagged edges, abrasion as sand, dirt, and rocks collide against stone, and the tumbling of stones in rivers. Yet the interaction extends far beyond these. Water evaporates upon contact with heated stone, condenses into clouds that reshape the distribution of sunlight across the Earth's surface, and eventually returns as precipitation. Through this continual cycle, water also influences local and global climate, generating winds, storms, and countless ecological interactions.

Even more interestingly, a reversal of this interaction can be found in the formation of stalactites, where mineral-rich water drips from cave ceilings, leaving calcite deposits that gradually accumulate into downward-growing rock formations. Beneath them, stalagmites rise upward, and over time the two may merge into columns connecting ceiling and ground.

Zooming out from the simple act of water dripping onto stone to the scale of the global water cycle, we begin to understand how water, one of the most common elements in everyday life, can impact systems unimaginably vast and fundamental.

Dedicated to activism, artists and couple Qiuyu Wu and Yuhan Shen witness the nuanced interactions between the complex forces that shape today's political environment. Sharing a mutual interest in web-building as a symbol of interconnected support systems, the two artists speak from perspectives on human resilience through works that showcase drastic contrasts. Working with ceramics, Qiuyu Wu creates large-scale, substantial sculptures. In Floating Body (2025), she examines the precarious condition of non-citizens. Centering on the feeling of suspension, the work captures the instant when a body is snatched out of everyday life, caught between domestic shelter and public vulnerability. Her other work, A Square is a Flag, is a Perimeter, is a Mourning Place (2025), weaves together 1,488 ceramic rocks tied into the form of a flag. The composition recalls the aerial view of a mass assembly: a sea of bodies occupying the streets in collective defiance. On the other hand, Yuhan Shen’s Water System #1 (2023) delicately collects ambient moisture from the air on a cooled copper coil, eventually channeling it into a piece of driftwood. Using similar techniques and 8-mm hoses through which water flows, Shen connects numerous variations of this kinetic sculpture with Wu’s works, all scattered throughout different corners of AREA 405’s industrial gallery.

Their large-scale installation embodies nature’s water cycle and its immensely versatile interactions with stone, an element associated with permanence. Wu and Shen weave a web that sheds light on the many forms resilience takes within a system and their unbelievably large impact on broader social ecosystems. While reminding the audience of the ever-shifting balance between water and stone, it pays tribute to the millions who persist in their causes through efforts unimaginably diverse.

Joyce Liang
07/20/2026

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Qiuyu Wu, Yuhan Shen

Curated by

Joyce Liang
Creative Programs Director, AREA 405

Opening Reception

Friday, August 14, 2026
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Join the Station North 2nd Friday Art Walk and enjoy a soundscape created by kinetic sculptures. Meet the artists behind the artworks.

First Flush

Sunday, August 23, 2026
10:00 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.
Ticket: $8–20

Enjoy an electronic music listening experience with Chinese ceremonial tea, featuring Soundscape of Soft Water.

Closing Reception + Performance

Friday, September 14, 2026
5:00 – 9:00 p.m.

Join the Station North 2nd Friday Art Walk and enjoy a performance in interaction with the exhibition soundscape.