Soft Instructions

FanFlus and Art Cake are delighted to present a three-artist exhibition, curated by Fanfan Yuxuan Fan. Soft instructions refer to forms of power that operate within relationships without appearing as explicit commands. Mediated through the language of care or devotion, these instructions are willingly accepted—even relied upon—for their promises of safety, belonging, and the sensation of being arranged. Thus, attachment emerges as a primary site through which power is sustained, internalized, and normalized in our everyday lived experience. This exhibition unfolds the tensions of intimacy across three interrelated layers: erotic scenarios structured by role assignment and reversal; the subtle disciplining of posture through objects and infrastructural arrangements; and sonic-religious spaces that regulate visibility and audibility, determining which identities may appear or be heard, and which may not.

Yshao Lin confronts power structures by working through the terrain of intimacy. In Not Even God Can Judge Me(2026), he summons muscular white men via dating apps, dresses them in black suits, and directs them into submissive postures. This gesture subverts the logic of Western pornography that aligns white masculinity with dominance and Asian masculinity with passivity. The suit, an emblem of authority, is redistributed. Lin plays the roles of director and confessor, turning shame into gazed-upon evidence, exposed, and recorded. When the Cicadas Cry(2025) suspends judgment and generation: gold-painted, incomplete cicada shells can no longer move, yet their absence persists through sound. Mechanical echoes of a summer long prepared in the dark and released in a brief eruption condense migratory dislocation and temporal delay, settling into a quiet mourning for seasons already sealed away. Here, soft instructions emerge through a double bind of desire and memory, exerted outwardly upon others while simultaneously turning inward toward the self. 

Soomin Kang translates soft instructions into objects and installations, shifting attention to micro-discipline embedded in everyday material forms. Works such as Soft Exit(2025) and Toys For(2025) transform fitness handles, animal restraint toys, and objects with misaligned functions that appear caring yet subtly prescribe the body’s “correct” postures. Hovering between handrails, toys, and training devices, these objects blur the boundary between care and constraint. They seem to support the body while simultaneously instructing it on how to exist compliantly and obediently, how to desire and submit within permitted boundaries, rendering love, care, and discipline increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Gabriel Siams examines religion as a spatial and symbolic system through sound, absence, and embodiment. In Madonna’s Runway(2025), the artist’s queer body moves through the interior of Antwerp’s Sint-Pauluskerk in high heels. Gender remains indeterminate, and the figure is visually withdrawn. The sharp echo of each step becomes the sole perceptible presence, set against an environment shaped by ornately carved confessionals articulated through sculptural reliefs, where only angelic figures retain feet, while saints and followers of Christ are depicted without them. In this context, sound functions as a residual trace of presence, familiar and unsettling. It gestures toward a queer corporeality long embedded within Catholic spaces, yet rendered imperceptible by their visual and symbolic regimes. Gender, posture, and identity condense into resonance, as sound itself becomes the medium through which soft instruction operates: at once exposed and erased, existing as the sole permissible trace of presence.

Soft Instructions are repeatedly enacted, tacitly permitted, and even desired within intimacy. It shapes how desire and attachment operate under the signs of care and control, allowing power to appear absent while embedding itself more deeply. The works of the three artists reveal the persistence of this gentle yet enduring force: when soft instructions become more visible, can intimacy be reimagined beyond compliance, toward forms of closeness that neither demand obedience nor erase difference?

Artists

Yshao Lin

Yshao Lin (Born in Fuzhou, China) is currently an MFA candidate in Expanded Practice and Sculpture at Columbia University. He holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Working across photography, new media, and installation, his practice draws on personal memory, displacement, and lived experience. His works examine migration, belonging, and cultural negotiation under modernization. Lin has been selected for Antoine d’Agata’s residency in Arles, France, the New York Times Portfolio Review, and the Flash Forward Award (Canada). His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Tate Modern’s COME TOGETHER: Art and Politics in a Climate of Unrest, and is held in institutional collections such as the Jiazazhi Photo Book Library (China) and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection.

Soomin Kang

Soomin Kang is an artist currently pursuing an M.F.A. at Columbia University School of the Arts. She received a B.F.A. from the Korean National University of Arts in Seoul. Kang’s practice explores how physical structures shape bodily experience, asking how bodies are managed and imagined across public and private spaces. She is particularly interested in how familiar forms and gestures, such as holding, binding, and pressing, recall sensations before language. In her process, she alters and reassembles objects like furniture, plastic toys, medical devices, and animal restraint structures. By misaligning their functions, she exposes the traces and tensions of bodily presence held within their forms, where structure becomes both a proposition and a demand. Her works seek out the soft threshold between containment and care.

Gabriel Siams

Gabriel Siams' (1996) trajectory as a transmedia artist has been influenced by his childhood in a religious environment. Accompanying his mother to church every Sunday exposed him to the power of symbolism and the possibility of subverting it. Transforming this formative experience into a focal point of exploration, his research delves into relationships constructed from ancient symbologies that date back to before Christ and remain present in contemporary culture. Siams also explores the transformation of materials, moments of transition, and states of indefiniteness—the intermediate, the ambiguous, the malleable. Through installation, photography, moving image, performance, and sound, his practice moves between narrative and documentary without conforming fully to either.

Curator

Fanfan Yuxuan FAN