Borrowed from a mistranslation of Julia Kristeva’s “Power of Horror,” the title “War Goes Straight to Their Tummies” positions the exhibition precisely in a space of misplacement. Upon entering, the gallery space feels nearly empty. But look closely, and stillness begins to fray: a wall swells as if something is trying to emerge, cracks on the floor fill with sand. The works aren’t merely placed in the gallery—they seem to grow out of it, like subtle mutations in the architecture itself.
The gallery at Below Grand is far from neutral. Nestled within an asian utensil supply store in New York’s Chinatown, the space carries its own history of use, improvisation, and residue. Its floors are uneven. Cracks, stains, patches, and discolorations become characters. In the newly opened extension on Allen Street, the signs of labor remain visible—fractures filled with care, planes bearing the imprint of repair. These imperfections aren’t cosmetic oversights, but conditions for artistic emergence. In this exhibition, the gallery becomes an active material—as membrane, scar, and skin.
Curated by wei, the exhibition unfolds through tensions held by three artists who speak at thresholds where repair feels indistinguishable from rupture, and misplacement becomes its own language of calibration.
Peggy Chiang’s six delicate pushpins—crafted from bone, referencing the ivory chopsticks once part of her mother’s bridal set—pierce the gallery wall. Each is tipped with a minuscule replica of the ossicles: the stapes, incus, and malleus—the smallest bones in the human ear that make hearing possible.
Even without anatomical recognition, the ossicles evoke bodily resonance. These pushpins puncture the wall, turning the space itself into a listening organ. The gesture is exacting, yet its charge lies in the dislocation of function and material. Objects meant to receive are now agents of insertion. Instruments of hearing transform into instruments of pressure—puncturing, embedding, leaving traces as the constellation calibrates.
Ivory, historically prized and heavy with lineage, is reshaped into pushpins—humble, nearly invisible, easily mistaken for leftover installation tools. The contradiction creates tension: precision rendered in the language of the disposable. This is a gesture of refusal.
By turning inheritance into infrastructure, Chiang’s work stages a quiet rebellion: what is precious does not beg to be seen; it becomes the site of listening, calibrated through absence.
Mariana Ramos Ortiz works with sand, a material that simultaneously penetrates and holds. Her installations navigate the peripheries of gallery spaces: where tile meets drywall, where floors split open, where walls ascend into ceilings. They trace the thresholds where architecture shifts—where form gives way to fracture.
The sand is pressed into existing fissures, neither covering nor concealing them. This process resembles maintenance rather than repair—a form of sustained attention that remains with what is broken, without seeking to fix it.
A solitary breeze block stands autonomous in the space. Drawn from Ortiz’s research on Caribbean modernist architecture, this element—typically used to divide space, filter light, and facilitate ventilation—is removed from its functional context. Isolated, it becomes something unfamiliar. It creates boundaries without asserting dominance—border visible, yet porous.
In Ortiz’s practice, fragility emerges not as deficiency but as methodology—a means of dwelling with the unfinished or decayed. Her materials resist permanence, creating a delicate equilibrium where time, erosion, and care coexist—transforming the gallery’s imperfections into quiet sites of possibility.
Unlike Chiang’s piercing precision or Ortiz’s acts of care, Jung Won Lee’s work introduces a third gesture: one of tension and expansion. Her sculptural intervention directly distorts the gallery wall, recalling the site’s past life as a bean-based food distributor.
Her box-like forms are embedded into the architectural structure—or more precisely, emerge from it. Drawing from archived Google Street View images, Lee reintroduces the memory of storage—its mass, its blockage of light, its mundane insistence—back into the space. The past returns not as a narrative, but as pressure.
The forms appear as boxes but reject their function. Some just outward from the wall as if straining against containment; one rises awkwardly from the floor. The vivid orange block feels not placed, but expelled—half-ejected, half-collapsed. The works do not simulate history; they compress it, forcing a physical encounter with the tension between memory and structure.
Lee’s process is deeply site-specific—not only in research, but in direct, prolonged contact. Over weeks, she worked not apart from the wall but with it—her hands repeatedly building and shaping its surface. In this act of sustained touch, the wall became something closer to skin: reactive, marked, slowly altered. The skin of her hand, too, became wrinkled and roughened in the process. Distortion takes form not only in the sculpture but in the blurred line between the artist’s skin and the gallery wall—both slowly transformed by the intimacy of labor.
The works on view do not monumentalize, narrate, or call out. In response to the conditions, lineages, and histories each artist brings in, the gallery—with all its flaws—becomes a porous structure, a metaphor. Each work presses, fills, pierces—against the surface, against absence, against the weight of being here. Their materials—ivory, sand, breeze blocks, vinyl, clay, cardboard—do not dominate the architecture. They enter it. They lean on it. They shift it slightly, until something else begins to register.
The exhibition’s title—borrowed from a mistranslation—transforms a detour into a method. It reframes theory into touch, language into pressure. It proposes a logic that does not seek clarity, but allows for porousness, misrecognition, and the uneven drift between languages, bodies, and surfaces.
This misplacement becomes the exhibition’s deepest structure. In a time saturated with assertion and visibility, these works offer another possibility: to stay close to what cannot be fixed, as Ortiz writes on the gallery wall—El acto erosivo de permanecer—the erosive act of staying. Through persistence. A form of attention that works slowly, quietly, without spectacle, but remains.
Exhibition Title: War Goes Straight to Their Tummies
Venue: Below Grand NYC, Manhattan, New York
Dates: 4/19/2025 – 5/17/2025
Artists: Peggy Chiang, Mariana Ramos Ortiz, Jung Won Lee
Curator: wei
