Thresholds of Becoming
Artists: Xianghan Wang and Liying Peng
Curated by Gene Sasse
Date/Time: June 27–29, 2025, 1:00 PM – 4:00 PM daily
Location: Sasse Museum of Art, 300 South Street, Pomona, CA
Admission: Free
For more information Sasse Art Museum Exhibitions
The Sasse Museum of Art, 300 South Thomas Street, will unveil “Thresholds of Becoming,” a focused duo exhibition in which artists Xianghan Wang and Liying Peng probe the fragile territory between cultural memory and digital reinvention under the curatorial guidance of museum founder Gene Sasse.
Curated by Gene Sasse, a seasoned curator, photographer, and arts advocate with over three decades of experience in contemporary arts and media, this two-person exhibition brings together the visionary works of Xianghan Wang and Liying Peng. Sasse is known for his curatorial sensitivity in bridging emerging technologies with fine art sensibilities, and his leadership has shaped numerous exhibitions that highlight cross-disciplinary innovation.
Founded in 2015 as the Inland Empire Museum of Art and re-established in Pomona’s historic arts district, the Sasse Museum is devoted to “celebrating the inspiring and transformative power of arts and culture and expanding our understanding of ourselves and the world.” The institution fills a long-identified cultural gap in the eastern stretch of the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area, offering year-round exhibitions, artist talks, and community programming—all at no cost to visitors—so that art remains accessible to the broad public. Its juried and solo shows have steadily expanded the museum’s reach; last summer’s international exhibition “Un-Defined Sensibility” drew artists from around the globe and foregrounded new media practices that blur painting, sculpture, video, AI, and installation, underscoring the museum’s reputation as a venue where cross-disciplinary experimentation thrives. Against this backdrop, “Thresholds of Becoming” continues the institution’s mandate to showcase work that is both conceptually rigorous and technologically adventurous.
The exhibition itself opens with an arresting thesis: in an era where machines fabricate myth and memory refracts through code, what remains of heritage and what morphs into new forms? Xianghan Wang answers by fusing traditional Eastern aesthetics with immersive XR. As an XR and motion designer and now based in Los Angeles, Wang recently led the creation of every instructional animation for Apple’s Vision Pro platform, pioneering motion standards for spatial computing and establishing new pedagogical models for three-dimensional interfaces. Her independent artistic practice spans poetic digital paintings, cinematic motion design, and immersive VR installations. One of her internationally acclaimed projects, The Rhythm of Tai Chi, reimagines the internal energy of martial practice through interactive spatial design, earning recognition from Our Culture magazine and awards such as the Red Dot Award. The work has been exhibited in London, Venice, and New York. In this current exhibition, Wang brings together a series of works that extend her long-standing interest in mythology, movement, and digital ritual. Luminous palettes and recurring natural symbols—mist, water, and moonlight—thread through her visual language, allowing cultural stories to come alive through code. Whether charting the invisible chi of Tai Chi or layering motion graphics onto archival ink motifs, she invites visitors to inhabit digital sanctuaries that honour ancestral rhythm without surrendering technological wonder.
Liying Peng approaches the same liminal zone from the standpoint of user-experience research and interactive storytelling. A graduate of Northwestern University’s Engineering Design Innovation program and a UX designer at Whirlpool Corporation, Peng directed the design of the globally launched Espresso Collection, which earned the 2025 iF Design Award for User Experience and the 2024 Red Dot Design Award. She also oversees UX design across the Countertop Appliances portfolio, ensuring consistency and excellence in product experiences. Her concept app PeaceMeal, a social platform that transforms intercultural recipes into shared stories, received Muse Gold and was showcased at Beijing’s 80,000-seat Bird’s Nest Stadium, highlighting her ability to translate design thinking into human-centered artistic engagement. Peng’s body of work spans commercial innovation and cultural inquiry, and she is recognized for integrating emotional nuance, systemic critique, and visual clarity into her design approach. In “Thresholds of Becoming,” Peng presents layered digital tableaux that fracture and resuture portraiture, text, and abstract gesture, tracing how identity splinters across virtual surfaces. Ethereal silhouettes dissolve into glitch, recalling half-remembered dreams. Soft gradients collapse into prismatic distortion, echoing the sensation of memory slipping through algorithmic filters. Her pieces are at once intimate and expansive — moments of self-reflection staged inside systemic architectures — and they mirror Wang’s meditations on heritage by foregrounding personal data as a new kind of cultural relic.
Together, Wang and Peng articulate two parallel yet resonant visions of cultural becoming. While their works remain independent, their shared exploration of heritage, identity, and digital transformation weaves a compelling narrative—one that asks: What do we retain, reimagine, or relinquish as we step into an algorithmic age?
Thresholds of Becoming invites audiences to dwell in the in-between—to witness identity not as a fixed entity, but as a process of continual negotiation. These are works that shimmer at the edges of time, memory, and machine — quietly powerful, culturally resonant, and poetically unresolved.
– Written by Harper Brown