On Manhattan’s Grand Street, two floors up, large radius windows with dramatic arches span the width of Peter Blum Gallery’s brick facade. The curtains are drawn, obscuring the view to the inside exhibition space, where This is (not) a love song, the gallery’s sixth solo show by Luxembourg and Berlin based artist, Su-Mei Tse, is on display. A paper invitation at the entry quotes poet Nayyirah Waheed, “can we speak in flowers. / it will be easier for me to understand,” alongside a print of a house plant’s shadow, dangling vines and sparse leaves against a white wall (Love Song, 2025). To the right, metal letters installed high on the wall announce: GOD SLEEPS IN STONE/BREATHES IN PLANTS/DREAMS IN ANIMALS/AND AWAKENS IN MAN (God sleeps in stone, 2025). Beside this, a small clay sphere, dry and cracked, sits atop a pedestal. Named “Dorodango (earth)” after the Japanese art form of dorodango, which traditionally uses mud to create a shining orb, this dorodango earth seems broken. 2025 has been a year of grief.
In the next room, a fan blows air onto a fine white cotton curtain (Meltemi [North Wind], 2025), hung inside the arched window, next to the closed blind. The fabric gently billows into the gallery space, propelled by the quiet hum of the fan, the only noise apparent in the show. The meltemi wind, I learn, is a fierce force, a byproduct of clashing pressure systems over the Balkans and Eastern Mediterranean. It channels a steady, rushing wind down the Aegean, amplified by the contours of the Greek Islands. I stand in front of this Meltemi, here a faint breeze, and feel the air move over my body. Slowly, my shoulders relax. I take in the adjacent work – a sweeping, vivid blue photograph of the ocean with an endless sea of small waves moving outward toward a faroff horizon. The piece, titled “The End of the World” is both a space within our physical plane – the southernmost tip of Greece, in the Peloponnese – as well as mythological; it is believed that the Peloponnese hides the Cave of Hades, the gate to the underworld, where souls cross over into the afterlife.
Abutting it, a small piece of paper is framed, with text, typed out by a type writer. I can’t remember how long I’d been walking. The path was stony, arduous, and austere, when suddenly I was right there. I’d been searching for it for so long! And I turned away, leaving it behind, and gazed into the distance.
The show’s press text calls this “a deep breath into one’s own stillness,” which I pause to consider. Looking at this horizon line in “The End of the World,” I think about death. I wonder what moments flutter into the mind, what memories of a life lived come to the forefront, as the lights begin to dim, and your end approaches. What moments of my life will have mattered? I imagine that I’ll think about a breeze as the feeling of being alive.
Tse’s show, I begin to understand, is an ode to living. Positioned from the Gates of Hades, This is (not) a love song operates under the devout belief that at the end of this “stony, arduous, and austere journey,” the opportunity to begin anew, and choose life again, presents itself. Filled with various spherical sculptures or rounded objects, alongside ephemera from the natural world, there is a persistent reminder of the cyclical way of living: the horizon is endless, the end is the beginning. Hope springs eternal.
In the centre of this second room, a small pedestal holds a cluster of bright shells inside a glass vitrine. Survival (shells) (2024/2025), hand-collected by Tse at the beach, offers a way through this austere journey of life; shells act as a mobile fortress, safeguarding soft-bodied marine animals from predators, pressure, and other threats. I wonder what my own survival shells might be, what I can gather to nestle around my body, and survive this broken juncture in time.
Farther down hangs a photograph of nineteen white birds (Bird Song, 2025) perched along three powerlines, their silhouettes somewhat blurry against a cloudy dark sky, appearing at times as white dots or glowing bulbs on string lights. Closer up, the birds’ spacing on the lines creates a kind of musical score, one I can’t read, but can imagine.
A message, framed and printed on richly textured cotton paper, is placed at the threshold of the two far gallery rooms (Enough, 2021). It reads: In a bath you can wash and lie. / Float and dive in the tide. / Mere ladles on the fish. / Doesn’t make him more alive.
Next to it a sculpted bamboo ladle hangs from a solid brass pin. It looks like the ones used for a sauna Aufguss. The poetic note is initialled with “M.S. (July 2020).” It’s unclear who that is, and what exactly this text is suggesting, but I sense there’s something in there about expansion and perspective. The ambiguity is kind of nice.
Around the corner, at the farthest end of the gallery, an ominous, matte moon is hung, left of centre on a wall, keeping vigil over another earth. This earth is made of wood and soil, and shinier than the other (Dorodango [big], 2025). The moon looks different than what I am used to, and I realize it’s because I’m looking at it from the other side, quite literally, the Far Side of the Moon (2022). In many ways, this piece anchors the show, despite it being tucked away in a back room. The moon, a spherical oracle above, offers an elixir for the constant anxiety and suffering more recently known as life on this planet, suggesting to us that indeed, another world is possible; I think about the moon's directives of the tide, of the ebb and flow of the ocean in Tse’s front room piece, and how we are all entangled in this gravitational, seismic choreography.
Across from the moon, a white candle burns on a shelf next to Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nations LP (Daydreams, 2024). The candle mirrors the album cover, which features Gerhard Richter’s painting of a candle (Kerze, 1983). A rarity in New York, there is a flame in a gallery. Standing next to the candle’s flicker as I face the moon, I sense that there is a light in the darkness: an ode to light, a call to living. This ode feels like a prayer, to be acutely present in the silence of all that Su-Mei Tse has collected for us in this exhibition: the moon, the breeze, the ocean; God, a bird song, and all that we have left. Fascism, ecological collapse, and genocide – realities of our current world aside, or because of – it’s as if Tse is whispering, gentle as her Meltemi wind, let us choose light, and with that, life.
Overarchingly, Tse’s show is a kind of psalm. Lyrical, sensory, and mystical, the titles of her works paired with the objects she creates offer vivid paratextual images of nature, protection, mourning, and praise. The titles also serve as a guide on how to shift one’s gaze from the external to the internal. Mud, soil, shells: we already have everything we need. The answers are here; they're in you and they're in me. They're in these shells and they're in this water. They're in the moon and they're in the sky. Indeed, God sleeps in stone/breathes in plants/dreams in animals/and awakens in man.
Before I leave, I spot a plant on a shelf, alongside publications by Tse. It’s almost the same plant whose shadow is photographed in Love Song, with dangling vines and sparse leaves. I learn she bought it here in New York, nearby, at a Chinatown flower shop. It’s nice to know something is living here in this exhibition space.
I take the elevator back down to street level, re-emerging into the cacophony of the world outside, a nation full of angst and pain. I don’t want to fully engage yet, so I pause, and think about why art matters, and what Tse’s work is saying.. A Mary Oliver poem comes to me – something about who made the world. I quickly search for it on my phone’s browser, reading it over in the downstairs vestibule before turning away and leaving the exhibition behind. I think of Su-Mei’s belief in humanity, the role art plays in dire times, and walk outside, gazing to the distance with this poem in my head.
Who made the world?
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?