Right and Wrong Undone

Bond Gallery, November 5, 2026 - January 22, 2027

Goucher Art Galleries is pleased to present Right and Wrong Undone, a solo exhibition by Xin Ni exploring what happens when objects, gestures, and cultural meanings move between contexts—and the familiar systems used to interpret them begin to break down.

At the center of the exhibition is a new installation composed of brightly colored, translucent plastic forms suspended throughout the Bond Gallery. Drawn from objects associated with Chinese funerary traditions, the materials arrive folded and compact, then expand into colorful lantern-like forms when opened. Suspended from the ceiling, they transform the gallery into a shifting environment of color, transparency, and light. What may carry recognizable cultural associations in one setting becomes strange, decorative, playful, or illegible in another.

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This instability is central to Ni’s practice. Right and Wrong Undone considers the moment a cultural object crosses into a context that was never built to read it—where meaning does not simply translate, but fractures, slips into absurdity, and, unexpectedly, opens into something new. Rather than resolving these contradictions, Ni remains with the discomfort they produce, asking what becomes possible when an object, body, or gesture can no longer be understood according to a single cultural framework.

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The exhibition opens November 5 with a live performance by Ni that activates the installation and the architecture of the Bond Gallery. Working entirely through improvisation, Ni refuses a fixed script, allowing meaning to shift in real time as gesture, material, architecture, and audience collide. During the performance, the artist brings her body into direct relationship with the gallery’s windows, pressing against the glass and occupying the uneasy threshold between interior and exterior, visibility and exposure.

The performance stages translation as something physical rather than seamless. Cultural objects encounter unfamiliar surroundings; the body encounters architecture; viewers encounter gestures without being given a stable set of instructions for how to interpret them. Misreading, discomfort, humor, and absurdity become generative rather than failures to be corrected.

Through installation and performance, Right and Wrong Undone resists the expectation that cultural meaning can—or should—remain intact as it moves between places, languages, and people. Instead, Ni considers mistranslation as a space of possibility: a place where established meanings can become unstable enough for other relationships and interpretations to emerge.

Exhibitions Details: 

• Opening Reception and Performance: November 5, 4–8 PM - Bond Gallery

Artists: Xin Ni