Three Ways to Cross a Field: Du Huaxian, Yi Cynthia Chen, and Devon Pin-Yu Chen
FLOHAUS Gallery is pleased to announce Three Ways to Cross a Field, a three-person exhibition featuring Du Huaxian, Yi Cynthia Chen, and Devon Pin-Yu Chen, on view June 12 - 26, 2026. Inspired by the film Postmen in the Mountains (dir. Huo Jianqi, 1999), the exhibition brings together three distinct artistic practices that move through landscape, memory, body, and everyday life in different ways.
The film follows an elderly postman and his son as they walk a long mountain route to deliver letters across rural villages. Along the way, they meet different people, pass through changing landscapes, and gradually come to understand one another. Nothing major seems to happen, however these small encounters and repeated moments quietly shape how the son begins to see his father, the people around him, and the world he is stepping into.
The exhibition begins from a similar place. Across painting and ceramics, mountains dissolve into body parts, creatures wander across shifting boundaries, and fragments of village life reappear as emotional terrain. While the artists share certain cultural references as a starting point, each approaches the world through a different visual language. Rather than arriving at a single narrative, the exhibition unfolds through three separate ways of sensing, crossing, and relating to the world around us.
Du Huaxian (b.1974, China) is a Chinese painter whose practice is deeply rooted in rural landscape, village life, and scenes of labor. His work has been selected for major national exhibitions in China, including the 14th National Art Exhibition, the China Beijing International Art Biennale, and the China Ethnic Art Biennale. For Three Ways to Cross a Field, Du presents a group of 2024 plein-air paintings depicting Chinese village life, people, animals, and rural landscapes. His paintings are grounded in lived reality, yet they are never strictly realist. Through bold, subjective color, simplified forms, and shifting spatial structures that move between flatness and volume, Du transforms everyday countryside scenes into vivid emotional terrains. Villagers, animals, houses, fields, and mountains appear both humble and lyrical, carrying the warmth of daily life, the texture of labor, and the quiet romance of rural memory.
Yi Cynthia Chen (b. 1996, Takoma Park, Maryland) is an interdisciplinary painter whose practice explores the entangled cycles of nature, body, memory, and history through the intersection of Chinese Hakka heritage and American cultural contexts. Her paintings unfold like internal weather, where figures, plants, roots, organs, water, and fragments of built environments dissolve into layered, shifting landscapes. In her recent work, Chen considers painting as a living object whose life continues through its role in the viewer’s body, psyche, and memory. The recurring use of ears, mouths, hearts, and brains points to the connection between visual culture and bodily experience, suggesting that looking is also emotional, physical, and neurological. In this exhibition, Chen presents new works including Remember Us Not, which reflects on time and the fragile lifespan of an artwork, alongside a twenty-minute opening performance extending from Nervous System. Through painting, object, and performance, Chen approaches landscape as an interior field where memory, material, body, and time continuously reshape one another.
Devon Pin-Yu Chen (b. 1994, Taiwan) is a visual artist based in New York City whose practice spans sculpture, painting, and moving image, with ceramic as her primary medium. Chen holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and a BFA in Fashion Design from Shih Chien University. Her work constructs intimate and uncanny worlds where animals, objects, and domestic fragments take on emotional and social roles. Dogs, cats, boxes, vessels, and other everyday forms often appear as companions or guides, opening questions around care, dependency, class, belonging, and who is allowed to rest, eat, travel, or be seen. Drawing from Taiwanese folk belief and the quiet drama of ordinary objects, Chen’s ceramic works move between humor and unease, tenderness and exclusion. In Three Ways to Cross a Field, her work offers a creaturely passage through landscape and memory, where animals and objects become witnesses to displacement, companionship, and the fragile desire to belong. Devon is the recipient of Andrew Fisher Fellowship. Notable recent exhibitions including HAPPY ISLANDS at Nguyen Wahed, New York, NY(2026); Come Rot In My Bed at Accent Sisters, New York, NY(2026); Fault Lines at The Blanc, New York, NY(2025); and PLAY at LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies, New York, NY(2025).
