The Bitterest Ice Cream
New York, July 2026 – We are pleased to present The Bitterest Ice Cream, a duo exhibition featuring Shengjie Jiang and Alex Wen. The exhibition explores how emotions inhabit objects, persisting through change and leaving traces that are neither fully present nor entirely gone.
In conditions shaped by temporality and memory, objects are rarely inert. They absorb, refl ect, and mediate human experience, becoming vessels for feelings that outlast their immediate context. Sweetness and bitterness, presence and absence, visibility and loss, all circulate through the material world, accumulating traces that resist straightforward comprehension. The Bitterest Ice Cream asks: how might emotions persist through transformation, and how can objects hold what the body and mind cannot fully articulate?
The exhibition approaches objects as relational carriers rather than fi xed forms. Jiang’s paintings position sliced fruit, half-eaten cakes, empty tableware, and animals passing through gardens within suspended moments, where past and ongoing experiences converge. Wen’s practice treats books, paper, garments, and archival materials as repositories of memory and feeling. Folded, bound, stacked, or stored, these objects allow emotion to travel across time, mediating between what has been and what remains.
Through painting, installation, and archival interventions, the artists articulate distinct modes of emotional endurance. Objects melt, fade, are misplaced, or forgotten, but certain feelings persist, lingering in the aftertaste of experience. Here, preservation does not guarantee permanence, nor does disappearance imply absence. Jiang and Wen invite viewers to inhabit a space where emotions endure not despite transformation, but through it, tracing a continuum of memory, sensation, and relational intensity
Shengjie Jiang (b. 1999) is a painter currently living and working in New York. She earned her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2025, and her BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in New York in 2023. Her first solo exhibition, The Cabinet of Hers, has been presented at Cubism Artspace in Shanghai in 2026. Her recent group exhibitions include Drown-Proofing (Chicago, 2025) and Imprints of Time (Chicago, 2025). "This transient sense of belonging fueled a deep desire to ‘recreate a tactile sense from memory.’ I set bitterness as the emotional foundation of the work, underscoring the irreparable nature of time and memory, and the delicate balance between what is remembered and what is irretrievably lost.”
Alex (Yeying) Wen (b. 2000) is a New York–based printmaker and illustrator working across multidisciplinary visual arts. She holds a Master of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts (SVA). Her work explores an "imaginary reality" through the language of print, where small, isolated figures inhabit expansive worlds that reflect human fragility, resilience, and internal emotional landscapes. First discovering her passion for printmaking through etching—which became both a meditative practice and a source of creative freedom—she has since expanded her practice into lithography, mezzotint, letterpress, papermaking, and book arts. Wen utilizes these diverse technical processes to question the complexities of existence and the purpose of living. For her, making art is an exercise in sensitivity, vulnerability, and openness—a reminder that to feel deeply is what ultimately makes us alive.
