Eight bridges connect the San Francisco Bay, so it is an apt name for a gallery platform that brings the Bay Area art world together.

Our mission is to maintain a vibrant gallery scene, despite restrictions on travel, celebrations and other larger gatherings. We want to support our artists by informing and entertaining curators, collectors and critics with potent online exhibitions of their work.

On the first Thursday of every month, we will launch 8 shows of artists relevant to the Bay Area. They may be working in this place, long considered an epicenter of change, or deeply engaged in the conversations the Bay Area holds dear, whether it’s related to technology, the environment, social justice or sexual identity, to name a few. In addition, each month will highlight the crucial work of a Bay Area non-profit arts organization.

Founding Committee

Claudia Altman-Siegel, Kelly Huang, Sophia Kinell, Micki Meng, Daphne Palmer, Ratio 3, Sarah Wendell Sherrill, Jessica Silverman, and Elizabeth Sullivan

Ambassador Committee

Sayre Batton & Maja Thomas, Joachim & Nancy Bechtle, Matt Bernstein, Sabrina Buell, Wayee Chu & Ethan Beard, Natasha Boas, Douglas Durkin, Carla Emil, Matt & Jessica Farron, Lauren Ford, Ali Gass, Stanlee Gatti, Brook Hartzell & Tad Freese, Pamela & David Hornik, Katie & Matt Paige, Putter Pence, Becca Prowda & Daniel Lurie, Deborah Rappaport, Komal Shah & Gaurav Garg, Laura Sweeney, The Battery, Robin Wright, Sonya Yu & Zack Lara

Sponsors

Lobus, The Space Program

Available to view in person
RESET
Paula Cooper Gallery
New York, NY / Palm Beach, FL
Paul Pfeiffer

Known for his innovative manipulation of digital media, Paul Pfeiffer (b. 1966, Honolulu, Hawaii) recasts the visual language of pop spectacle to examine how images shape our perception of ourselves and the world. Sampling footage from YouTube, cable television, and other sources, he uses these as an occasion to plumb the depths of contemporary culture, assessing its racial, religious, and technological dimensions. At the same time, Pfeiffer’s objects and images function diachronically, establishing profound genealogies that connect contemporary culture and its many particularities — professional sports, televised game shows, Michael Jackson, etc. — to the long, seemingly remote histories of art, media, religion, politics, and nationhood.

He has had one-person exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2001), the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (2003), the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne (2005), MUSAC León, Spain (2008), the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2009), the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, Texas (2012), Museum of Contemporary Art and Design, Manila (2015), the Honolulu Museum of Art, Hawaii (2016), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2017), the Bellas Artes Outpost, Manila (2018)—and was the subject of a retrospective at Sammlung Goetz in Munich, Germany (2011). Pfeiffer’s work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Inhotim Museu de Arte Contemporanea, Brazil; the Pinault Collection, Venice; and Kunst Werke, Berlin.

Recent projects include a commission by Performa 2019 that was presented at Harlem’s Apollo Theater, and upcoming is a curatorial project titled Exodus in the Watergate Building in Washington D.C. He currently lives and works in NYC and Manila.

Paula Cooper Gallery

Desiderata (1972), 2018

Digital video loop, fabricated steel monitor with embedded media player

Duration: 9 minutes 30 seconds, looped

42 x 20 x 42 inches

Paula Cooper Gallery

Caryatid (Miura), 2021

Monitor with embedded media player

Duration: 1 minute 7 seconds, looped

13.5 x 14 x 13 inches

Paula Cooper Gallery

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (18), 2004

Fujiflex digital C-print

Image: 48 x 60 inches

Frame: 55 7/8 x 67 7/8 inches

Edition of 6 + 1 AP

Paula Cooper Gallery

Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (11), 2004

Fujiflex digital C-print, in artist’s frame

Image: 47 3/4 x 60 inches

Frame: 56 x 68 x 3 inches

Edition 6 of 6 + 1 AP

Ratio 3
San Francisco, CA
Barry McGee

Working across media,  Barry McGee’s artistic output is diverse and constantly evolving. Through incremental changes, and occasionally momentous gestures—as in his installations featuring overturned vehicles or surfboards stacked floor-to-ceiling—McGee has built a singular and eclectic visual language, garnering the attention and adoration of an audience that extends far beyond the realm of contemporary art. From the international museums and galleries hosting his sprawling and immersive exhibitions, to dedicated collectors of art, to ardent fans seeking out exhibition ephemera or relics from his early involvement with graffiti, McGee’s influence is recognized well beyond his native San Francisco. His arresting geometric patterns, inventive typography, and iconic faces rendered in flawless brushstrokes are nearly universal in their appeal.

Barry McGee was born in 1966 in San Francisco, California. He lives and works in San Francisco, California.  McGee’s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums and institutions including Fondazione Prada, Milan; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; the Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, California. His works are part of public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the UC Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; New Art Gallery Walsall, United Kingdom; and Fondazione Prada, Venice.

Ratio 3

Untitled, 2019
Acrylic on panels; 28 elements
52 x 59 x 2 inches

SOLD
Ratio 3
Untitled, 2018
Acrylic and ink on paper

11.75 x 18.5 x 0.25 inches

Ratio 3
Untitled, 2021
Ceramic

11 1/2 x 12 inches

SOLD
Ratio 3

Untitled, 2019
Ceramic
8 5/8 x 8 7/8 x 1 1/8 inches

P.P.O.W
New York, NY
Dinh Q. Le

For Asian-American and Pacific Islanders Heritage month, P.P.O.W. is pleased to present photo-weavings and films by Dinh Q. Lê (b. 1968) that confront the history of the Vietnam War. Lê uses photography and film as technologies for image making and apparatuses for distributing ideological narratives. The range of techniques he employs expands the categories of photographs and film to reveal the failings of individual memory and collective perceptions.

In Of Memory and History, a 2003 exchange with Moira Roth, Lê writes “From Vietnam to Hollywood is drawn from the merging of my personal memories, media-influenced memories, and Hollywood-fabricated memories to create a surreal landscape memory that is neither fact nor fiction. At the same time I want the series to talk about the struggle for control of meanings and memories of the Vietnam War between these three different sources of memories.”

Lê has exhibited at the 2013 Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, PA and documenta 13, Kassel, Germany in 2012. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Carnegie Museum, PA; MoMA PS1, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, TX; Mori Art Museum, Tokyo; and the Asia Society, NY, among many others. Dinh Q. Lê: True Journey Is Return, a retrospective with a recently published full-color catalog, was recently on view at the San Jose Museum of Art. Lê is a co-founder of the nonprofit organization Sàn Art. Lê lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

P.P.O.W

From Father to Son: A Rite of Passage, 2007
Two channel/single channel video
Duration: 10 minutes
Edition of 10

P.P.O.W

South China Sea Pishkun, 2009
Digital animation video
Duration: 6:30 minutes

P.P.O.W

The Characters, 2002
C-print and linen tape, framed
33 x 67 1/2 inches

P.P.O.W

Untitled from Vietnam to Hollywood (paratroopers), 2005
C-print and linen tape
38 x 72 inches

Haines Gallery
San Francisco, CA
Binh Danh
Of Stone and Space

In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Haines Gallery proudly presents a suite of new daguerreotypes of Yosemite National Park by Bay Area photographer Binh Danh. With their ethereal images of Yosemite’s sweeping vistas, snow-capped peaks, and glacial ponds, these stunningly detailed works reveal the artist’s full command of this complex process. 

Though raised in California following his and his family’s escape from wartorn Vietnam, Danh had not visited Yosemite until he began his daguerreotype project, documenting his lived experience of a previously imagined landscape. Danh explains, “I am interested in how we as a nation of immigrants could ‘reflect’ on these daguerreotypes and see our faces in this landscape.” The highly reflective surfaces of Danh’s daguerreotypes literally mirror their surroundings, embracing viewers within the idyllic environs of this national landmark.

Danh’s innovative approach to historic photo processes reconsiders and expands the pursuit of pioneering nineteenth century photographers such as Ansel Adams and Carleton Watkins. For over a decade, Danh has traveled across the American West in a mobile darkroom he calls Louis (after Louis Daguerre), using large-format cameras modified to accept silver plates rather than film negatives. Throughout the work, Danh imbues his subject with a distinctly personal perspective, as he negotiates his connection as a Vietnamese-American to the landscape and history of the United States, raising questions of access and belonging within these iconic scenes.

Haines Gallery

El Capitan in Winter, 2021
Daguerreotype (in camera exposure)
12 x 10 inches

Unique
$12,500

Haines Gallery

Half Dome, Merced River, Winter (1), 2021
Daguerreotype (in camera exposure)
12 x 10 inches

Unique
$12,500

Haines Gallery

Yosemite Valley View (1), Winter, 2021
Daguerreotype (in camera exposure)
8 x 10 inches

Unique
$10,500

Haines Gallery

Bridalveil Fall, winter, 2021
Daguerreotype (in camera exposure)
10 x 8 inches

Unique
$10,500

James Fuentes LLC
New York, NY
Kikuo Saito

Kikuo Saito (1939–2016) was born in Tokyo and moved to New York City in 1966 at the age of 26, curious about the city’s burgeoning artistic movements. He had began painting a decade prior, building a steady understanding of traditional Japanese arts alongside contemporary movements such as the Gutai Group, while working for three years in the studio of established traditional painter Sensei Itoh. Landing in San Francisco, Saito traveled to New York by bus, visiting the country’s museums and witnessing its variable and remarkable landscape, confronted by the city’s own topography of signs upon arrival. During his first decade in New York, Saito worked between painting and theater. In many senses, he considered much of life as a performance. By 1979 he decided to devote his attention entirely to painting, preferring the serene isolation of the studio, where he could physically manipulate paint across ground, over the complex, multi-disciplinary approach behind his theater pieces. Nevertheless, at the core of his work is this early interplay between theater and painting, and the artist’s longstanding interest in choreographic expression and theory is evident throughout his career. Saito attended to a number of concerns throughout his decades of painting, which he would continually reference and revisit, forming feedback loops across time. For Saito, painting relied on the explicit relationships of color and light, alluding to examinations in nature and daily life rather than offering the literal or pictorial—implying observation and delivering sensation. The artist’s works offer notations that change pace and direction, just as color reacts to color, so as to necessarily involve (and even instruct) the one looking into or at them. Through his intensive commitment to painting, Saito was able to render expression more explicit, permanent, and exclusive.

James Fuentes LLC
Broom Eater, 1994
Signed, dated, and titled verso
Color pencil and oil on canvas
59 x 91 inches
$125,000
James Fuentes LLC
Little Window, 2010
Signed, titled and dated by artist on verso
Oil on canvas
58 x 73 1/2 inches
$80,000
James Fuentes LLC
Blue Shepards, 2008
oil on canvas
49 1/8″ x 80 1/8″
$70,000
James Fuentes LLC
Red Mountain, 2014
Oil on canvas
46 1/4 x 67 1/4 inches
$55,000
François Ghebaly
Los Angeles, CA
Kelly Akashi
Bronze Candles

François Ghebaly is proud to participate in an online presentation of bronze sculptures by Kelly Akashi on the San Francisco based online platform 8-bridges, part of a month-long special exhibition celebrating Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The online viewing room will concentrate on Kelly Akashi’s recent bronze candle sculptures and is accompanied by a written conversation between Akashi and the artist Sharon Lockhart.

Candles have long served as an enduring emblem within Kelly Akashi’s practice. Short lived and luminous, candles act as captivators and embodiers of human attention. This presentation of bronze sculptures focuses on a quiet series within Akashi’s practice that sprung up in the tumult of 2020. For this series, Akashi burns paraffin candles to mark specific tragic events in the world as their ramifications are beginning to unfold—the murder of George Floyd (May 25-27, 2020), the explosion in Beirut (August 4-6, 2020), the murder of Asian women and others in Atlanta (March 16, 2021). She casts each candle’s spent mass in bronze and titles it with the dates of its burning, transforming its timespan from the immediate to the eternal. These works commemorate the sorrow and rage of life under the pandemic in America, where information feels infinitely available, hurtling toward us at great speed while the clock itself seems suspended. Absorbing a tragedy, burning a candle, setting her attention to it, and then transforming that object of focus into bronze—through this process Akashi interweaves consciousness with material, life with fire, and memory with the trace of what remains.

François Ghebaly

August 4-6, 2020
Bronze
4.5 x 13 x 8.5 inches
$12,500

François Ghebaly

May 23-26, 2020
Bronze
6 x 6.25 x 6.25 inches
$10,000

François Ghebaly

May 25-27, 2020
Bronze
5.5 x 13.75 x 7 inches
$12,500

François Ghebaly

March 16, 2021
Bronze
5 x 13 x 10 inches
$12,500

Hosfelt Gallery
San Francisco, CA
Rina Banerjee

Rina Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata, India and lives in New York, works with a cosmopolitan eclecticism that reflects both her transnational background and her sophisticated understanding of the narrative power of objects. She assembles rapturous sculptures that are mystifyingly shamanistic, yet overflowing with connotation. Conjoining rarities with cheap, mass-produced bric-a-brac, she appropriates extravagantly while rejecting hierarchies of material, culture and value.

In Banerjee’s paintings and delicate drawings on paper, female figures float in chimerical landscapes, often in states of transformation or with hybrid features of birds and beasts. Her titles are long, free-form refrains that immerse the viewer in the physical and emotional space of the work, heightening its quasi-mystical magnetism.

In a 2011 feature in Artforum, Banerjee describes the foundations of her work:

My mother told me that my first name is special because it is not typical in India—it is spelled differently. Hence, I was free to be what I wanted, so I presumed. Growing up abroad was a strange experience in the 1960s; there were so few Indians in the West. My parents saw themselves as international citizens. Maybe they imagined a future that we are just beginning to glimpse. I dream of this willingness to close the gaps between cultures, communities, and places. I think of identity as inherently foreign; of heritage as something that leaks away from the concept of home—as when one migrates. Even my interest in science embodies an awareness of other worlds, worlds that coexist with us, but which we cannot experience or know. The sky, the stars, and the earth contain so much more than we think.

Freedom is the most expensive commodity; nature the most dangerous beauty. My work examines both. My art depicts a delicate world that is also aggressive, tangled, manipulated, fragile, and very, very dense.

Hosfelt Gallery
unlike “Two peas in a pod,” peanuts or golden droplets, like matrimonial dangers, a mixed bag on her lap, aloha to horizons which can be wide open, she met she, was sweetened and she was wakened and gregarious often articulate but quiet, how nice to see daughter go go and be growing fizzy in her bubbles, 2021
Acrylic on paper
16 x 12 inches
$10,300
Hosfelt Gallery
Lady of Commerce. Hers is a transparent beauty, her eager sounds, her infinite and clamorous land and river, ocean and island, earth and sky…all contained, bottled for delivery to an open hole, a commerce so large her arms stretched wide and her sulfurous halo, 2012
Wood figurine, vintage glass bottles, chandelier ornaments, birdcage, steel, wood pedestal, lace, cowry shells, taxidermy deer paws, Indian marriage jewelry, ostrich eggshells, porcelain doll hands, silver leaf, gold leaf, wire, linen cord, and marble baby doll hands
Diameter: 48 inches
$45,000
Hosfelt Gallery
Standing trial by man and the family of Man denied she wore the hardest but turtle shells on her mossy back heels dug on hers alone a golden island with foaming waters at edge, exhausted by humanity his fears of others, mothers, girls and boys that could pass mustard, 2019
Acrylic and gold leaf on wood panel
20 x 16 inches
$10,000
SOLD
Hosfelt Gallery
In transplant of people battle of all things grew funny and fickle until new things could be gotten and old things forgotten, 2013
Ink and acrylic and collage on paper
30 x 44 inches
$27,000
Monique Meloche Gallery & Jessica Silverman
Chicago, IL / San Francisco, CA
Maia Cruz Palileo

Monique Meloche Gallery in collaboration with Jessica Silverman present Maia Cruz Palileo.

In anticipation of Palileo’s upcoming solo show at the CCA Wattis Institute, opening in September 2021, and a group show at Jessica Silverman this Spring/Summer, we present recent works by Maia Cruz Palileo.

Informed by her family’s Filipino heritage, Palileo investigates the malleable language of painting, offering a panoramic lens through which to investigate the larger questions pertaining to forgotten histories and how best to honor these stories in perpetuity.

Monique Meloche Gallery & Jessica Silverman

We Walked for Hours, 2021
Oil on panel
40 x 30 inches

Monique Meloche Gallery & Jessica Silverman

Conference of the Birds, 2019
Oil on linen
60 x 52 inches

Monique Meloche Gallery & Jessica Silverman

Exceptionally Mild and Kind to my Throat I, 2020
Gouache on paper
7 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches

Monique Meloche Gallery & Jessica Silverman

Towards the Bay Shores Where Reeds Grow, 2021
Oil on canvas
83 x 71 inches

Brian Gross Fine Art
San Francisco, CA
Leo Valledor

Brian Gross Fine Art is pleased to present the works of Leo Valledor (1936-1989) as part of 8-Bridges’ celebration of Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month.   An important American painter of Filipino heritage, Leo Valledor grew up in San Francisco’s Fillmore District, where he was influenced by its’ jazz and poetry scene.  In the 1950s, he attended the California School of Fine Arts (now San Francisco Art Institute), exhibited his paintings at 6 Gallery, and later showed at the seminal Dilexi Gallery. In 1961, he moved to New York, where he was a founding member of the historic Park Place Gallery and began painting Hard-edge abstract paintings on shaped canvases.

Among the works featured here, Desire is from Valledor’s East-West Series, an important body of work he made immediately after his return to San Francisco in 1968.  The East-West works represent a synthesis of Hard-edge and Abstract Expressionist techniques.  Aslantis, TGIF, and Pacificon reveal Valledor’s later evolution to dividing the interiors of his flatly painted, shaped canvas compositions into complex colorful geometries that create a sense of perceptual depth within each work.

 

Brian Gross Fine Art

Desire, 1971
Acrylic on canvas
96 x 60 inches
$85,000

 

 

Brian Gross Fine Art

Aslantis, 1986
Acrylic on canvas
96 x 34 inches
$50,000

 

Brian Gross Fine Art

TGIF, 1982
Acrylic on canvas
72 x 48 inches
$48,000

 

Brian Gross Fine Art

Pacificon, 1981
Acrylic on canvas
108 x 48 inches
$75,000

 

 

Lehmann Maupin
New York, NY / Hong Kong / Seoul / London
Do Ho Suh

Do Ho Suh (b. 1962, Seoul, Korea; lives and works in London) works across various media, creating drawings, film, and sculptural works that confront questions of home, physical space, displacement, memory, individuality, and collectivity. Suh is best known for his fabric sculptures that reconstruct to scale his former homes in Korea, Rhode Island, Berlin, London, and New York. Suh is interested in the malleability of space in both its physical and metaphorical forms, and examines how the body relates to, inhabits, and interacts with that space. He is particularly interested in domestic space and the way the concept of home can be articulated through architecture that has a specific location, form, and history. For Suh, the spaces we inhabit also contain psychological energy, and in his work he makes visible those markers of memories, personal experiences, and a sense of security, regardless of geographic location.

Do Ho Suh’s large-scale fabric work can be viewed at the Cantor Arts Center in  When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Migrations through Contemporary Art, through May 30, 2021; and his 23-foot tall sculpture Karma (2010) is on view in the Oshman Sculpture Court at the San José Museum of Art through January 2022.

Lehmann Maupin

Corridor 11, Wieland Strasse, 18, 12159 Berlin, Germany, 2013
polyester fabric and stainless steel wire
9.65 x 7.28 x 1.1 inches
10.51 x 8.15 x 2.01 inches (projected framed)
Edition of 3 with 2 APs
Signed, dated, titled, and editioned
$18,000

Lehmann Maupin

Undressing, 2019
watercolor on postcard
Paper: 3.94 x 5.91 inches
Frame: 10.43 x 12.2 x 1.57 inches
Signed and dated by the artist
$15,000

Lehmann Maupin

Dreaming Home, 2019
Watercolor and ink on rice paper postcard
Paper: 4.17 x 5.55 inches
Frame: 10.67 x 11.85 x 1.57 inches
Signed and dated by the artist
$15,000

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi
Berlin, Germany
Wu Tsang

For over a decade, Wu Tsang has worked between the disciplines of film, performance, and visual art. Her award-winning films combine documentary and narrative techniques with fantastical detours and explore hidden histories, marginalized narratives, and the act of performing itself. Her projects re-imagine racialized and gendered representations to encompass the multiple and shifting perspectives through which we experience the social realm.

Wu Tsang works iteratively between film, performance and sculpture to create a palimpsest of imagery, movement and sound. Generating tension between cinematic and poetic forms, between fixed and ephemeral objects, the series of sculptural objects and films.

Her projects have been presented at museums and film festivals internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), Guggenheim Museum, Tate Modern London, Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Kunsthalle Münster, Antenna Space (Shanghai), Hiroshima MOCA, Kuandu Museum (Taipei), MCA Chicago, MOCA and Hammer Museum (Los Angeles), Nottingham Contemporary, Berlinale Film Festival (Berlin), SANFIC (Santiago), Hot Docs Festival (Toronto), and South by Southwest Film Festival (Austin). She has received grants from Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, and the MacArthur “Genius” Award. 

 

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Wu Tsang
Untitled (Original 1), 2016
Inscribed cat bronze
31 x 3 1/2 x  1/2 inches
Unique
$15,000

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Wu Tsang
Spinster, 2016
Metal frame, bronze swords and LED light
58 x 18 x 10 inches
Unique + 2AP
$55,000

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Wu Tsang
Female Hero, 2016
Neon, mirror, wood
30 x 72 1/2 x 36 3/4 inches
Unique
$75,000

Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi

Wu Tsang
Duilian
2016
Single-channel HD video with Dolby 5.1 Surround Sound
Dimenisons variable
Edition of 5 + 2AP
$55,000

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
Berkeley, CA
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha (1951–1982) was a multidisciplinary artist who made artist books, performances, videos, and poetry, including key themes such as language, personal history, and cultural dissonance. Her work, made throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, operates from a vocabulary deeply indebted to the theories and practices of Conceptual Art, film theory, comparative literature and philosophy but centralizes identity in a way that foreshadows the emphasis on multiculturalism that would come in the later 1980s and 1990’s.

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

A Ble Wail, 1975
Performance, Worth Ryder Gallery, University of California, Berkeley
BAMPFA, gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Mot Cache, 1978
Ink on paper
3 1/2 x 5 1/2 inches
BAMPFA, gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Pomegranate Offering, 1975
Stenciled ink and typewritten text on cloth, with thread
11 1/2 x 14 3/4 inches
BAMPFA, gift of The Peter Norton Family Foundation

Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive

Vidéoème, 1975
Video: black and white, sound
Duration: 3 minutes
BAMPFA, gift of the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Memorial Foundation

Galerie Chantal Crousel
Paris, France
Haegue Yang

Haegue Yang (born in 1971 in Seoul, South Korea / Lives and works in Berlin and Seoul) creates installations that include photographic, video, and sculptural elements and are informed by her philosophical and political researchs. Responding to the places where she exhibits, Yang creates site-specific new work that incorporates both the architecture of the exhibition space and materials gathered from the region. Her highly refined and yet particular sense of materiality, combined with an elegant sense of space and atmosphere, contribute to her enveloping and resonant installations.

Galerie Chantal Crousel

Sonic Rotating Binovular Geometric Twins – Gold and Silver #14, 2021
Powder-coated steel frame, powder-coated metal grid, brass plated bells, nickel plated bells, metal rings
39 1/8 x 64 6/8 inches

Galerie Chantal Crousel

Dripping Clock Hands, 2019
Chipboard, wood varnish, seeds, clock hands, electrical wire crimps, washers, dust, hair
Diptych – 7 7/8 x 7 7/8 inches each

Galerie Chantal Crousel

The Intermediate – Ikebana Alienage, 2016
Artificial straw, powder-coated steel stand, powder-coated metal grid, casters, artificial plants, artificial vegetables, artificial stones
32 2/8 x 53 1/8 x 32 5/8 inches

Galerie Chantal Crousel

Sonic Sphere – Diagonally-ornamented Copper and Nickel, 2015
Powder-coated steel stand, powder-coated metal grid, casters, copper and nickel plated bells, metal rings
39 x 32 2/8 x 32 5/8 inches

Gagosian
New York, NY / Beverly Hills, CA / London / Paris / Le Bourget / Geneva / Basel / Rome / Athens / Hong Kong
Nam June Paik

Gagosian is pleased to participate in the special 8-bridges presentation in celebration of Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. Three sculptures and one drawing by Nam June Paik are featured in anticipation of the artist’s major retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, opening May 8. In these works, Paik uses paper and TV screens interchangeably as surfaces for gestural improvisation. Dating from the last decade of the artist’s life, they embody his playful and predictive conflations of tech and mass communication with images from nature and spontaneous mark making.

Gagosian

Untitled (RCA Victor), 1996
Single-channel video (color, silent), vintage wood television cabinet, and cables, with acrylic
43 1/2 × 37 1/2 × 35 inches

Gagosian

Untitled, 2005

Single-channel video (color, silent) in a vintage television with permanent oil marker and acrylic

18 7/8 × 19 × 18 7/8 inches

Gagosian

Lion, 2005
Three-channel video (color, silent) with 2 plasma monitors and 26 CRT monitors and wood lion with acrylic and permanent oil marker additions
133 × 109 × 65 inches

 

 

Gagosian

Untitled, 1997–1999
Pastel on paper
22 1/8 × 30 inches

 

 

Bureau
New York, NY
Diane Severin Nguyen

Diane Severin Nguyen’s images reveal intimate views of unfamiliar, alienated materials, doused in sensuous light and vivid color. Her complex imagery is achieved by staging materials in her studio, focusing on matter in states of transformation. She speaks of the ‘wounds’ and ‘ruptures’ she creates for the camera. Flesh-like objects are cut, pierced and burned, often using the sticky and slow burning fire from napalm. Nguyen writes, “most of my constructions are incredibly delicate or tenuous, and the camera intervenes moments before their collapse.” The amorphous subject is captured decisively by her camera, and in that instantaneous action of seizure, her work also acknowledges photography’s partnership with violence, inherent in the medium.

*

“I think I’m actually dismissing legibility so that I can access a new kind of clarity, one that is immanent to the image, a lucidity that cannot be usurped by someone’s ‘knowledge’ of the thing being photographed.” – Nguyen interviewed by Alec Recinos for BOMB, 2021

*

“Contingency might be a word for it, as [Nguyen’s] visual alchemy departs from the stuff that surrounds us: anything and everything that we touch and handle, from the things we ingest to the currencies we circulate to the devices that mediate our unbounded global views.” – Franklin Melendez in Kaleidoscope, 2020

 

Diane Severin Nguyen (b. 1990; lives and works between LA and NY) received her BA from Virginia Commonwealth University and MFA from Bard College. Her work is currently on view in Made in L.A. 2020 at the Hammer & Huntington Museums in LA and the 13th Shanghai Biennale at Sun Ke Villa, Shanghai. Recent exhibitions include Reoccurring Afterlife, Empty Gallery, HK and Minor twin worlds, Bureau, NY (2019). Nguyen’s film, Tyrant Star (2019) was screened at the 57th NY Film Festival; the Yebisu Festival, Tokyo; IFFR, Rotterdam; and Carnegie Museum.

Bureau

An era where war became a memory, 2018
LightJet C-print, metal frame
15 × 22 ½ inches
Edition 3 of 3 + 1 AP
$4,000, framed

Bureau

Her Charismatic Agony, 2020
LightJet C-print, steel frame
15 × 10 inches
Edition 2 of 3 + 1 AP
$3,500, framed

 

Bureau

Shallowed Spectrum, 2019
LightJet C-print, metal frame
15 × 10 inches
Edition 3 of 3 + 1 AP
$3,500, framed

Bureau

Ambitious Descent, 2020
LightJet C-print, steel frame
15 × 22 ½ inches
Edition 2 of 3 + 1 AP
$4,000, framed

Friends Indeed Gallery
San Francisco, CA
Carl Cheng

In celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Friends Indeed presents selected works by Carl Cheng. Carl Cheng (b. 1942, San Francisco, CA) is one of the first Asian-American artists to establish themselves in Southern California in the post war period. His expanded art objects—”nature machines,” “specimen viewers,” and “art tools”—were made under the auspices of his corporate DBA John Doe Co., and are intended to “model nature, its processes and effects for a future environment that may be completely made by humans.”

Cheng’s interactive objects—many of which were made in his outdoor “nature laboratory”—use viewer participation and systems art to question corporate responsibility, individual freedom, and the effects on the natural environment of a growing mass-consumer material culture. Throughout five plus decades of practice, Cheng has addressed environmental change, being a member of a generation who watched not only the rapid growth of Los Angeles, but also the rapid growth of Asian cities, where he traveled extensively.

Friends Indeed Gallery

Natural Museum of Modern Art, 1979
Coin-operated console, two canopied windows, sand table
Bread vitrine: 19 x 48.5 x 3.25 inches
Coin-operated console: 39.75 x 48.25 inches
Overall: 144 x 240 inches
Inquire for Price

Friends Indeed Gallery

Liquid/Solid Series: Solid – liquid No. A3, 1980-81
Glue, paint, framed
8 5/8 x 11 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches

$8,000

Friends Indeed Gallery

Organic Visualizer/Assembler, 1970
Acrylic plastic, wood, steel frame, LED lighting, florescent UV light fixtures, motor, electrical switches, meters, radios, organic material, and an assortment of human-made specimen objects
48 x 117 x 40 inches

$275,000

Friends Indeed Gallery

Alternative TV #3, 1974
Plastic chassis, acrylic water tank, air pump, LED lighting and controller, electrical cord, aquarium hardware, conglomerated rocks, plastic plant(s)
14 1/2 x 11 1/2 x 8 inches

$16,000

47 Canal
New York, NY
Josh Kline

Josh Kline (1979, Philadelphia, PA) lives and works in New York. Working primarily in sculpture, video, and installation, Josh Kline creates artworks and exhibitions that consider the ways in which our humanity has been transformed, commodified, and instru­mentalized within neoliberal society. In 2015, Kline began a major cycle of installation-based projects exploring the politics and economics of the 21st Century, which have so far explored the impact of social media on democracy, technological automation, and climate change. His art has been exhibited internationally, including in solo exhibitions at Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo; Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, UK; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy; Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon; Modern Art, London; and 47 Canal, New York. In 2019, his work was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial; New Order: Art and Technology in the Twenty-First Century at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and The Body Electric at Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Kline’s work is in the permanent collections of Astrup Fearnley Museet; Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf; Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin; and the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum, The Guggenheim, New York; among others.

47 Canal

Technological Innovation, 2019
Steel powder from China, salt, epoxy, silicone epoxy, plexiglas tank, powder coated steel frame, vacuformed plastic, digital prints on vinyl, reservoir tank, pump, fan, ocean water, silicone molds, freezer
61 ¼ × 35 ½ × 40 inches
Edition of 3 + 2 AP’s

$75,000

47 Canal

6˚C (Continental Shelf-Life), 2019
Shenzhen beach sand, California beach sand, Chinese and American flags (nylon), epoxy, fiberglass, polyurethane, resin, and door hardware, wood, house paint, and steel
79 ¾ × 29 ¾ × 6 inches
84 ¼ × 37 ½ × 6 ¼ inches, framed
Edition of 3 + 2 AP’s

$65,000

47 Canal

Insomnia, 2020
Red wine, NyQuil, Xanax, Ambien, melatonin, vodka, magnesium, Benadryl and CBD
120 × 6 × 7.825 inches
$60,000

47 Canal

Reality Television 14, 2020
Nylon flags, polyurethane, epoxy, microfiber, mounting hardware
28 × 48 ⅝ × 4 ½ inches
$60,000

Luhring Augustine
New York, NY
Zarina

The work of Zarina (1937-2020) is defined by her adherence to the personal and the essential. An early interest in architecture and mathematics is reflected in her use of geometry and her emphasis on structural purity. While her work tends towards minimalism, its starkness is tempered by its texture and materiality. Zarina’s art poignantly chronicled her life; recurring themes include home, displacement, borders, journey and memory. Her later collages involving luminous flakes of gold and pewter leaf showcase a relationship with light that moves beyond purely optical concerns and into a more symbolic and spiritual contemplation.

Luhring Augustine

Fold in the Sky, 2014

Woodcut printed on BFK light paper mounted on Somerset Antique paper

Image: 18 x 14 inches

Sheet: 26 1/2 x 22 inches

Edition of 6

$22,000

Luhring Augustine

Untitled, 2016

Collage of Indian handmade paper stained with Sumi ink on Arches Cover buff paper

10 x 10 inches

$15,000

Luhring Augustine
Folding House, 2014
Collage on Indian handmade paper with Sumi ink and 22-karat gold leaf mounted on Arches Cover Buff paper
8 3/4 x 8 3/4 inches
$15,000
Luhring Augustine
Untitled, 2013
Collage of woodcuts printed in black on Indian handmade paper mounted on Arches Cover buff paper
Image: 16 x 10 3/4 inches
Sheet: 24 x 17 inches
$30,000
Marian Goodman Gallery
New York, NY / Paris / London
Danh Vo

Danh Vo lives and works in Berlin and Denmark. Vo’s projects often emerge from personal relationships and fortuitous encounters. These objects and images accrue shifting layers of meaning in the world.

2.2.1861 duplicates the last letter home of the French missionary Jean-Théopane Vénard (1829 –1861), who was executed on the titular date in Vietnam. Danh’s father, Phung Vo, has transcribed this document, carefully rendering it in blue fountain pen on a single sheet of white A4 paper. Commissioned by his son, the task is meditative and intensely serial in nature. Although he is unable to decipher the French words he painstakingly copies, he is aware that the content relates to a martyr of his church.

Vo produced the photogravure Snowfall, Northern Sierras 1847 from a stereograph of an original image taken in 1868 by Alfred A. Hart. In the source image, titled Stumps cut by Donner Party in 1846, Summit Valley, the cut trees indicate the height of the snowfall that trapped the Donner expedition in the Sierra Nevadas over the course of a brutal winter, infamously leading some members of the party to resort to cannibalism to survive.

Cathedral Block Prayer Stage Gun Stock is a central component of Vo’s ongoing project Cathedral Block. This collaborative project, begun in 2019, takes the walnut wood from the McNamara farm Sierra Orchards as both material and theoretical ground, examining questions of origin, sustainability, and interdisciplinarity. Vo and the McNamara family forged a friendship following Craig McNamara’s encounter of Vo’s work with objects from his father, Robert McNamara’s estate.

Cathedral Block Prayer Stage Gun Stock embodies Vo’s longstanding interest in American iconography. It references the first flag of the United States, adopted on 14th June 1777 following the unification of the thirteen colonies. That the wood literally grafts the English onto the American makes the flag a literal manifestation of the foundations of the United States itself. The work acts as an invitation for collectors to enter into the collaborative project, continuing and developing the important relationships behind it.

Marian Goodman Gallery
2.2.1861, 2009
Handwritten letter by Phung Vo
11 3/4 x 8 1/4 inches
Marian Goodman Gallery
Snowfall, Northern Sierras 1847, 2014
Heliogravure on Somerset Satin
Paper: 16 5/8 x 22 1/2 inches
Frame: 18 3/8 x 25 x 1 1/2 inches
Edition of 24 + 6 AP’s
Marian Goodman Gallery
Cathedral Block Prayer Stage Gun Stock, 2020-2022
American flag made from walnut wood with metal clamps; threshold custom made in walnut wood
Flag: 43 1/4 x 59 5/8 x 5 1/8 inches
Threshold: 155 7/8 x 43 3/4 x 1 5/8 inches
Inquire on Price
kurimanzutto
Mexico City, Mexico
Rirkrit Tiravanija

Rirkrit Tiravanija’s diverse artistic production eludes classification, he has accurately described it as “relational”: a body work focused on real-time experience and exchange that breaks down the barriers between the object and the spectator while questioning the art object as fetish, and the sacredness of the gallery and museum display. Tiravanija’s work first came to public awareness in a 1989 New York gallery through untitled (), which consisted of weekly renewed displays of the various stages of a green curry meal: a pedestal for ingredients, a pedestal for curry cooking on a burner, and a pedestal with waste products. In 1992, he continued to push and question the possibilities and principles of the gallery space in untitled (free), in which he emptied out an art gallery and turned it into a social/meeting space where he cooked large meals for visitors; and in untitled (1999), an exact replica of his East Village apartment where people were invited to live in. Tiravanija has also described his work as: “comparable to reaching out, removing Marcel Duchamp’s urinal from its pedestal, reinstalling it back on the wall, and then, in an act of returning it to its original use, pissing in it.” Tiravanija is interested in subverting deeply-ingrained ways of interacting with art through novel forms of collaboration and exchange that diminish the preciousness of objects reconsidering their lifecycle and function while remaining accessible to a broad public.

Tiravanija is an Argentina born Thai artist who lives between New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai and his work carries strains of this nomadic existence, blending and re-combining different cultural contexts. Rather than insisting on a particular reality or truth, his work creates open-ended contexts for people to grapple with these questions themselves. The strength of Tiravanija’s work lies precisely in its ephemerality and the slippery ways it escapes definition; he takes the material of the every-day and re-stages it, allowing the viewer a perspective at once banal and deeply profound about the quickly fleeting nature of life itself.

Tiravanija received his BA from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 1984 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1986. From 1985-1986, he participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has received numerous grants and awards, including the Absolut Art Award 2010, the Silpathorn Award by the Ministry of Culture in Thailand (2017), Hugo Boss Prize (2004), and Lucelia Artist Award by the Smithsonian American Art Museum (2003),  among others.

Tiravanija lives and works in New York, Berlin, and Chiang Mai.

kurimanzutto
untitled 2021 (do we dream under the same sky), 2021
Silver silkscreen on ping pong table
107.87 x 66.54 x 7.87 inches
$85,000 USD
kurimanzutto

untitled 2017 (fear eats the soul/new york post, tuesday, january 24, 2017), 2017

Enamel on newspaper
Newspaper: 11.93 x 22.05 inches
Frame: 15.35 x 25.39 x 1.38 inches

$20,000 USD

kurimanzutto

untitled 2018 (1.5 kilos of rice) (one), 2018

Polished stainless steel corner of 2 mm and 10.500 kg of silver rice 23.62 x 23.62 x 23.62 inches

$120,000 USD

kurimanzutto

untitled 2018 (do we dream under the same sky), 2018

Gold leaf and newspaper on linen
91.34 x 55.12 inches

$120,000 USd

HESSE FLATOW
New York, NY
Tammy Nguyen
O,

Hesse Flatow is pleased to present a series of work by Tammy Nguyen. The series entitled O, is an address, an utterance emerging from the body, passing the threshold of the throat and mouth then thrust out into the open. It’s a circle, the return of what has been presented as finished, done or stuck in the past, back into the present and the material world – it records the previously unrecorded or inserts it back into the archive. The work participates in the update of the collective archive – a living organism made of intimate stories and macro-narratives that power dynamics usually shape. It examines the past, official and unofficial histories, myths, and personal stories which accumulate and seep into the present through the physicality of the exhibited workNguyen’s series of paintings on paper, stretched over wood panels, allude to Plato’s Divided Line and the threshold between the visible and the intelligible, and reflect on the sound of the letter “O” in the aftermath of war and trauma. Nguyen uses the circle and fragments of circles in the composition, often through the representation of natural environments including swarms of bats and butterflies.

HESSE FLATOW

the exit hole showed its bright light, as if to say “come here.”, 2021
Watercolor, vinyl paint, pastel, and metal leaf on paper stretched over wood panels
36 x 36 inches

$7,000

HESSE FLATOW

Realm of nous, 2021
Watercolor, vinyl paint, pastel, and metal leaf on paper
stretched over wood panels
36 x 54 inches

$9,000

HESSE FLATOW

even more succumbed to environmental hazards, 2021
Watercolor, vinyl paint, and metal leaf on paper stretched over wood panels
30 x 24 inches

$6,500

HESSE FLATOW

The organisms around us had been dead for millions of years, 2020
Watercolor, vinyl paint, and metal leaf on paper stretched over wood panels
16 x 20 inches

$3,500

Various Small Fires
Los Angeles, CA / Seoul
Anna Sew Hoy

Anna Sew Hoy’s (born 1976, Auckland, NZ, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) work pushes the boundaries of ceramics while simultaneously drawing on the medium’s history as a material for creating ritual and functional objects. Sew Hoy’s work often augments stoneware with textiles and articles of clothing, creating sculptures that feel bodily and animate. Recognizable pieces of clothing, like jeans, are often combined alongside familiar household objects. If these recognizable components of human life lend the artist’s sculptural creations a certain familiarity, the artist’s co-opting of these materials to form tentacle-like limbs, round, gaping heads, and other vaguely anatomical forms, gives her work a distinctly alien quality. The artist’s ceramic works often feature gaping holes or peeling, textured layers, drawing our attention to the tension between interior and exterior, and in turn engaging with questions of the psychological and the metaphysical.

Various Small Fires
Naked, If I Want To, 2019
Fired clay, glaze, and leather mesh

23 1/2 x 24 1/2 x 22 inches

Various Small Fires
Veiled Orb, 2019
Fired clay, glaze, and printed leather

27 x 30 x 29 inches

Various Small Fires
Psychic Portal (Blue), 2017
Glazed and underglazed ceramic

35 x 20 1/2 x 7 1/2 inches

Various Small Fires
Embodied Head III, 2016
Glazed stoneware, powder-coated steel and mixed media

68 x 20 x 13 inches

Commonwealth and Council
Los Angeles, CA
Kenneth Tam
Silent Spikes

An outgrowth of Kenneth Tam’s research into the history of diasporic Asians in the United States, Silent Spikes, on view at the Queens Museum through June 2021, interrogates Asian-American masculinity through video and sculpture in an immersive installation. For 8-bridges, the artist has produced a single-channel version of the film. The below video is an excerpt; please contact for full version.

Probing the intersections of gender, economics, and race, the work draws on the historical relationships of cowboy culture, idea(l)s of Manifest Destiny, the remaking of the American West through conquest and colonialism, migration histories, the mass propagation of stereotypes in Hollywood cinema—particularly in Western films—and contemporary experiences of Asian-American males.

Over 20,000 Chinese men worked on the construction of the treacherous western portion of the Transcontinental Railroad, which celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. Silent Spikes draws connections between the recruitment of Chinese male bodies that were both necessary and productive members of this workforce and heavily discriminated against, and the experiences of young Asian-American men in the insecure conditions of the post-industrial labor force​.​ These new works consider the homogenized construct of Asian-American identity alongside the paradigm of Anglo-American individualistic maleness. Tam integrates his own relationship to the latter’s imagery, most notably embodied by the Marlboro Man. It is as if Tam asks, can an Asian man truly inhabit or embody the touchstones of (white) American masculinity and its attendant freedom?

The eponymous video component of Silent Spikes employs local participants as performers, scripted and directed by Tam. In previous works Tam solicited performers from Craigslist; Silent Spikes seeks a relationship with its participants, sourced from Asian-American communities in Flushing, Queens. The performers interact with each other and with props from cowboy standbys (caressing a green plastic cowhead, mounted on a featureless mechanical bull)  rendered incongruous and strange by the vacant, misty backdrop of a stage set. There is an awkwardness to these sequences, seeing grown contemporary men in cowboy drag, a self-awareness and self-consciousness revealed by their confrontation with histories of exploitation and erasure.

Transgressing boundaries of gendered and racialized labor and social value through movement, the video invites us to consider the ways in which maleness and concepts of productive and nonproductive labor are entangled, as they are registered within and expressed by the body. Forming the core of the video, this performative ensemble of Asian-American men is framed by sites in Flushing that range from characteristically dense and urban to uncannily barren, creating moments of slippage between these landscapes and film sites along the California railroad. Working through and with a range of cinematic references, Silent Spikes ​effects a collective investigation of the concomitance of the paradigm of masculinity with capitalist economic structures and the imperial impulse.

Commonwealth and Council

Silent Spikes, 2021

Single-channel HD video, color, sound

Duration: 20 minutes 29 seconds

Edition 1 of 5 + 2 AP’s

$20,000

Pace Palo Alto
Palo Alto, CA
Maya Lin

Maya Lin (b. 1959, Athens, Ohio) critically engages with notions of site and place, exploring the development of systems in order to reflect on the environment, creating objects that invite contemplation—intellectual, sensorial, and physical—of the natural world.

Lin’s creative inclinations were encouraged from a young age and she spent much of her childhood in her father’s ceramics studio. She went on to study architecture and sculpture at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1981. Lin was thrust into the spotlight after winning a nationwide design competition for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. (1982). Informed by Robert Smithson’s earthworks and Richard Serra’s Minimalist sculpture, Lin’s memorial design was recognized with an Honor Award as well as a Henry Bacon Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects in 1984.

Alongside commissions to design monuments for the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama (1989), and the Women’s Table for Yale University (1995), Lin pursued her art practice through the creation of site-specific sculpture and earthworks.

Lin’s longstanding environmental advocacy and her fascination with maps led her to begin exploring water as a precious resource in 2007, charting birds-eye views of major bodies of water. These wall works, drawings, and large-scale sculptures have been produced using materials including recycled silver, glass marbles, and custom-made stainless-steel pins. The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts (1988, 2007), Lin was also honored with the National Medal of Arts, conferred by President Barack Obama in 2009, and later the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, for her significant contributions to art, architecture, and environmental activism.

For Lin, the idea of experience, movement, and nature are integral to her work, heightening spatial perception and environmental awareness. Her approach to artmaking often finds its origins in science rather than art, demonstrated in her application of satellite technology and cartographic techniques.

Pace Palo Alto
Blue Wave, 2013
Crystal
1 1/2 x 14 x 14 1/2 inches
Pace Palo Alto
Latitude New York City, 2013
Vermont Danby marble
Diameter: 108 inches
Pace Palo Alto
Pin River – Sandy, 2013
Steel pins
114 x 122 inches
Pace Palo Alto
Folding the Columbia, 2017
Glass marbles and adhesive
156 × 312 × 1 inches
Art Drop
Stuart Robertson

Our latest Art Drop is Stuart Robertson’s …bare blessings mi sen dem (Stuart R.)

This self-portrait initiated, but is not a part of, a series called Bare Blessings which was originally created for 24 VIEWS by Tiffany Lin. 24 VIEWS is a longitudinal project “that uses Census race data to investigate the history of racial classification in the United States.” Bare Blessings features 24 Black men who continue to fulfil an abundance of roles in my life that can never be captured by surveillance tools such as the census, despite being constantly forced into racial classifications in the US and beyond.

Stuart Robertson

…bare blessings mi sen dem (Stuart R.), 2021

Paper, textile, and acrylic on wood
8 x 8 inches
$1,400
The Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at Cantor Arts Center

Co-directed by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Assistant Curator of American Art, and Marci Kwon, Assistant Professor of Art and Art History, the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) aims to establish the Cantor Arts Center and Stanford University as a leading academic and curatorial center for the study of Asian American and Asian diaspora artists. The AAAI encompasses a range of activities, including: collecting and exhibiting works of Asian American/diaspora artists; preserving archival materials; fostering undergraduate and graduate education; and cultivating community collaboration and dialogue through public programming.

Image: Stephanie Syjuco, I Am An…, 2017, Cotton fabric mounted on ceiling rack, 96 x 255 inches, Modern and Contemporary Art Fund, Cantor Arts Center, 2019. 49. Photograph by Johnna Arnold.

 

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Do We Dream Under The Same Sky?

A special curated selection of artists from the Asian diaspora in celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, curated by Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander of the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University and Kelly Huang of KCH Advisory

In honor of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May 2021, 8-bridges founding member Kelly Huang of KCH Advisory, and Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, Assistant Curator of American Art and Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, have curated a selection of historical, mid-career, and emerging artists from the Asian diaspora.

The Bay Area has historically been and continues to be at the center of Asian American studies, artistic production, and activism. The term "Asian American" was coined by the Bay Area-based Asian American Political Alliance in 1968, demanding a much-needed move away from the Eurocentric, exoticizing, and racist appellation "Oriental." This selection understands the term "Asian American" expansively, allowing for a multiplicity of relations and connections rather than as a fixed identity category contained within national borders.

Considering artistic production across the Asian diaspora, these artists work in a broad range of media—from painting to installation, new media to sculpture. Furthermore, they address a myriad of issues: Nam June Paik's conceptual objects speak to technological omnipresence, Rirkrit Tirivanija’s mixed-media practice bridges the personal with the collective and is the source of the presentation’s title, “Do We Dream Under the Same Sky?”, and Anna Sew Hoy's sculptures combine the handmade with consumer culture. This multigenerational selection of artists necessarily reiterates that Asian Americans are, and have always been, formidable creators and artists.

In a moment in which anti-Asian discrimination and violence are surging during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it is imperative that the artistic production of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders remain part of larger cultural conversations about representation, nationhood, and equity. For so long, Asian Americans have occupied a peripheral role—if one at all—in the mainstream art world, their contributions to the global cultural landscape rarely acknowledged. By centralizing Asian American artists here, we hope to increase visibility, foster interest, and support the diversity of these artists' practices. May this platform serve as a celebration of the strength and diversity of the Asian American community and an opportunity for further engagement with Asian diasporic art.