Set within the architecture firm Leroy Street Studio, Annie Chen Ziyao’s exhibit Livingroom Rhapsody at Allen Street Gallery, dissolved the traditional boundaries of exhibition-making by transforming the gallery into a fully inhabitable living room. Sculptural seating, hand-built tables, and ceramic light fixtures were not static installations, but objects woven into daily use. Employees from the firm sat, conversed, and passed time within the space—living inside the art rather than viewing it from a distance. In doing so, Annie posed a quiet, radical question: what if art is not observed but inhabited?
by Chris Garcia
This inquiry threads through Annie’s broader work as both artist and curator. Born in China and trained in photography and video at the School of Visual Arts in New York, she gradually expanded her practice to embrace space, ritual, and sensory design. Refusing the limits of the white-cube format, she has built a methodology that fuses domesticity with aesthetics, asking how everyday gestures—sipping tea, lighting a candle, sitting still can become acts of art and care.
Her founding of Flowing Space, a hybrid art and tea venue on the Lower East Side just blocks from Chinatown, solidified this vision. More than a gallery, it functions as a curatorial platform and omakase-style tea lounge where art is not merely shown, but lived with. Every element—incense holder, tea bowl, bench, or vessel—is selected for use as much as for display. In exhibitions like Pause, Sip, Breathe, Annie curated functional objects that emphasized tactile intimacy and ritual presence. Guests were not asked to observe but to engage: to drink, to rest, to smell, to hold. Time itself seemed to stretch inside the space, cultivating a slowness that felt increasingly rare and necessary.
In her most recent project, The Cup Speaks, a collaboration with Harvard Ceramics Studio, Annie deepened her exploration of the vessel as both object and storyteller. Each cup became a site of haptic dialogue—its glaze, weight, and contour communicating memory and emotion. These were not symbolic gestures; they were quiet provocations. What can we learn by simply holding something thoughtfully made? What kinds of attention emerge when beauty invites touch?
Annie Chen Ziyao’s work resists spectacle. Instead, it offers conditions—intentionally constructed environments where the borders between life and art blur into a gentle coexistence. Her curatorial language is one of intimacy and subtlety, rooted not in persuasion but in presence.
“I’m not trying to make people slow down,” she says. “I’m creating spaces where they naturally want to.”
In a cultural moment marked by acceleration and overload, Annie’s soft insistence on slowness, care, and sensory encounter becomes a form of quiet defiance. Through Flowing Space and beyond, she is charting new terrain for what it means to live with art—and to let it change us, one breath, one sip at a time.