"If you can't even make your bed in the morning, you might be living your life the wrong way."
A remark casually heard on television stayed with Heyo Lee for years—not because making the bed could transform a life, but because it quietly altered the way a day begins. The smallest gestures and most ordinary objects rarely announce their importance, yet they shape our routines, emotions, and relationships in ways we seldom notice.
Mandy Zhang Art is pleased to present The Things That Hold Us, a duo exhibition bringing together paintings by Korean artist Heyo Lee and photographs by Chinese artist Can Sun.
We often imagine that our lives are shaped by extraordinary events and decisive moments. Yet just as importantly, they are shaped by the accumulation of smaller moments, repeated gestures, and everyday routines that quietly, but steadily, build us. The Things That Hold Us explores how these often overlooked moments become entwined with the ordinary objects through which we navigate daily life. These objects become not only witnesses but also participants in the emotional, social, and psychological structures that shape our everyday experience.
Though working in different mediums, Lee and Sun share a fascination with what objects convey beyond their practical function. Neither artist is interested in objects as subjects in themselves. Instead, they ask what objects do: how they shape our emotions, embody our relationships, and reveal the invisible forces that organise our daily lives.
Lee's still-life paintings slow the pace of looking, allowing fruit, books, plants, vessels, and domestic interiors to become reflections of emotional states rather than simply representations of things. His images emerge from pigment soaked into unprimed linen, creating luminous surfaces that draw as much from East Asian ink traditions as from Western painting. Familiar objects become quiet companions, offering moments of pause, comfort, and self-recognition.
Sun likewise begins with ordinary objects but transforms them into stand-ins for ourselves. Carefully staged photographs turn fruit, stationery, and household items into protagonists of human relationships, their tensions, imbalances, and moments of precarious equilibrium mirroring the quiet struggles of everyday life. Through humour, restraint, and subtle intervention, commonplace things become metaphors for intimacy, vulnerability, power, and resilience.
Together, Lee and Sun suggest that objects are never simply passive. They participate in our lives: they comfort and constrain, support and interrupt, quietly shaping the ways we inhabit the world. The Things That Hold Us invites us to reconsider how the objects that surround us come to embody not only the world we inhabit, but also the emotional lives we carry within it.
For any inquiries, please contact info@mandyzhang.art
