Once Again, Many Time More
Reception for the Artists on Friday, April 24th from 6 to 9 pm: Ivo Nagel, Kyla Liang, Lexi Hide and Hang Yu
“Once Again, Many Times More” brings together Lexi Hide, Ivo Nagel, Kyla Liang, Hang Yu in a playful conversation about the way in which a gesture, object, or routine, given sustained attention and pressed on long enough, can begin to loosen from its original meaning and drift toward the absurd. What was once unremarkable might become, through sheer insistence, a little ridiculous.
In her “End of Slide” series, Kyla Liang revisits the memory of childhood play, where the physical immediacy of playground slides has largely disappeared, replaced by the frictionless continuity of the scrolling interface. Echoing this sense of repetition and displacement, Lexi Hide repeatedly positioned skunks within human-centered urban environments, staging subtle disruptions in seemingly familiar places that, through repetition, appear somewhat estranged and constructed. In Hang Yu’s objects, the artist photographed fantastical characters at Times Square and paired them with Green Card mock-ups, which combined, reveal the disjunction between projected identity and immigrant experience. Intervening directly in the image, Ivo Nagel sourced a discarded photograph from his university and subjected it to cycles of handling and reprinting. Through both physical and digital interventions of the original photograph, he poses questions about what constitutes the taxonomy of a ‘photograph’ and an ‘image’.
Across these works, gestures and narratives recur and multiply through their displacement, reflecting an image culture defined by duplicity and circulation. In doing so, the exhibition considers how distinctions between direct experience and its mediated counterparts become increasingly indistinguishable.
– Ivo Nagel
CuratorialStatement
“Once Again, Many Times More” brings together Lexi Hide, Ivo Nagel, Kyla Liang, Hang Yu in a playful conversation about the way in which a gesture, object, or routine, given sustained attention and pressed on long enough, can begin to loosen from its original meaning and drift toward the absurd. What was once unremarkable might become, through sheer insistence, a little ridiculous.
In her “End of Slide” series, Kyla Liang revisits the memory of childhood play, where the physical immediacy of playground slides has largely disappeared, replaced by the frictionless continuity of the scrolling interface. Echoing this sense of repetition and displacement, Lexi Hide repeatedly positioned skunks within human-centered urban environments, staging subtle disruptions in seemingly familiar places that, through repetition, appear somewhat estranged and constructed. In Hang Yu’s objects, the artist photographed fantastical characters at Times Square and paired them with Green Card mock-ups, which combined, reveal the disjunction between projected identity and immigrant experience. Intervening directly in the image, Ivo Nagel sourced a discarded photograph from his university and subjected it to cycles of handling and reprinting.
Through both physical and digital interventions of the original photograph, he poses questions about what constitutes the taxonomy of a ‘photograph’ and an ‘image’.
Across these works, gestures and narratives recur and multiply through their displacement, reflecting an image culture defined by duplicity and circulation. In doing so, the exhibition considers how distinctions between direct experience and its mediated counterparts become increasingly indistinguishable.
– Ivo Nagel
Ivo Nagel
(b. 2001, Germany)
Artist Bio
Ivo Nagel is a New York-based artist working with photography, born in Germany. His practice spans abstract and pictorial forms – made both with and without a camera. Occupying the intersection between readymade and expressionist gesture, his work deconstructs the photographic image, questioning its utility, evolvement, and role in shifting reality. Each work allows a serendipitous spontaneity to inform the visual surface and poetics imbued in the images. His interests are rooted in a postmodernism post-photographic discourse.
Nagel graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Media Arts at Emerson College in Boston (2019 — 2023) and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at Parsons School of Design | The New School in New York City (June, 2024 — June, 2026). Nagel is a recipient of the American Photography 40 award (2024) and the Parsons School of Design 50% Merit Scholarship (2023). Selected group exhibitions include ‘Privacy Index’, LUmkA Gallery (2026), ‘Contact’, The 25th Pingyao International Photography Festival (2025); ‘Andes, America’, The Corner Gallery, New York (2024). Selected press includes IMPULSE Magazine (2026), Museé Magazine (2025), Die Zeit (2023). Nagel currently lives and works in New York City.
Ivo Nagel ‘Lost, Found’
C-type photographic print Framed
Hang Yu
(b. 2000, China)
Artist Bio
Hang Yu is a New York–based artist working across photography, object, and video. Born and raised in Shanxi before relocating to New York, Yu’s practice is shaped by constant migration and cultural displacement, which cast a sensitivity to shifting social dynamics and a sustained interest in marginalized communities.
Rooted in documentary practice, his work has evolved into a conceptual exploration of identity, migration, consumerism, and the ideological structures embedded in everyday life. Through ironic gestures, staged interventions, and visually seductive images, Yu examines how desire, belief, labor, and identity are produced and performed under global capitalism, often oscillating between sincerity and satire.
Yu received his BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2022) and is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography at Parsons School of Design. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at Photoville Festival and Pingyao International Photography Festival, and is held in public and private collections such as Printed Matter, New York.
Hang Yu
‘Green Card for Elsa’ 2023
Direct-to-card print on PVC
39.37 × 24.84 × 0.31 inches
Hang Yu
‘Green Card for Sonic’ 2023
Direct-to-card print on PVC
39.37 × 24.84 × 0.31 inches
Hang Yu
‘Green Card for Spiderman’ 2023
Direct-to-card print on PVC
39.37 × 24.84 × 0.31 inches
Hang Yu
‘Green Card for Grinch’ 2023
Direct-to-card print on PVC
39.37 × 24.84 × 0.31 inches
Hang Yu
‘Green Card for Stitch’ 2023
Direct-to-card print on PVC
39.37 × 24.84 × 0.31 inches
Lexi Hide
(b. 1999, Capetown)
Artist Bio
Lexi Hide is a photographic artist born in Cape Town, South Africa. She completed her undergraduate degree in Motion Design before receiving an honours degree in Contemporary Art from Cape Town Creative Academy in 2023. She is currently completing her MFA in photography at Parsons School of Design in New York, where she is based.
Hide is ultimately interested in contradictions, dualisms and self-aware hypocrisy. She states that nothing that is only one thing is interesting to her. She uses staged narrative photography to explore predominantly the themes girlhood and memory with a playfully humorous and tragic approach. Hide feels she mainly looks to cinema and music for influence; following threads of interest that all end up leading back to one another, and hopes this permeates the feeling of her work.
Hide has been featured in numerous group shows both within South Africa and internationally. Notable exhibitions include: Try a Little Tenderness: Oath Magazine Cape Town in 2021, Imagenation Paris at Galerie Joseph Le Palais in 2022, Winter show at Everard Read Cape Town in 2024, Pingyao International Photography Festival 2024, the American Center of Photography, North Carolina in 2024 as well as Photoville 2025 in New York City. Hide presented a solo cubicle show titled Sugar for the Pill at Everard Read Cape Town in August 2024.
Kyla Liang
(b. 2001, China)
Artist Bio
Kyla Kaiqi Liang is a Chinese artist based in New York. Her practice focuses on urban environments, their underlying social structures, and everyday gestures. Working across video, images, objects, and street-based interventions, she introduces subtle mismatches that make familiar urban forms newly noticeable. She reworks index, scale, and function, to shift how objects and spaces relate. Her work moves between the miniature and the monumental, placing the sublime beside the everyday. Her practice balances a playful, improvisational touch with a precise, almost architectural sense of structure.
With a background in social science and filmmaking, she is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography at Parsons School of Design. Her solo exhibition was presented at Houshan Art Space in Zhuhai, China. Her work has also been shown at the American Center for Photographers, the Photoville Festival in Brooklyn, A4 Art Museum in Chengdu, Another Art Museum in Guangzhou, and the Pingyao International Photography Festival in China, as well as film festivals in Macau. Her video work received the Jury’s Special Mention Prize at Macao Films and Videos Panorama and the Macao Youth Film Festival, as well as a Top 5 Documentaries Award at the First Macau Documentary Competition. She is also the founder of Detour Press, an independent publishing project that explores detour as a way to reclaim and renegotiate public space. Her publications and artworks have been shown at Printed Matter’s Art Book Fairs and the Available Works Book Fair, among others.
Kyla Liang
