(New York, NY) CHINCHINART is pleased to present Lithic Coordinates, a group exhibition curated by Shuhan Zhang, featuring artists Chuanduan Chen, Huanzhe Hu, Kun Juliet Wang, Tingru Chen, Yinghan Zhang, and Zhanyi Chen. The exhibition brings together six artists whose practices explore how contemporary life forms new geological strata across digital, biological, atmospheric, and emotional terrains.

Positioning stone as both material and metaphor, Lithic Coordinates considers geology not as a static foundation, but as a mutable system shaped by pressure, time, erosion, and transformation. In an era defined by technological mediation and ecological instability, the exhibition proposes that memory behaves like sediment, bodies resemble shifting terrains, and digital and atmospheric fragments crystallize into new mineral forms within an unfolding artificial geology. What emerges is a speculative cartography in which atmosphere becomes archive, flesh becomes lithic, and infrastructure leaves emotional residue.

Zhanyi Chen approaches geology through soft science fiction, treating sky technologies and weather systems as sites of emotional sedimentation. Using satellite data and speculative archives, she transforms celestial infrastructures into intimate terrains of memory. In Cloudbusting (Rain Poems), rain serves as both medium and messenger, inscribing longing onto fragile surfaces and envisioning the sky as a stratified archive where breakdown allows desire to crystallize. Kun Juliet Wang fuses natural stone with biomimetic, skin-like surfaces, creating hybrid forms where flesh and mineral dissolve into one another. Her sculptures reframe geology as a living, responsive system, one continuously eroding and regenerating under contemporary pressures.

Chuanduan Chen renders nature as psychic terrain. Through photography and moving image, he treats stones, moss, and debris as emotional strata where memory and myth accumulate. His works function like unstable fossils, preserving traces of weather and mourning within natural forms. Huanzhe Hu extends geology into sound and site. Working with ice, water, and vibration, she explores how non-human forces generate alternative inscriptions. In Drifting Records, pancake ice becomes an instrument and an archive, proposing geology as an event rather than an object and suggesting landscapes that actively resonate and remember.

Yinghan Zhang draws from scholars’ stones and Daoist thought, using full-shape rubbing alongside printmaking to treat the stone as surface and timekeeper. Inspired by the notion that “a stone is the smallest mountain,” the works condense scale and temporality, bridging ancient aesthetics with contemporary material inquiry. Tingru constructs fragile architectural situations from reclaimed materials and local stones. In Safe House, discarded fragments form a provisional shelter that appears protective yet remains conceptually unstable. Referencing the museum as a sanctuary, the work questions whether safety is stable or simply a fragile construct shaped by distance, exclusion, and perception.

Together, these artists propose a speculative geology of coexistence. Bodies, technologies, atmospheres, and environments fold into one another, forming unstable yet generative strata of lived experience. Lithic Coordinates maps a terrain where the mineral is no longer inert and the digital no longer immaterial, but where memory, matter, and mediation continuously crystallize into new coordinates of being.