Exhibition

 SVA presents “Wondering Paths,” an exhibition of thesis work by the MFA Fine Arts class of 2025. The exhibition is curated by Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger and organized by MFA Fine Arts Program Coordinator, Isabelle Schipper. The exhibition will be on view Tuesday, April 22, through Tuesday, May 6, at the SVA Chelsea Gallery, 601 West 26th Street, 15th floor, New York City.

Artists featured in this exhibition are Manuela Arnal, Boo Yingzhe Chen, Tianjing Chen, Jieun Cheon, Aleksy Cisowski, Lexi Fleurs, Joshua Evans, Anqi Gu, Nivia Hernandez, Ruoxi Jarvis Hua, Lily Hyon, Ninja Ningyi Jiang, Taerim Terry Kim, Xinyu Liu, Nathalie Marti, Lev Pinkus, Erin Rehil, Thavika Savangwongsakul, Hao Shen, Moyan Sun, Feyzi Kutay Tufekci, Austin Clay Willis, Amanda Wong, Hyunjun Yang and Isa Yixin Yang.

“Wondering Paths” unfolds in a pivotal moment in American history, marked by an insurgent attack on artistic freedom, expression and culture.The exhibition meanders through the personal, creative and migratory journeys of 25 artists from eight countries and is loosely organized around four themes that intersect and blend into each other around the edges:

1. Gendered Norms and Lived Experience
2. Sense of Place and Site of Memory
3. Knowledge, Self-Expression and Political Identity
4. Artistic Exploration and Experimentation

The featured works were developed in the years leading up to President Trump’s second term and were first shown in the months following his return to office. These works reflect lived experiences and critical inquiries, often drawing on research and knowledge systems that are being challenged by federal policies.

Through various media, Nivia Hernandez, Boo Yingzhe Chen, Lily Hyon, Hyunjun Yang and Lexi Fleurs explore entrenched gender norms and how they shape both individual and collective experiences. Hernandez’s multidisciplinary works honor and provide talismans for women and children impacted by violence against immigrant workers. Chen’s sculptures critique Chinese beauty standards, while Hyon’s work addresses the packaging of femininity through representations of “pink collar” labor. Yang’s paintings and comics explore masculine insecurities and compulsions, while Fleurs’ documentary films take a raw, activist approach to geopolitics. 

A sense of place and sites of memory capture connections to the physical and imagined realms, cultural ties and personal attachments in the works of Isa Yixin Yang, Taerim Terry Kim, Ruoxi Jarvis Hua, Hao Shen, Ningyi Jiang, Nathalie Marti and Austin Clay Willis. Yang and Kim evoke home and loss through sculpture and installation. Blending realism and surrealism, Hua and Shen highlight New York City’s mundane elements. Jiang’s immersive installations examine identity within a dystopian urban context, while Marti’s ceramics approach the American Dream and its discontents with light, observational humor. Willis creates an immersive room set as social sculpture that appears suspended in time, blending architecture, design, mass production and everyday life. 

The conflict between the external environment and internal self permeates the works of Xinyu Liu and Jieun Cheon. In sculpture and text, Liu whimsically removes a sense of time to emphasize the possibility of new beginnings. On the other hand, Cheon’s philosophical inquiry is manifested in a series of installations that explore the passage of time and the limits of human knowledge. Artists Anqi Gu, Joshua Evans, Amanda Wong, Moyan Sun and Erin Rehil intertwine knowledge acquisition with self-exploration and identity. Gu’s gestural paintings map somatic states, blending traditional Chinese techniques with movement practices. Evans’s large-scale figurative works draw on his Southern African American upbringing and explore “double consciousness,” and Wong’s portraits express anxiety around social perception. In Sun’s small, contained, multi-media works, feelings and sensations flourish, and in Rehil’s life-scaled immersive study environment, the artist explores dreams and their translation into object arrangements guided by nature-based spirituality.

Challenging artistic distinctions, Manuela Arnal, Thavika Savangwongsakul, Lev Pinkus, Feyzi Kutay Tufekci, Tianjing Chen and Aleksy Cisowski stretch the boundaries of genre, medium and technique. Arnal’s graphite abstractions on paper are guided by intuition, influenced by plant science and seed dispersal, and Chen’s painterly aesthetic is shaped by his family’s background in medicine and stem cell research. Svangwongsakul’s playful installation, assembled from found street objects, indulges in self-portraiture, while Pinkus’ paintings combine personal journal entries and a grid painting grid to reflect on human relationships. And whereas Tufekci’s urban-inspired paintings blend street aesthetics to share personal and cultural memories, Ciwoski’s transparent acrylic panels depart from narrative altogether, blurring the line between painting and sculpture. Revealing the support structure and surface as one, a seemingly perfect image of the object that is a painting emerges from his materials.

Confronting a rapidly changing cultural and political landscape, “Wondering Paths” demonstrates the persistent influence of art. As nationalism resurges and ideological conflicts intensify, the works in the exhibition affirm art’s capacity to question, challenge and imagine new pathways.

Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger is an NYC-based curator with a focus on place-based practices around socio-cultural issues. As Curator of Visual Arts at Wave Hill, a public garden and cultural center in the Bronx, she organizes the Sunroom Project Space, an opportunity for NYC artists to develop a site-specific project as a solo exhibition. Exhibitions include “Trees, we breathe” (forthcoming); “Perfect Trouble: Queering Natureculture” and “This Place We Once Remembered” at Wave Hill; “in pieces” at PS122 Gallery; “Bound up Together” at Smack Mellon; “Jameco Exchange”, in a vacant storefront in Jamaica, Queens; and “Hold these Truths” at Nathan Cummings Foundation. From 2020-2023, she was guest curator of Residency Unlimited’s NYC-based Artist Residency Program, dedicated to BIPOC artists whose research-based practices fill in gaps in historical knowledge. Prior, she was curator at No Longer Empty (NLE), a non-profit organization that curated site-responsive programming in unique spaces ranging from landmark buildings to vacant storefronts. While at NLE, she also served as director of the NLE Lab Curatorial Program.

The SVA Chelsea Gallery is open to the public Tuesday through Saturday, from 10:00am to 6:00pm, and closed on Sundays and Mondays. The gallery is fully accessible by wheelchair.