There are places in New York that feel less like addresses and more like thresholds. LATITUDE’s new home on Lispenard Street is one of them, not simply another gallery in Tribeca, but a passage into the in-between, that liminal, fertile territory where identities collide, values shift, and the world’s usual edges blur and open.
The inaugural exhibition for 5 Lispenard, Birth of the Between: The Infinite Interchange, curated by Neil Jiang, leans into this threshold. Opening September 12, 2025, the show is less a declaration than a blooming, an embodied reminder that creation arrives not in stasis, but through intersection, tension, and the fragile harmonies that bind apparent polarities.
The move to Tribeca marks not a departure but a continuation, a way of carrying forward LATITUDE’s roots in Chinatown while re-situating itself within another historic New York neighborhood. As Shihui Zhou, Founder and Owner of LATITUDE Gallery, explains: “This move has been a meaningful chapter, both for the gallery and for me personally. LATITUDE has always been about crossing boundaries, between cultures, practices, identities, and this transition to Tribeca is part of that unfolding story. We’re not leaving anything behind; we’re growing into what’s next.”
The title echoes a line from the Dao De Jing.
“One gives birth to Two, Two gives birth to Three, and Three gives birth to all things.”
In this schema, One is origin, undifferentiated unity. From it emerges Two, the polarity of yin and yang, primal counterpoints. But the story does not end in division. From Two comes Three, the mediating breath, the dynamic relation that allows opposites to move together. From that movement flow the “ten thousand things”, infinite forms, infinite life.
It is this charged in-between, not unity, not mere duality, but the third movement of becoming, that the exhibition materializes. In many ways, the move to Tribeca embodies this same principle: neither the past nor the future, neither departure nor arrival, but a space of transformation where LATITUDE continues to grow into itself.
The roster reads like a constellation: Chando Ao, Ruth Asawa, Hernan Bas, Ji Won Cha, Xinyi Cheng, Yuan Fang, Owen Fu, Xintong Gao, Shuling Guo, Wenhui Hao, Yirui Jia, Alice Ningci Jiang, Chantal Joffe, Kan Hung-Ju, Ho Jae Kim, Xian Kim, Heidi Li, Nianxin Li, Yanjun Li, Tiantian Lou, Miwa Neishi, Yanging Pei, Elizabeth Peyton, Anna Jung Seo, Shi Chengdong, Tan Mu, Yongqi Tang, Daniel Um, Wang Chao, Wang Haiyang, Minghui Wei, Lingrou Xie, Zhang Huan, Zhang Shangfeng, Tianshu Zhang, Zhang Xiaogang, Yesiyu Zhao, and Jesse Zuo, to name a few.
Together they span vivid surreal landscapes, minimalist interventions, and poetic conceptual works, pulling the viewer across styles and geographies.
“These artists are a combination of longtime collaborators and newly joined voices,” Zhou shares. “LATITUDE has always been dedicated to cultivating a community for emergent creatives and fostering deep cross-cultural dialogues. This roster is not just a lineup, it’s a cartography of the new spaces we’re trying to map.”
Some pieces trace the dualities of Asian artists moving through Western contexts, gestures of translation, adaptation, and re-invention. Others open complementary pathways from Western vantage points, enlarging the dialogue across histories and practices. Throughout, the works unsettle inherited norms, dismantling familiar moral and aesthetic frameworks, not for destruction alone, but to clear ground for something otherwise impossible.
When the works probe liminal zones of emptiness and becoming, they enact a kind of constructive demolition, like fields briefly burned bare so that new shoots may break through ash. To confront the contingency of values is to see them not as eternal laws, but as human constructions. In that recognition lies a strange liberation, and the frame itself becomes subject to reinvention.
Moving through the space, two floors composed with attention to the exhibition’s rhythms, one notices how confluence here is not dilution but renewal. A modest table downstairs holds glass sculptures that scatter light, a surreal canvas around the corner refuses resolution, a conceptual installation elsewhere holds its silence until you step inside. East and West, tradition and experiment, self and collective, these vectors do not erase one another, but refract into small, unexpected illuminations.
As LATITUDE re-roots itself in Tribeca after five years in Chinatown, the gallery carries forward its vision of art as convergence. “Our purpose has never been confined to a single neighborhood or identity,” Zhou says. “We’re constantly navigating the between, not just in where we are, but in how we curate, collaborate, and create.”
This fall marks not only a new chapter for the gallery but also a global expansion. LATITUDE will participate in the Shanghai 021 Art Fair in November and the Miami Untitled Art Fair in December 2025, with more ambitious programming planned for 2026. “We’re excited to continue growing our international footprint,” Zhou adds. “There’s a lot more to come.”
In a city that survives on friction and re-making, Birth of the Between feels less like a beginning than a continuation, an interchange already humming through the streets outside.
