The Overslept Mayfly

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. Tianshu Zhang (b. China 1994) is a painter based in New York whose practice centers on the fluidity of energy and the spiritual resonance of the human form. Working primarily in oil on canvas and wood panel, Zhang investigates the mayfly-esque state of existence born from years of cross-cultural migration. Her work seeks to look past physical surfaces to find underlying frequencies, where anatomical anchors—such as the spine and sternum—serve as stabilizers within a shifting, atmospheric field. Zhang received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2023 and her BFA from the University of Texas at Austin in 2017. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at NADA Miami, Chambers Fine Art, Pulse New York, Chilli Art Projects, and Latitude Gallery. In 2023, she presented her solo exhibition Entropy and Hidden Force at Gallery Func in Shanghai. Ailyn Lee (b. 1994, South Korea) is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York. She works across sculpture, painting, and video, creating dreamlike characters and scenes using handmade and found objects. Drawing from childhood memories of her grandmother’s antique shop in Busan, filled with mysterious yet nostalgic objects, as well as her mother’s figurative sculptures, her work explores memory, transformation, and the subconscious through a feminine lens. Lee often employs recurring symbols such as butterflies, the moon, and the female body. Lee received her MFA in Fine Arts in 2022 and her BFA in Illustration in 2017 from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She has exhibited her work at various venues, including A.I.R.Gallery, Wassaic Project, SVA Chelsea Gallery, SVA Flatiron Gallery, and Here Arts Center, among others. She has been an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation, the InternationalStudio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), Wassaic Project, and Vermont Studio Center.