CH3–CH2–O–CH2–CH3: Group Exhibition
François Ghebaly is proud to present CH3–CH2–O–CH2–CH3, a group exhibition opening on November 21 at the gallery’s downtown Los Angeles location. The exhibition features artists Ragini Bhow, KV Duong, Jess Hang, Soren Hope, Candice Lin, Ragen Moss, Sarah Rosalena, Asami Shoji, Jakkai Siributr, Willa Wasserman, and Nana Wolke.
Diethyl ether, or simply ether as it’s commonly known, is a colorless, volatile, and highly combustible compound that is liquid at room temperature. Until the middle of the 20th century it was the anesthetic of choice for physicians, prized for its analgesic and tranquilizing effects. Its name comes from “aether,” an element in classical philosophy thought to fill the heavens beyond the terrestrial sphere of earth, wind, and fire. In common parlance, to be “lost in the ether” is to be forgotten or gone to oblivion. It is to the many concepts of ether that the artists in CH3–CH2–O–CH2–CH3 are drawn: the emergent, elemental, indeterminate, or catalytic.
Ragini Bhow fosters deep seeing through artworks that have lives, spirits, and strengths of their own. In vibrational paintings and floor sculptures that hold commanding, deep-rooted animism, Bhow’s work speaks to the microbial, psychoactive, cosmic, and supernatural. Using materials such as hand-made pigments and ritual ash, she explores different temporalities and materialities to illustrate the shiftiness of recollection through her ritualistic processes.
Bhow holds a BFA from the University of Minnesota and an MFA from the University of New Mexico. Recent solo exhibitions include Nature Morte, Mumbai; Stems, Brussels; François Ghebaly, New York; Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York, and Rubber Factory, New York. Recent group exhibitions include Murmurs, Los Angeles; François Ghebaly, Los Angeles; Jack Barrett Gallery, New York; Charles Moffett Gallery, New York; Kleine-Humboldt Galerie, Berlin; Galerie Mirchandani & Steinruecke, Mumbai, India; UNM Art Museum, Albuquerque; and Gallery SKE, Bangalore, India. Her documentary film with Art21 debuts in December, 2026.
KV Duong unites material exploration with political memory, drawing on his own transnational identity to trace histories of migration and cultural assimilation. Duong’s paintings begin with poured liquid latex, into which paint is brushed or applied with the artist’s body, even scratched or gouged. Duong’s use of latex refers to the material’s erotic qualities, while connecting it to the rubber plantations of colonial Vietnam. His sensuous, visceral paintings celebrate a tangible erotics while acknowledging their delimitation by external systems.
Duong holds an MA from the Royal College of Art in London. Recent solo exhibitions include Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London; Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, Palm Beach; and the Migration Museum, London. Recent group and biennial exhibitions include the Ford Foundation Gallery, New York; Hauser & Wirth, Somerset; Whitechapel Gallery, London; the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation, London; Palazzo Nani Bernardo, Venice; and the Jogia 18 Biennale, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Duong’s work is in the collection of The Nasher Museum, Durham, North Carolina; the Museu Inimá de Paula Museum, Belo Horizonte, Brazil; the Spazio Almag, Brescia, Italy; and the Vietnam Art Collection, Hanoi.
Jess Hang’s work reflects on the limits of language, marked time, and the ways inherited and found materials can hold collective memory, drawing on her parents’ histories in Vietnam, Taiwan, and the U.S. Hang’s experience of growing up without a shared fluent language with her family informs her use of material, image, and space to convey meaning. Her work explores memory, domesticity, and gendered embodiment through sculpture and interdisciplinary practice.
Hang received a BFA from the USC Roski School of Art and Design. Her work has been exhibited at the Fisher Museum of Art, Los Angeles; WK Gallery, Tokyo; In Lieu, Los Angeles; Night Club, Minneapolis; and Hermit Gallery, Taipei. From 2019 to 2021, she co-directed Mother Culture, an artist-run gallery in Los Angeles, where she organized exhibitions and programming. Her work is included in the 2021 Contemporary Art Archive, an experimental archiving project sponsored by the Arch Mission Foundation and deposited on the moon.
Soren Hope's figurative paintings flirt with recognition and thrive on the contradictions inherent to the discipline of painting. Recursive marks and forms agitate the fixity of the image and strange the familiar. Through excessive accretions and overlaid iterations, the paintings mimic themselves, while figures employ costumes and pranks that upend their own legibility. Parts stand in for wholes, and holes abound. Hope's work makes ambiguity and ambivalence visible with deft shifts in association, identification, and perception.
Hope holds a BA from Carleton College and an MFA from Yale University. Recent solo and group exhibitions include Carleton College, Northfield, Minnesota; New York Life Gallery, New York; Harpers, New York; Eric Firestone Gallery, Chicago; and Perrotin, New York. Hope was a 2025 recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant.
Candice Lin is an interdisciplinary artist who works with installation, drawing, video, and living materials and processes, such as mold, mushrooms, bacteria, fermentation, and stains. Her work deals with the politics of representation and issues of race, gender, and sexuality through histories of colonialism and diaspora.
Lin has had recent solo exhibitions at Whitechapel Gallery, London; Jameel Arts Center, Dubai; Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh, Scotland; Canal Projects, New York; Spike Island, Bristol, UK; the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Cambridge; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Guangdong Times Museum, Guangzhou, China; and Govett Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, New Zealand. Lin’s work was included in the 59th Venice Biennale, The Milk of Dreams, Prospect.5 Triennial Yesterday We Said Tomorrow, and both the 13th and 14th Gwangju Biennales. She is the recipient of the 2024 Ruth Award, the 2023 Arnoldo Pomodoro Sculpture Prize, a 2022 Gold Art Prize, and a 2019 Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, among numerous other recognitions. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Walker Art Center.
Candice Lin lives and works in Los Angeles. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the University of California Los Angeles.
Ragen Moss has forged a singular visual language through an innovative, self-developed technique of transparent, light-suffused works that carry sculpture and painting beyond surface and exteriority toward a layered, dynamic interiority. Each work is animated as much by Moss's attention to luminosity, color, contour, mark and form as by concept, research, and references drawn from wide-ranging multi-disciplianry sources including philosophy, poetry, law, and art history. Operating as spatial windows, the works invigorate the threshold where openness and abstraction converge with sustained inquiry.
Moss holds an MFA from UCLA, a JD from UCLA School of Law, and a BA in Art History from Columbia University. Recent solo and group exhibitions include the Cantor Museum of Art; Blanton Museum of Art, Austin; Museum Kurhaus Kleve, Kleve, Germany; Lumber Room, Portland; Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee; Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne; Capitain Petzel, Berlin; Bridget Donahue, New York; JOAN, Los Angeles; Center for the Arts, Jackson Hole, Wyoming; and The Brick, Los Angeles. Moss was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Her work is held in the public collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Sarah Rosalena (Wixárika) is a Los Angeles-based artist and scholar working at the intersection of craft and technology. Her groundbreaking work in textiles, basketry, and ceramics joins handcraft and technological innovation into dialogue through explorations of material tension, transformation, and the interplay between organic and technological systems, rooted in cosmology and ecology. Rosalena’s work moves fluidly between traditional handicraft practices and digital technology, exploring the geopolitical impacts of climate change, technoscience, artificial intelligence, and extractive industries, envisioning futures outside these systems.
Rosalena is Associate Professor of Computational Craft and Haptic Media in the Department of Art at UC Santa Barbara. Recent solo exhibitions include the Columbus Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara. Rosalena’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at the San Jose Museum of Art; the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum; and El Museo del Barrio, among other institutions. Her awards include the United States Artists Award, 2025; the Artadia Award, 2023; the Creative Capital Award, 2022; and the LACMA Art + Tech Lab Grant, 2019. Her work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, and the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, among others.
Asami Shoji (b. 1988, Fukishima, Japan) creates paintings that explore the murky relationship between Eros and Thanatos—love and destruction. Her figures, often shown with exaggerated limbs, expressive faces, and seemingly transparent bodies, emerge from a haze of colors and symbols that point toward internal vistas of conflicted emotion and unconscious drive.
Shoji received her MFA from Tama Art University in Tokyo. In addition to solo exhibitions at LC Queisser in Tblisi, Linseed Projects in Shanghai, and Semiose in Paris, Shoji’s work has been featured in numerous institutional exhibitions, including at the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Taro Okamoto Museum of Art, Kanagawa; Ashikaga Museum of Art, Tochigi; Kurume City Art Museum, Fukuoka; and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo. She was awarded the FACE Grand Prize in 2019 and an Emerging Artist Award at the Gotoh Memorial Cultural Awards in 2020.
Jakkai Siributr is one of Southeast Asia's leading contemporary artists, working primarily in the textile medium. He is known for his intricately handmade tapestries, quilts and installations, which convey powerful responses to contemporary and historical societal issues in Thailand, and globally.
Siributr holds a BS in Textile/Fine Arts from Indiana University, and an MS in Printed Textile Design from Philadelphia University. Recent solo exhibitions include the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester; Flowers Gallery, London; 100 Tonson Foundation, Bangkok; and the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre. Group exhibitions include the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; the Asian Civilizations Museum, Singapore; and the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; as well as the 15th Gwangju Biennale, 2024, in the Thailand Pavilion. His work is in public collections including the British Museum, London; the Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Queensland Art Gallery and Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane; FENIX Museum, Rotterdam; National Taiwan Museum of Fine Art; Asian Art Museum of San Francisco; the Sun Pride Foundation, Taiwan; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Collection; the Vehbi Koc Foundation, Istanbul; the Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore; and the Gerrig-Peterson Collection, Yale University, New Haven.
Willa Wasserman deftly interrelates histories of classical painting and material culture with contemporary portrayals of queerness. From convex still lifes and gauzy self-portraits to impressive mise-en-scenes on polished brass and fine linen, Wasserman’s practice in painting and figuration is aligned with the world of dreams. Her images are loose and spectral — impressions plucked from the hazy essences of her sitters and various subjects, and at the same time cast in the pensive, indeterminate ambiance with which Wasserman embraces vital questions of intimacy, gender, and above all, becoming.
Willa Wasserman (b. 1990, Evansville, Indiana) lives and works in New York. She gained her BFA at Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College in 2013, and received her MFA at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2019. Recent solo exhibitions include Fortes d’Aloia & Gabriel, São Paulo; Benny’s Video, New York (with Becca Albee); Travesía Cuatro, Madrid and Guadalajara; François Ghebaly, New York and Los Angeles; High Art, Paris; Downs & Ross, New York; Good Weather, Chicago; and in lieu, Los Angeles. Selected group presentations include Drei, Cologne; Kiang Malingue, New York; James Cohan, New York; Modern Art, London; Michael Werner Gallery, London; Sargent’s Daughters, New York; and Park View / Paul Soto, Los Angeles.
Nana Wolke examines conditions under which desire, power, and control are encountered — and staged. Her work originates from prompted actions and unscripted events captured in raw video footage, subsequently split into painting, sound, and installation. Wolke seeks out environments defined by their social, architectural, and psychological charge. Moving between spaces of privilege and marginality, Wolke’s works hold the impermanence of exposure and the thrill of concealment.
Nana Wolke (b. 1994 in Ljubljana, Slovenia) is based in New York and holds an MFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. Solo exhibitions include NiCOLETTi, London; Management, New York; Castor, London; VIN VIN, Vienna; and Fondazione Coppola, Vicenza. Group exhibitions include Michel Rein, Paris; Olney Gleason, New York; Museum of Modern Art, Ljubljana; Marlborough, London; South London Gallery, London; and G2 Kunsthalle, Leipzig, among others. Wolke was selected for the 2021 cohort of Bloomberg New Contemporaries.