Iliana Sun
Everything in between: On Life, Death, and the Lives We Meet Along the Way
Kira, Iliana Sun.
Opening: Sunday, December 14, 2025 5:00 PM
Sun’s work focuses on various forms of beings with presence, sentience, and trajectories of their own. Rather than depicting these animals as symbols or metaphors, she approaches them as lives moving alongside ours, each following an uninterrupted path from birth to death. In the theory of relativity, these paths are “world lines”—threads of existence that curve through spacetime, converging briefly before diverging again. Everything In Between studies these rare convergences: the moments when an animal turns its gaze toward the artist, when two lines briefly touch, and when recognition occurs without words.
Through photography, Sun captures these fleeting intersections as tangible markers—points on a shared graph of time where two lives momentarily inhabit the same frame. The images do not attempt to define the animals, nor to impose narrative upon them. Instead, they acknowledge the autonomy of each being and the immense worlds that stretch beyond the encountered moment. The installation expands this inquiry into physical space. Constructed as an immersive environment of suspended threads, intersecting paths, and shifting light, it embodies the concept of the world line as both scientific structure and poetic metaphor. As viewers move through the installation, their own trajectories become part of the work, folding individual experience into the larger geometry of coexistence. The space does not illustrate spacetime; it invites viewers to inhabit it.
At the heart of the exhibition lies a simple but enduring question: When do our world lines intersect with those of other creatures, and what shifts within us when they do? These encounters may be brief—a shared breath, a moment of stillness—or quietly transformative, stirring something ancient and instinctive. Sun lingers in these in-between states, where the boundary between human and animal flickers and two lives momentarily mirror each other. Across cultures, animals have long served as carriers of myth and metaphor. Yet Everything In Between resists mythologizing. It turns instead toward the fragile reality of coexistence, where beings move through the same universe of beginnings and endings but follow vastly different rhythms. While birth and death fix the endpoints of every world line, Sun is drawn to the mutable expanse between them—the place where agency, intuition, and connection reside. Ultimately, the exhibition is an invitation rather than a conclusion. In life, we cannot choose birth. We cannot escape death. We cannot outrun what is written in the deep architecture of fate. But within these fixed points lies a boundless territory—everything in between—the mutable space where connection happens, where we witness and are witnessed, where our lines meet another’s and alter us, even if only for a moment.
About:
Iliana Sun invited the audience to look closer at the quiet interconnections that sustain our planet, and at the shared responsibility we carry within them. Her stories, drawn from both fieldwork and imagination, wove together, ecology, and endurance, reminding us that change often beings in observation.
Website: www.ilianasun.com
Instagram: @ilianasun
