Osmosis
April 25 – May 3, 2026
Curated by Jinyi Freya Xu and Luman Jiang
Guo Tongtong, Kyung Kim, Joy Li, Xingze Li, Yu Ruo-Jie, Bingyi Zhang
New York, NY, April 25, 2026 – Symora Art presents Osmosis, a group exhibition at Flohause Gallery bringing together six artists working across painting, installation, photography, and mixed media.
"What's more mystifying and seductive than encountering an other that feels familiar?"
We have never touched the world directly. What we touch is the way the world arrives at us. Between the two, there is always a medium: language, culture, the environment in which we grew, the narratives we were given, the assumptions so familiar we no longer think to question them.
In biology, osmosis describes the spontaneous movement of solvent molecules through a semipermeable membrane, requiring no external force, only a membrane and a difference in concentration on either side. Osmosis takes this process as a framework for examining how cultural contact occurs in contemporary life: not through rupture or assimilation, but through prolonged, silent, unstoppable mutual permeation. The exhibition considers the invisible membrane that encloses each individual, filtering everything visible, refracting every arriving signal. Osmosis happens when the membrane thins. Not disappear. But sometimes it thins enough that pressure from the other side begins to seep through, carrying an unfamiliar warmth, quietly shifting the density on this side.
Guo Tongtong (b. 1979, Suzhou) works in paper-based mixed media, drawing on her training in printmaking at Nanjing Art Institute and Tianjin Academy of Fine Arts. Her Love Letter series weaves watermark prints, hand-drawn marks, and collaged materials into layered compositions accompanied by three-line poems. Printed traces and freehand gestures coexist on the same surface, producing a transparency that is never fully resolved. Recent exhibitions include a solo show A Love Poem to the Time at BFM Art Center (2025) and the Guanlan International Print Biennial (Shenzhen, 2023).
Kyung Kim is a South Korean-born, New York-based painter who translates sensory memories of natural landscapes into painting, capturing invisible sensitivities of sound, temperature, and time. She holds a BFA from SAIC and an MFA from Pratt Institute (2024). In 2024 she published her first art book, The Waxing Moon.
Joy Li (b. 1999, Gansu) is a sculptor and interdisciplinary artist. BFA from MICA, currently MFA Sculpture at Yale School of Art. For Osmosis, she presents Our Ephemeral Eternity: Our Love, Our Ordinary Battlefield (2025), a mixed-media installation where domestic objects construct a landscape in which intimacy and conflict become a permeable membrane. Recent solo exhibitions include Gas Station X (Vanguard Gallery, Shanghai, 2024) and Icarus' Wings (Guangdong Times Museum, 2024). She was a 2024 Porsche Young Chinese Artist of the Year nominee and Skowhegan fellow.
Xingze Li (b. 1992, Ya'an) is a Brooklyn-based artist working at the intersection of photography and sculpture. His dye sublimation on aluminum pieces lend weight to unassuming walls in domestic and semi-public spaces, capturing each surface's sense of time and passage of light. For Osmosis, he presents Untitled (mid Jan. on 43 St) (2024), an elliptical aluminum panel where the membrane becomes visible as material encounter. BFA from Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts, MFA from Pratt Institute (2019). Exhibitions at Yi Gallery, Ortega y Gasset Projects, and Sweet Lorraine Gallery.
Yu Ruo-Jie is an artist, curator, and writer working across video, installation, painting, and new media. For Osmosis, she presents Take a Nap in Bubble – No. 18 (2022), a photographic work that freezes the oscillation of transient foam, rendering uncertainty in pixelated visual language. The bubble, simultaneously transparent and distorting, becomes the exhibition's most literal figure for the membrane. Recent solo exhibitions include Dozing in the Fold of Dreamland (Modern Art Museum, Shanghai, 2022) and The Lying Flower (Three Shadows Photography Art Centre, Beijing, 2021).
Bingyi Zhang is a painter exploring relationships between perception and the natural world. BFA in Studio Art from NYU, currently pursuing graduate studies at Harvard University. For Osmosis, she presents Whisper of Water (2024), an acrylic painting capturing the ever-changing surface of water under shifting light. Her work has been exhibited in New York, Berlin, and Cambridge.
