The Overslept Mayfly: Ailyn Lee and Tianshu Zhang: Curated by Shuang Cai

Mayflies are said to live for only one day.
 

Some say they emerge only to disappear. Some imagine they spend most of their brief lives hovering between water and air, light and shadow, instinct and sleep. Others dream of what they dream. 

Featuring the works of Tianshu Zhang and Ailyn Lee, the exhibition is to be read as the elaborated dreams of The Overslept Mayfly. Moving through drift, metamorphosis, and private symbolism, the exhibition unfolds like a tale remembered incompletely — something overheard in sleep, half-preserved and half-forgotten.

Ailyn Lee’s work builds intimate cosmologies through insects and small devotional objects that feel at once familiar and strangely singular. Her paintings and sculptural tableaux resemble cabinets of memory: fragments of correspondence, nocturnal creatures, miniature reliquaries, and private mythologies arranged with ritual care. Butterflies and moons linger as quiet witnesses to longing, repetition, and reverie. Gothic and delicate, Lee’s world feels suspended somewhere between a childhood bedroom, a taxonomic archive, and an altar to things too fragile to keep.

Alongside, Tianshu Zhang paints figures that emerge and dissolve simultaneously. Flesh folds into shapes; bodies soften into liquified color. The morphing forms hover between intimacy and abstraction, as if caught mid-transformation — lovers, ghosts, embryos, selves. Saturated violets, bruised pinks, and glowing ambers move across the canvas like weather passing through skin. What remains is articulated sensations: tenderness stretched across instability.

Together, Lee and Zhang construct an emotional ecology of ephemerality. One gathers remnants; the other dissolves forms. One works through object and symbol, the other through atmosphere and bodily metamorphosis. Yet both return insistently to the same question: what does it mean to hold onto something that cannot remain?

Mayflies belong to a day in May, or so they say. Yet this one arrives late.

Perhaps it lingered too long in dream. Perhaps it lost its sense of season. Or perhaps certain fragile things simply refuse to vanish when expected. The Overslept Mayfly unfolds in this slight delay — where memory stretches, forms soften, and longing remains awake just a little longer.