Leidy Churchman’s Wood Snake Reveals the Unseen

In Leidy Churchman’s world, reality seems to flip with a quiet gesture, revealing what normally remains unseen. The artist’s first exhibition in China invites viewers into a perceptual ecosystem where painting and sculpture become tools for exploring the hidden networks connecting beings, desires, and natural systems. It is a journey beyond the surface, into that liminal territory where intuition and perception intertwine. The title draws on the “wood snake” of Chinese astrology - a symbol of transformation and growth, but also an embodiment of the archetypal trickster, capable of disrupting certainty and dissolving boundaries. Across the 17 paintings on view, Churchman’s gaze shifts between explosive cosmologies - as in Feeding The Eternal Infinite, where the universe appears to expand and recede at once - and enigmatic creatures like the one-eyed shells of Rain of Wisdom, which watch us or perhaps offer a portal into a kaleidoscopic, ever-shifting reality. The exhibition reflects an artistic journey deeply informed by esoteric study, from Zangchuan Buddhism to the insights of author and thinker Martín Prechtal, whose vision of a world where “everything is plant” resonates through the work as an alternative cosmology. Through materials, symbols, and shifting forms, Churchman stages a universe where species, energies, and thoughts coexist without hierarchy. Wood Snake does not offer answers, but openings - fissures through which to perceive the complexity of the real: an invitation to witness the co-emergence of things, where the visible and invisible continuously intertwine.