GROUP EXHIBITION : "Soma" at Contemporary by Angela Li 2026

In ancient Greek, soma simply meant "body." But in the traditions of somatic practice, from dance to phenomenology, and to Eastern ritual, soma refers to something more precise: the body as felt from within, not the body as seen from outside. It is the body that breathes, aches, remembers, and trembles. It is the body that is the mind, and the mind that inhabits the body.

This exhibition brings together four artists working at the intersection of mind, body, and time; not as separate categories, but as a single, indivisible soma.

Claire Lee paints and builds in the space where vulnerability becomes strength, not by conquering fragility, but by learning to breathe inside it. Her surfaces bear the marks of touch, pressure, and narrow escape; reminding us that a living body is never smooth. Lee is telling us that breaking is not the end of the story. Falling and rising, she shows us, are the same motion, seen from different angles.

Four artists. Four ways of listening to the body from the inside.

In a world that asks us to live inside screens, to optimize our bodies like machines, to outrun time with filters and formulas, this exhibition offers something simpler.

It asks you to stand still.
To feel your own breath.
To realize that you, too, are a living archive. A thinking body. A creature of time.