Inner-World-Space

Upstairs Gallery

Harrison Atwater, Abigail Dudley, Justin Rui Han, Kyung Kim, Paulina Moncada, Alexandre Pépin, Suyi Xu

Uffner & Liu is pleased to present Inner-World-Space, a group exhibition in the Upstairs Gallery featuring work by seven artists.

The exhibition takes its title from Weltinnenraum, a word coined by the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke to describe the deep, interconnected space where human consciousness and the external universe merge. Weltinnenraum is roughly translated as “Inner-World-Space.” In his celebrated poem from 1914, Rilke writes:

"One single space pervades all beings here:

an inner world-space. Silently, the birds

fly through us still. Oh, I who want to grow,

can gaze outside: a tree will rise inside me."

The works in Inner-World-Space occupy a similar threshold. They are neither fully inside nor out, but suspended in the charged space where the built environment meets the natural world. The artists in the show approach this boundary as a site of psychological and formal inquiry.

In Alexandre Pépin’s Evening, Living Room, two figures lean into one another on a daybed. The room around them is so densely patterned that it no longer reads as a room at all. Houseplants, lamplights, quilted geometries, and a red sun press in from every side, all flickering with the same dappled marks as the bodies themselves. Abigail Dudley reaches a similar porousness by gentler means. She works from observation but lets invention seep in, and her figures thin at the edges until they become part of the rooms around them. Figure, furnishing, interior, and exterior are seemingly woven from a single fabric.

Kyung Kim and Suyi Xu work in a quieter, more subliminal register, where human touch is suggested but not seen. In Kim’s Forest Window, two warm vertical bands, perhaps a window frame or doorway architecture, open onto a haze of amber fog that drifts forward. In Xu’s Limerence, architecture is less a container than a scaffold for something cosmic: an inner sanctum that opens infinitely outward.

To build is to impose: to draw a line between shelter and exposure, cultivation and wilderness. But the works gathered here resist that logic. Windows become permeable membranes. Walls give way to light, weather, and growth. The domestic opens onto something vast or unruly. What emerges is less a contrast between inside and outside than a meditation on how each depends on the other. Interior life is shaped by what surrounds it, and the natural world is transformed by the mark of habitation.

Inner-World-Space dissolves the boundary between the inner self and the outer world and imagines in its place a continuous, porous space that reaches through all beings.