Event | Breath Is Everywhere: Conversation at Liu Shiming Art Gallery

New York, NY – January 15, 2026 – Liu Shiming Art Gallery hosted Breath Is Everywhere, a public conversation with artist Linnea Gad and curator Ariana Kalliga, moderated by gallery director and curator Maëlle Ebelle, presented in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title. Linnéa Gad is a visual artist from Stockholm, Sweden, whose sculptural practice engages geology, ecology, and material accumulation through processes involving lime, glass, metal, and organic matter. Ariana Kalliga is Assistant Curator at Amant, Brooklyn, and a writer and researcher whose work examines the intersections of infrastructure, landscape, and ecological thinking.

The conversation traced the curatorial and conceptual foundations of Breath Is Everywhere, an exhibition that brings Gad’s materially driven works into dialogue with sculptures by Liu Shiming. Ebelle described the project as an effort to “create a new way to navigate an exhibition,” centering on a single shared platform that resists linear viewing and invites viewers to slow down, compare textures, and question authorship. Gad reflected on the notion of porosity that underpins the exhibition’s title, observing that when a work is left “slightly unfinished, it has this porous quality,” allowing breath, time, and presence to remain perceptible.

Drawing from research into Neolithic vessels, marine calcification, and the tradition of gongshi, or scholar stones, Gad discussed sculpture as a process of accumulation shaped by material agency rather than fixed form. Across the discussion, lime mortar, oyster shell tabby, cardboard, slag, ceramic, and glass were framed not simply as mediums but as temporal systems—materials that record pressure, erosion, and care. The evening concluded with a quote by Liu Shiming that resonated with the exhibition’s intergenerational dialogue: “I want my life to be present in all my works… so that after my death, my friends could still dialog in silence.”

Breath Is Everywhere is on view through January 31, 2026.