Futures Ever Arriving (May 6–June 27, 2021)
Presented in partnership with the Asian American Arts Alliance and Chelsea Market, FUTURES EVER ARRIVING was a group exhibition in celebration of Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month.
The exhibition was curated by Sophia Park and featured emerging Asian American artists working in the United States who are examining the past and present in order to imagine new futures through their work. With the rise and increased focus on anti-Asian racism and violence across the country, conversations around safety and survival are key to ensuring that everyone in our communities can thrive. Questions have arisen about who we are, what it means to belong, and how we all might move forward as a community while at the same time acknowledging our multiplicities.
Each artist’s work plays a part in the rise of a new Asian America that we are forming during this critical time of uncertainty. When brought together, these artists’ works offer a small vision for the emergence that we can practice.
Participating artists
Raymond Hwang is an artist currently living and working in Ridgewood, NY. “My work often draws from the fallacy and inadequacy of memory, and how it relates to themes of family and violence within my second-generation Asian American experience. Throughout my paintings, forms are rendered with differing levels of atmospheric energy that challenge the idea of what is concrete. I choose to embrace the inaccuracies that reveal themselves afterwards because I believe there’s a reason our minds remember things a certain way.”
Christina Yuna Ko is a Korean American artist living and working in Queens, NY. She received her BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and has since then shown her work in Los Angeles, Washington D.C., and in around NYC. “I attempt to demarcate the visual lexicon born from the cultural inheritance of a multi-generational Asian American experience through paintings and installations.”
Jennifer G. Lai is an audio producer, writer, and artist based in NYC. Most of Jennifer’s pieces use vintage National Geographic magazines from the ‘50s, ‘60s, and ‘70s — a time when most of their photos promoted colonialism (if not outright racism).
Kim Sandara is a Laotian/Vietnamese artist from Northern Virginia, now based in Brooklyn, NY. She has been featured in Visart's Gen 5 exhibition, the Torpedo Factory's 2019 Emerging Artists exhibition and the Washington Project for the Arts’ 2019 Auction Gala. In her Torpedo Factory summer 2019 Post-Grad Residency, she created a stop motion animation about her parent's immigration story intersecting her coming out story. She used the studio space as a shop to fund raise for local and national LGBTQ+ nonprofits empowering queer youth.
Jia Sung is an artist and educator, born in Minnesota, bred in Singapore, now based in Brooklyn, and received a BFA from RISD in 2015. Her paintings and artist books have been exhibited across North America, including the Knockdown Center, RISD Museum, Wave Hill, EFA Project Space, Lincoln Center, Yale University, and MOMA PS1. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Emergence Magazine, Hyperallergic, Jacobin Magazine, and Asian American Writers Workshop, and collected by SFMOMA and the Special Collections at Yale, SAIC, and RISD. She has taught at organizations like the AC Institute, Abrons Arts Center, Children’s Museum of the Arts, and Museum of Chinese in America.