February 8 - April 6, 2026
Broodthaers Society of America, New York
Winter Garden, an installation by Caitlyn Min-ji Au
The Broodthaers Society of America presents Winter Garden, an ambitious new site-specific installation by Caitlyn Min-ji Au (DoVA MFA 2022), her first solo presentation in New York.
From the exhibition press release: "For the past five years, Au has been concerned with the delineation of space as an unequal power relationship between exterior and interior, real and virtual, revealed and masked. Her elemental forms have portals and video feeds that offer oblique views into their otherworldly interiors. The sinister uncertainty of what you're able to see inside any of Au's structures makes you aware that you might be trapped inside something too. Not only the gallery and its surveillance system but also the very skin that covers your body, just like the Moonlight Jade™ polyester fleece sewn snugly onto Au's forms.
Winter Garden ups the ante of Au's a posteriori aesthetics by introducing a live inhabitant to her sculptures. Where Au's previous work compelled viewers to delve into her forms and discern what they were up to, now just as much (if not more) scrutiny will be aimed back at us by Atlas the turtle, the show's demonstrably wise and wary protagonist. It's as if Au's new installation is proposing, by way of Schrödinger's Cat, that artworks have a skeptical view of us, too."
Caitlyn Min-ji Au earned a BFA from the Glass Department at the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA from the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago. From 2020-22 and 2023-24 she was a teaching assistant and fellow at the University of Chicago. She has recently shown work at Shanghai Seminary and W.I.H.S.H. projects, Chicago. She currently lives and works in Chicago.