What Distance Holds: An MFA Thesis Exhibition Featuring video installations by Sarasa Kikuchi, Rui Shen, and Siqi Xiong
Sarasa Kikuchi, Rui Shen, and Siqi Xiong invite viewers into the contemplative textures of fluid identity, invisible labor, and immigrant guilt, exploring what remains amid absence with innovative aesthetics and immersive strategies that invite viewers to linger and feel.
Sarasa Kikuchi — 13 Hours Ahead
Six-channel spatial cinema
Thirteen hours separate a mother in Japan from her daughter in America. In Kikuchi’s immersive six-channel installation, that gap becomes something one can feel in their body: two lives unfolding in parallel, connected, yet never quite touching.Through quiet domestic scenes, layered soundscapes, and a fractured screen arrangement, 13 Hours Ahead asks what it means to love someone you can only reach across time zones. It holds space not only for the immigrant who left, but for the parent left behind — a perspective rarely given its full weight.
Rui Shen – I
Installation
Shen considers the continuous becoming of identity. The moment one tries to answer who they are, something shifts. Shen’s installation uses a single word, I, — the most personal word in any language — to meditate on the essence of becoming.
A fan stirs the suspended surface of horizontal screens upon which projections of “I” form and dissolve. They gather, briefly cohere, then scatter again. The quiet circuit demonstrates how alive it is, always moving, always just beyond the labels we reach for.
Siqi Xiong – Angel Has No Share
Multimedia interactive installation
In whiskey-making, a portion of the spirit evaporates through the barrel each year — lost to the air, unrecoverable. Distillers call this the “angel’s share.” Meanwhile, ice wine creation avoids evaporation because it is sealed in stainless steel. Does anything disappear, regardless? When one compares these processes, what is missed?
Xiong’s installation transforms these questions into a factory floor to walk through. The documentation of labor sits alongside imitation and artistic recreations that move together on a conveyor belt. The spectator’s presence, attention, and quiet effort to look closely is part of what the work produces. You don’t observe this factory. You complete it.
What Distance Holds Opening reception: April 22, 2026, 5 – 7 PM at 25 Avery Street, Boston
On view April 21 – May 10 · Tuesday through Sunday, 11am – 6pm
Free and open to the public
April 21 @ 12:00 pm – May 10 @ 6:00 pm
