Borrowed from ancient cosmology, sublunary—“beneath the moon”—refers to the imperfect, ever-changing world of human experience. Reimagined in the context of the modern city, it evokes an atmosphere of light, melancholy, and quiet estrangement.
Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present Sublunary, a duo exhibition featuring new paintings by Long Huang and Yuhao Chen. Through differing painterly vocabularies, both artists explore the affective terrain of the contemporary city at night, tracing the fragile correspondence between perception, emotion, and the shifting texture of urban light.
The term sublunary—“beneath the moon”—derives from Aristotelian cosmology, in which the world below the lunar sphere was defined by transience, imperfection, and perpetual change, in contrast to the immutable perfection of the heavens.
Reconsidered in a contemporary context, the sublunary world becomes a metaphor for the human condition: a realm shaped by instability and desire, where the very incompleteness of existence generates meaning. It is within this imperfect, luminous surface of the modern city—constructed through glass, light, and reflection—that human emotion quietly persists.
In Huang’s works, architecture becomes a container for solitude. Facades, pools, and corridors appear as vacant structures enveloped by spectral illumination. Birds drift through these spaces as silent witnesses, registering the unseen intervals of stillness that haunt urban life. Their presence—at once natural and otherworldly—suggests an alternative consciousness observing the city from within and beyond.
Chen’s paintings, by contrast, focus on the city’s thresholds and peripheral gestures. Figures appear partially obscured, often receding into shadow or framed from behind. Animals emerge as subtle surrogates—agents through which private emotion is displaced and refracted. Their quiet awareness, and at times ironic posture, mirror the fragility of human intimacy in an increasingly mediated environment.
Together, Huang and Chen construct a psychological topography of the sublunary realm: one that oscillates between the tangible and the spectral, the familiar and the estranged. The city, under their gaze, becomes a vessel of memory and effect—a space where nostalgia turns not toward the past but toward the present’s unresolved possibilities.
Light, in both practices, functions less as description than as thought: a means of revealing the tension between clarity and obscurity, revelation and concealment. Within this suspended atmosphere, emotion is neither narrated nor defined but quietly diffused, hovering at the threshold of recognition.
Sublunary captures the subtle vibration that lies beneath illumination—the murmurs that persist within monumental structures, the human warmth that endures amid transience. It invites reflection on the condition of inhabiting a world both connected and distant, fragile and enduring—a reminder that imperfection itself is the ground of our shared existence.
