What Holds, What Lingers: Curated by Sean Zhang
LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to present What Holds, What Lingers, a four-person exhibition curated by Sean Zhang, Founder of Loft 121 Advisory. The exhibition brings together Elizabeth Dimitroff, Alice Ningci Jiang, Paulina Moncada, and Yutong Yin, whose works consider how identity is formed through transition, the environments we enter, the encounters we experience, and the traces we carry forward.
The exhibition explores liminality, memory, and shifting notions of place. Figures and environments appear within these in-between conditions where boundaries between the interior and exterior, presence and absence, and past and present begin to blur. Painting becomes a site where memories accumulate and shift, allowing fragments of experience to resurface in altered configurations. The result is a sense of place that is neither fixed nor singular, but continually formed by the interplay between perception, memory, and imagination.
Alice Ningci Jiang’s recent paintings and works on paper are atmospheric meditations on placehood, memory, and belonging. Ethereal figures drift through luminous landscapes punctuated by washes of amber and crimson, where forms emerge only to dissolve again. In Fly Fly, Jiang presents a bird-like figure stretched across the canvas in a sweeping arc, its elongated limbs suggesting motion or escape. It exists between flight and drift, as if carried by forces beyond its control. While the landscape is fluid and indeterminate, a small structure on the distant horizon offers a faint suggestion of a place that feels both remote and unreachable. This atmosphere recalls a sensibility also seen in Yu Nishimura, whose works similarly place solitary figures in ambiguous naturescapes that hover between familiarity and the unknown.
Elizabeth Dimitroff extends this sense of spatial and psychological instability, constructing complex visual narratives that engage the capacity of painting to represent subjective experiences. Anonymous figures appear estranged in indeterminate spaces, often caught in physically improbable postures. In works such as Pause, a figure inverted in a precarious handstand reinforces this sense of physical and psychological dislocation. Suspended against muted, ungrounded fields, these bodies seem untethered from time and place. Through a restrained palette and sensitive brushwork, Dimitroff maintains a deliberate sense of irresolution, where figures and environments resist recognition, compelling the viewer to reconsider how identity is shaped through absence and uncertainty.
Yutong Yin’s paintings center on intimate portrayals of anonymous subjects, detached from any specific setting or activity. Set within sparse, undefined grounds, these figures appear absorbed or elsewhere, their averted gazes and slight bodily turns suggesting an attention directed beyond what is depicted. This quiet deflection creates a charged relation not only between subject and setting, but also with what is withheld from view. In each subject’s specificity, a broader condition of being begins to surface. In La mémoire de M.G XIII, a singular figure emerges through subtle tonal shifts, its features softly rendered. The eyes drift, refusing direct contact, while the expression carries a sense of feeling that is palpable but without clear origin. Through this approach, Yin treats portraiture as a site of encounter, where the act of looking draws the viewer into a subtle awareness of their own perceptual and emotional response.
Rooted in the visual and ecological language of the Andean Tropics, Paulina Moncada constructs paintings that unfold as interconnected narratives, where each mark responds to the next and each work reverberates across the others. In this new body of work, a figure gazing out of a window serves as a point of departure, positioned at the threshold between interior and exterior. Light floods the interior space, rendering it visible, while simultaneously obscuring what lies beyond. This tension extends into adjacent landscapes, where trees emerge through layered washes of color and dense applications of oil paste, producing radiant surfaces that oscillate between clarity and dissolution. Across Moncada’s practice, landscape becomes a vessel for memory and emotion, a space for navigating the unfamiliar.
What Holds, What Lingers returns to the question of how identity takes shape across shifting conditions of experience. Meaning emerges through relation rather than certainty, as memory and emotion continually reframe how place is understood. What remains is not fixed or fully graspable, but something carried forward, reconfigured, and felt over time.
