Location: No. 758, Changle Road, Shanghai

Exhibition Dates: 9 November 2025 – 31 March 2026

Open Hours: Tuesday to Saturday, 12:00 – 18:00

Coro de Soles Menores (Chorus of the Minor Suns) presents Mexico City–based artist Bárbara Sánchez-Kane’s field-research exhibition in China, following a two-month residency as part of the inaugural artist-in-residence programme at CHERUBY. The survey marks the launch of CHERUBY’s physical space as a site for experimentation, research, and dialogue. Sánchez-Kane deflects the readymade, reshapes what it means to create from the body, while reclaiming clothing as an emotional and political language. Trained in engineering and fashion, his practice moves fluidly across mediums: fashion, painting, sculpture, performance, and spatial intervention become porous terrains through which he ridicules the aesthetics of authority and questions how identities are embodied and undone.

Developed during the artist’s two months in Shanghai, the commissioned exhibition emerges from his first residency—an alchemical process of encountering new materials and environments. Here, the body’s relation to circulation and the dominance of power are layered through the study of volcanic phenomena. The shapeshifting mountain is entangled with temporal scales, cultural knowledge, and the emergence of scientific disciplines—though science is not the only way to read an eruption. Volcanic breath also belongs to myth, to the wisdom of ancestors, to the intimate tremors of spiritual knowing.
Coro de Soles Menores presents an entirely new body of work that tilts away from disciplinary dominance—whether fashion or art—toward something more tender and insurgent. Sánchez-Kane asks, “How do we tilt within existing systems to envision a better place, rather than remain in collapse?”

The exhibition articulates the desire to find new ways to “descend into hell”¹ and make sense of a “better place”, through our inner volcanoes: the minor suns. Against the paralysis of dystopia, this vision aligns with literary historian Darko Suvin’s discussion of eutopia: not pure fantasy, but a hope identified within our lived realities, drawn from the analysis of historical events and conditions. Taking inspiration from the collaborative making of Chinese scrolls, Sánchez-Kane conceives the exhibition as a collective mode of enunciation — a choral exercise in learning how to breathe together.

Coro de Soles Menores embraces the gesture of tilting to contest the shared space of tenderness and violence. Nymph of the Luo River (2025) crafts new myths through a canoed trench coat made of transparent cowhide stretched over bamboo ladders. Its title draws from the Song dynasty handscroll that visualises Cao Zhi’s poem written in 222 CE describing his imaginary romantic encounter with the goddess of the Luo River in central China. The handscroll marked one of the earliest moments in Chinese art history where poetry, calligraphy, and painting converged into a single gesture of elegance.

In China, Sánchez-Kane observed the invisible monetary transactions through mobile payments. In response, she imprinted currency onto Intercambio Vernacular (Vernacular Exchange, 2025): a garment and also an artist edition fashioned from metallic memory fabric, a material echoing the minerals found in magma. The shirt bears the image of the 500 Mexican Peso note, where the faces of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera gaze away from each other. The tilted structure unsettles the established symbols to generate new interpretations, new circulations of meaning.

In Caballero de Noche (The Dark Knight, 2025), a bronze body rises from a molten sun—an eruption held in suspension within the foundry. A hanging transparent tailored leather jacket invokes the body as a measure and critiques the socio-economic and colonial structures that underpin standardisation and measurability. What one wears becomes a negotiation of identity, and tailoring itself signifies shifting and different national ideals—a geological failure as a result of climactic imperialist scramble.

The bodies collide and re-emerge across One Step One View I & II (2025), assemblages of recycled materials—transport covers, boxing punching bag, sun-blocking fabric—stitched into painterly compositions that hold collective memory embedded in the everyday. In the galleries, clothing is not held by the body but suspended in gestures of motion and pause, its ghostly presence animated by breath. Una rama de sauce por detrás de mi oreja, No se quiebra con el viento, Se dobla y en ese acto, Me enseña a esperar (A willow branch behind my ear, does not break with the wind. It bends, and in that gesture, it teaches me to wait, 2025) expands and contracts, awaiting its next inhalation. As volcanologist Clive Oppenheimer reminds us, “Volcanoes, they’ve got a bit more self than we have. We are ultimately made of the breath of volcanoes—cycled countless times through the earth.”

¹ “Descend into hell” comes from the Apostles’ Creed, referring to Christ’s descent to the underworld after death, symbolising passage through darkness to rebirth.

About Bárbara Sánchez-Kane

Bárbara Sánchez-Kane (b.1987, Mérida, Mexico) lives and works in Mexico City. Under the figure of the macho sentimental, Bárbara Sánchez-Kane resists the traditional notions of mexicanidad and its relationship with the feminine and masculine. Whether through fashion, performance, painting or installation, all of his works present the anxieties and fears of daily life to question pleasure and domination within a hegemonic masculine society. His selected solo exhibitions and performances include: ¿Cuántos ángeles caben en la punta de un alfiler?, Collegium, Arévalo, Spain, (2025); Aguas Frescas, Mudam, Luxembourg City, Luxembourg, (2025); New Lexicons of Embodiment, kurimanzutto, New York, USA,
(2023); Sánchezkaneismo, kurimanzutto, Mexico City, Mexico, (2022), among others. His works have been exhibited in Foreigners Everywhere, 60th Venice Biennale (2024); Do we dream under the same sky, Okayama Art Summit, Okayama (2022); OTRXS MUNDXS, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, Mexico, (2020); Prince·sse·s des villes, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France, (2019), among others.