AAPI Artists Reinterpreting Tradition at The Shed’s “Open Call: Portals,” Bri Ng Schwartz, Asian American Art Alliance, Amp Magazine
Opening Portals, Bridging Worlds, Dejá Belardo, The Shed
Exhibition Review: “Open Call: Portals” at The Shed, Hudson Yards, Liam Otero
Lily & Honglei on Using Old Stories to Heal New Wounds, Shannon Lee, Asian American Art Alliance, Amp Magazine
String Together: A Conversation with Lily & Honglei, Ya Yun Deng, NYFA Blog
Scan These Artworks and They Will Come to Life, Jasmine Liu, Hyperallergic
The Digital Illusion, Angela Becher, University of Liverpool. Download PDF
Augmented reality: From the art of intervention to the craft of public engagement, Pamela See, Griffith University. Download PDF
Remaking Tank Man, in China, Margaret Hillenbrand, Oxford University. Download PDF
CRUEL MODERNITY: THE ALLEGORIES OF LILY AND HONGLEI’S SHADOW PLAY Serena Jara
SHADOW PLAY, Shoshan Brosh-Vaitz and Shir Meller-Yamaguchi
Shadow Play: Tales of Urbanization in China, Interview by Creative Capital Foundation, NY
AAPI Artists Reinterpreting Tradition at The Shed’s “Open Call: Portals”
Bri Ng Schwartz, Asian American Art Alliance, Amp Magazine
(excerpt)
At The Shed’s fourth iteration of their annual program, “OPEN CALL: PORTALS” (on view through August 24), 12 NYC-based artists were commissioned to create works that would transport audiences into socio-political contexts across the globe. Exploring themes of migration, colonialism, ecology, and spirituality, these pieces form a sacred space within the institution’s second-floor gallery—a balm for the current US political landscape that vilifies the non-white and non-US-born.
Of these dozen artists featured, three identify as AAPI: duo Lily Honglei, Zain Alam, and collective AYDO. Curator Dejá Belardo shared how, during the curation process, they were “struck by the blending of traditional and ancestral references along with contemporary representation” in the works of these artists.
In conversation with one another, these works prompted me to consider the role spirituality holds in our contemporary grappling with colonization, both in the US and abroad. These artists reinforced the role of looking back at my own ancestry to see how those who came before us moved forward in times of such inequality.
In Lily Honglei’s KITES: A Poem by an Immigrant, traditional Chinese kites and a railroad constructed of Mahjong tiles pay homage to Chinese immigrants and New Yorkers past and present. “As part of the Qing Ming festival, or the Tomb-Sweeping Day, people wrote the names of their family members on kites and cut the strings when the kites flew high,” shared the Flushing-based duo. “The released kites would symbolically remove all the issues and troubles from the loved ones, blessing them with good energy from nature. The kites represented undying souls traveling between heaven and humanity.”
In addition to nature motifs, painted on each kite is a letter—collectively, they spell out the word “IMMIGRANT”. Closer examination reveals each letter to be either a body in motion, greenery, golden symbols of abundance, or combinations of the three. The kites making up the rest of the installation feature people at work: building, delivering food, caring for plants, and creating art. Others call back to ancestral images of families across time periods. A railroad made of mahjong tiles looms to the side, reminding audiences of the labor of Chinese immigrants in their construction.
While most of these illustrations are celebrations and memorialize Chinese American culture, there are two figures that offer a darker, sobering portal in the flag titled Bamboos on Kissena Blvd. One figure, a blonde woman in red, stands in front of DC’s Capitol Hill representing hardline anti-immigrant politicians. The other figure is a migrant lying under a blanket on Flushing’s Kissena Blvd in the cold winter.
by Lily Honglei at The Shed’s “OPEN CALL: PORTALS.” Photo by Adam Reich.
“Each kite in this series has its unique title and context,” Lily Honglei explains. “These two images signify the challenges facing the immigrant community.” In the middle of the composition is a thriving bamboo tree with enormous roots, which hints at the underlying resilience of our immigrant communities in spite of the hardships. … …
Upon visiting the different artist portals featured in the exhibition, I was able to reflect not only on the incredible mirrors that these AAPI artists lifted to my own family and community, but the solidarity across all backgrounds that is so necessary for our collective survival.
Open Call: Portals
Opening Portals, Bridging Worlds
Dejá Belardo, associate curator at The Shed
(excerpt)
Physical, remembered, or imagined, portals allow us to revisit the connections that tether us to each other. The door to the Level 2 Gallery at The Shed marks the first portal of this exhibition, welcoming visitors to the multidimensional world created by 12 artists’ projects selected as part of Open Call’s fourth edition. Poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of mondialité, or “worldmentality,” guides the connections between artists in this exhibition by introducing a vision of global belonging rooted in relation, difference, and poetic entanglement—a vision of a world shaped not by sameness but by the unpredictable interplay of differences, instead of the national boundaries and fixed identities that typically divide us.1
The works in the exhibition inhabit thresholds where histories of migration, colonialism, and spirituality converge. Across installation, film, sculpture, painting, sound, and performance, the artists offer layered meditations on displacement, memory, and belonging. They reveal portals not merely as physical passages but as sites of transformation, imagination, and return. While confronting the lasting impacts of colonial extraction, migration, and environmental instability, this exhibition gathers artists who engage with histories and rhythms of cultural inheritance, including beliefs, traditions, knowledge, skills, and material objects. The portals and realms created in the exhibition open passageways between past and present, memory and material, displacement and belonging, representing a constellation of interrelated yet irreducibly distinct identities, each contributing to a dynamic, shared humanity.
… …
Painted wooden kites float above the landscape, defying gravity but also carrying the weight of immigrant stories, in Lily Honglei’s KITES: A Poem by an Immigrant. The painting series is inspired by traditional Chinese kites and visual traditions updated to depict the urban landscape of Chinese immigrants living in Flushing, Queens. Wood panels are hand-cut in various shapes, such as a bird, butterfly, dragonfly, moon, or cloud, which are popular motifs of East Asian kites. Inspired by their cultural heritage, the duo’s work highlights the Asian diaspora, especially working-class Asian immigrant experiences and history reflecting the artists’ family sagas and community life. Through a contemporary visual art language, Lily Honglei creates images that honor the immigrant worker, from depictions of work on the railroads, which first brought Chinese immigrants to the United States, to present-day food delivery drivers. The floating images Lily Honglei creates coalesce into a celestial installation that captures the dreams and losses borne across generations and borders.
(continue reading here)
Kite paintings in process in Lily Honglei’s studio. Photo: Marissa Alper.
https://artandponder.substack.com/p/exhibition-review-open-call-portals
Exhibition Review: “Open Call: Portals” at The Shed, Hudson Yards
Aug 12, 2025
(excerpt)
Since its founding in 2019, The Shed has become one of the most popular up-and-coming arts spaces in New York for a multiplicity of reasons: its streams of immersive performing arts programs, the building’s kinetic architectural style, and, naturally, its invigorating art exhibitions that go beyond the standard museum or gallery show. Vis-a-vis exhibition programming, The Shed hosts an annual Open Call seeking young, emerging artists based in New York who endure a rigorous admissions process for participation in a forthcoming group exhibition. About 1000 applicants – artists and collectives – apply for this coveted museum-quality exposure. Multiple rounds of interviews and in-the-works proposals gradually narrows the applicant pool into a focused group of creatives whose ideas are deemed germane to that year’s exhibition theme. As an advocate for the one-word association approach in exhibition concepts, the 12 chosen artists & collectives here were asked to respond to notions of what “portals” signify for them, especially in the context of being based in New York City. As is typical of my group exhibition reviews, I will provide a subject-by-subject rundown underscoring the remarkable feats demonstrated by these artists who all responded most effectively to The Shed’s Open Call.
… …
Ancestral veneration is an important attribute of traditional Chinese family life. Lily Yang and Honglei Li, both Chinese artists based in Flushing Chinatown, produced a whole body of paintings on kites that are diagonally suspended above their allotted section in the Portals exhibition space. Colorfully stylized vignettes showing multiple generations of the artists’ families feels like seeing an opulently historic family tree. But this is not a mere charting system comprised of portrait heads and connecting lines, for these kite paintings are emblazoned with episodic portraits of relatives at various stages of life as portrayed in a style very much in tune with the aesthetic conventions of historic Chinese literati painting.
Personal histories and collective histories are intertwined, one such example being a section of railroad tracks whose surface mimics glazed porcelain, a reminder of both the presence of Chinese immigrants in the 19th Century who contributed to the construction of the Transcontinental Railway along with the Western commercialization of Sinospheric culture to the decorative kitschiness of chinoiserie. Other sections present contemporary workers – food delivery drivers to seamstresses – in the midst of their labor while surrounded by the protective gaze of a group of monochromatic guardian figures. Though these kites are kept in place for the purposes of this exhibition, their soaring position and suggestion of flight makes for a powerful metaphor on the enduring strength and perseverance of Chinese and Chinese-American culture.
… …
Conclusion
The 12 artists and collectives who were ultimately accepted to exhibit their works at The Shed have given such a multitudinous range of interpretations of what “portals” mean for them. Yet, with all of the perspectives shaped by race, gender, class, sexual orientation, and religious / spiritual upbringing, there have been quite a few commonalities reflective of our shared sense of humanity: the short and long-term changes dealt in diasporic communities; the continuities and evolutions of cultural identity; migratory patterns, displacement, and resettlement; political activism and prescriptive methods in attaining a better future; spiritual and religious awakenings; the performative body, etc. Belardo’s sage insight helped to facilitate an awe-inspiring exhibition concept that brings together a mixture of voices and visions by New York’s next generation of significant contemporary artists.
Photos courtesy Liam Otero
https://bjocs.site/index.php/bjocs/article/view/72
British Journal of Chinese Studies, Vol. 11, July 2021
ISSN 2048-0601
© British Association for Chinese Studies
The Digital Illusion: Chinese New Media Artists Exploring the Phenomenology of Space
Angela Becher
University of Liverpool
Abstract
This article examines how Chinese new media artists negotiate the symbolic nature of urban space via 3D-modelled simulations and augmented and mixed reality. Via semiotic and media analysis, the article scrutinises the ontology of these media in their deployment of spatial parameters such as proportion, perspective, stasis, and motion to create spatial narratives. The article contrasts the imaginary of architecture and space in the independent 3D animation Mist by Zhang Xiaotao and the Second Life project RMB City by Cao Fei against the implementation of video art in the mixed-reality performance Wearable Urban Routine by Zhu Xiaowen and the augmented-reality app Statue of Democracy & Tank Man by artist collective 4 Gentlemen. In all of the discussed works, the use of the digital medium serves to create a temporary illusion whereby the ephemeral experience of a virtual world can help inform the role of the human in actual, physical space which adopts particular importance in the context of a radically transforming country. This study contributes to the growing scholarship on the interlinkages between Chinese art, architecture, and the city and on the use of technology in Chinese cultural production.
Keywords: Chinese contemporary art, urban space, architecture, digital media, 3D animation, augmented reality, embodiment
(excerpt)
Reification of Buried History: 4 Gentlemen’s Augmented Reality
An ephemeral spatial alternative is also what is generated in the augmented reality art by the anonymous artistic collective 4 Gentlemen. According to their blog, 4 Gentlemen is comprised of “Chinese artists in exile” as well as American artist(s) and is linked to the New York-based artist studio of Lily and Honglei ( , ). The web presence of 4 Gentlemen explains that the pseudonym “4 Gentlemen” or sijunzi references a group of Chinese intellectuals, namely Liu Xiaobo (1955–2017), Hou Dejian (b. 1956), Zhou Duo (b. 1947), and Gao Xin (b. 1956) (“About 4 Gentlemen,” n.d.). All four were intellectuals who had a prominent role during the protests in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and who jointly initiated a hunger strike prior to the violent crackdown. After June 4 they either fled abroad or suffered repeated
imprisonment, such as Liu Xiaobo, who was in 2010 awarded the Nobel Peace Prize “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China” (Norwegian Nobel Institute, n.d.) while serving an eleven-year prison sentence for “inciting subversion of state power” (Lin, 2013).
augmented reality application for mobile and tablets. Still courtesy of the artists.
4 Gentlemen’s deployment of digital technology for the exploration of physical space is even more prominently marked by a critical engagement with the political and symbolic encumbrance of space. The artists encoded a smartphone and tablet app in order to overlay the factual landscape with dynamic information.
Entitled Tiananmen SquARed the app negotiates the political symbolism of Tiananmen Square and its neighbouring Chang’an Avenue via a visualisation of the historic iconicity of the “Tank Man” image and the “Statue of Democracy” erected during the 1989 protests.
The Statue (or Goddess) of Democracy was a ten-metre high sculpture built by students of the Central Academy of Fine Arts and displayed during the student-led protests on Tiananmen Square in 1989 as a monument to and embodiment of the quest for political and societal change. The Tank Man, possibly internationally more widely known than the statue, also refers to 1989 and specifically to the day of June 5 when a hitherto unknown man positioned himself in the way of the tanks that were sent onto the square following the violent crackdown on June 4. 4 Gentlemen overlay the historical sites of the appearance of the Tank Man and the Statue of Democracy with Google geolocation software so that, when one uses the app on both Tiananmen Square and Chang’an Avenue and directs the smartphone or tablet in a particular direction, virtual sculptures of the Statue of Democracy and Tank Man appear on the screen. In coding the appearance of these sculptures onto the mobile screens of the app users, 4 Gentlemen reinscribe their own visualisation of history into factual space, which is nowadays devoid of any visible traces of this past. As they point out on their blog, their work is intended as a reminder:
Although it has been more than twenty years since [the] Tiananmen Protest took place in 1989, the authority persistently uses all means erasing [sic] the facts that Chinese people pursued democracy in this democratic and anti-corruption movement. In China, nowadays, young people are not aware [of] the courageous actions, such as “Tank Man” and erecting [the] “Statue of Democracy” facing Mao’s portrait on Tiananmen . . . , [which] emerged during [the] student movement of 1989. Nonetheless, history should not be forgotten. (“Tiananmen Square Augmented Reality,” 2011: n.p.)
They use the locative medium of AR as an appeal to remember which is a defiance of the heavy censorship of the protests in mainland China today. Even the mere accounting of the events of 1989, even if unaccompanied by any normative comment or political claim, is one of the most severely censored and most thoroughly banned topics from the Chinese public sphere, no matter whether in textual or visual form. Yet the photograph of the Tank Man has adopted the role of a symbolic icon of resistance that has long transgressed the borders of China. In her analysis of the legacy of Tank Man in China, Margaret Hillenbrand argues that the minimalist aesthetic of the photographic documentation could potentially be at risk of reducing political complexity into facile image narratives. However she attests that the photograph “offered to Western audiences what Slavoj Žižek . . . calls ‘a moment of transparent clarity’ about China after Mao and revolution” (Hillenbrand, 2017: 131). She underlines that the photograph, despite its arguably predominant appropriation for US (and international) neoliberal narratives, is still continuously remediated and repurposed by Chinese artists as well (Hillenbrand, 2017: 131).
4 Gentlemen make their political message available more widely and added Tahrir Square (Cairo, Egypt) and Occupy Wall Street (New York) as similarly politically charged spaces where the Tank Man and Goddess of Democracy could be visualised. Similar to Cao Fei’s connection to art events in the physical world, 4 Gentlemen, too, included the geolocations of art events, such as Saint Mark’s Square during the Venice Biennale in 2011 and the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA). Not dissimilar to Cao Fei’s virtual urban landscape in which symbolically charged visual icons are juxtaposed or represented in unconventional, subversive ways, 4 Gentlemen, too, use the possibilities of technology and virtuality to playfully undermine and revert the forced dissociation of factual, real landscape from its historical meaning and attached memories. They create a kind of historical archive engendered by bodily movement in space which can then performatively do “revelatory justice” to what has long since become a “public secret” in China (Hillenbrand, 2017: 153).
Augmented reality: From the art of intervention to the craft of public engagement
garlandmag.com/article/augmented-reality-craft-of-public-engagement/
Pamela See
28 May 2021
(excerpt)
AR: The art of intervention
Shortly after the release of smartphones by Apple in 2007, artists and activists began employing the technology. The first significant intervention into a museum or gallery space was instigated by Sander Veenhof and Mark Skwarek in 2010. Endorsed by the festival Conflux, DIY Day was staged on 9 October and occupied the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA) with a GPS coordinated exhibition. Manifest AR, the international cyberart group of which the two aforementioned artists are a part, also created their own unauthorized “pavilion” at Venice Biennale in 2011. The artworks were reinstalled in the Istanbul Biennale later in the same year by invitation of one of the curators, Lafranco Aceti.
Amongst the contributors to Manifest AR are 4Gentlemen. The collective working under the pseudonym includes Professor John Craig Freeman from Emerson College, and Chinese artists Lily Yang and Hong Lei Li. The title makes reference to Four Gentlemen, one of whom was Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo, who played a role in organizing the ill-fated Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The art collective used AR to “…allow Tank Man’s spirit to return to Beijing and stalk his former haunts.” In 2010, Tiananamen SquARed was staged using GPS in the precise location of the historical event it represented. The installation was also transposed onto a number of other sites, including the aforementioned Venice Biennale.
Yang and Li explored similar subject matter in their papercut animation Forbidden City, which received the People’s Choice Award at the Moving Paper Film Festival staged at the Museum of Art and Design in 2009. Papercuts have been affiliated with divination from their first historical accounts during the Western Han Dynasty (206BCE – 24CE). A papercut likeness, fashioned from hemp, was used to summon the presence of Lady Li, a favoured concubine of Emperor Wu. He was a devout follower of the Yellow Thearch, a cult of immortality. Papercuts, as talismanic figures without ground, were used to communicate with the immaterial world. Subsequently, the transition from papercut animation into AR appears to be a natural progression for the collaborative.
The eruptions of the immaterial that AR entails matches a number of the key attributes of the Surrealist movement, including the uncanny, juxtaposition and autonomism. The latter employed the irrational to subvert the rising authoritarianism that dominated the interwar period. The limited field of vision offered by AR devices is not unlike the canvases of surrealist paintings that offer a window into the mind. The abstraction of Chinese landscape painting, which was catalysed by the literati during the Yuan Dynasty (1271 – 1368), similarly focused on depicting internal realities in response to a Mongol occupation. AR interventions provide the opportunity for a collective liberation of consciousness, unadulterated by governments or corporations.
It is, perhaps, unsurprising that the benchmark for the democratisation of the medium was initially banned by the Chinese government on the grounds of imposing a security risk. Pokémon GO was released elsewhere 6 July 2016, with the downloads of the application reaching five hundred million in the first forty-three days. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) encouraged the development of “indigenous” providers of AR. Both Alibaba and Tencent released AR applications in 2017. Concern over the sovereignty of their geo-digital borders was not an exclusive concern of PRC. In late 2019, a class-action against the developers of Pokémon GO reached a settlement. The developers of the app paid four million US dollars for “virtual trespassing.” The plaintiffs were primarily owners of residential properties.
Remaking Tank Man, in China
Margaret Hillenbrand
Read the essay here or on Journal of Visual Culture