Thresholds of Becoming at esea contemporary

esea contemporary‘s 40th anniversary could have been a moment to look back. Instead it presses forward with a group exhibition that probes ideas of transition and sees instability as a generative force.

Curated by esea contemporary Director Xiaowen Zhu, Thresholds of Becoming brings together six artists working across sculpture, video, digital montage and participatory practice: Nicole Coson, Xin Liu, Charmaine Poh, Minoru Nomata, Yang Yongliang and Yin Aiwen. What links the works is an attention to thresholds – ecological, technological and social – and to the systems that hold life together while quietly reshaping it.

That sense of change-in-motion runs through Nicole Coson’s Through Some Place, Within Here (2024), a suspended constellation of aluminium-cast oyster shells drawn from the makeshift structures used to farm oysters in Aklan, a Visayan province in the Philippines. Translating these latticed forms into sculpture, Coson explores how materials gather histories as they move, settle and shift across contexts.

In Insomnia (2025), London-based artist and engineer Xin Liu stages a self-contained micro-ecosystem built around duckweed, a fast-replicating invasive aquatic plant. Often treated as an environmental problem, duckweed is also being studied as a potential future source of food and fuel in outer space. Liu’s work holds that contradiction in balance, positioning overproduction and depletion alongside the possibility of renewal.

Berlin- and Singapore-based artist Charmaine Poh’s The Moon Is Wet (2025) turns toward memory, ritual and queer longing, entwining personal testimony with the changing ecologies of contemporary Singapore. Across three video channels, narratives drawing on Majie domestic workers, queer Southeast Asian caregivers and the sea goddess Mazu trace submerged histories as they resurface through acts of care.

Elsewhere, Tokyo-based painter Minoru Nomata’s Resonance–1 and Resonance–2 present solitary, humanless architectures that feel both familiar and uncanny, suspended between aspiration and fragility. And Yang Yongliang’s Mountains of Crowds (2016) reworks classical shanshui through digital montage, where mountains dissolve into skylines and ink-like washes resolve into grids of light.

The exhibition’s most direct invitation comes through Rotterdam-based artist Yin Aiwen’s Liquid Dependencies (2021–ongoing), a live-action role-playing work in which 10 participants inhabit interdependent relationships across simulated decades. Framed as rehearsal rather than metaphor, it’s a space to test the infrastructural conditions under which care, obligation and interdependence might be organised in the future.

Taken together, Thresholds of Becoming frames transformation as a condition that is both intimate and planetary, where collapse and renewal coexist within the unstable architectures of the present.