Tag: art

Grandpa’s desk, 2025
Yifan Jiang

Alisan Fine Arts

Haircut, 2025
Ellie Kayu Ng

LATITUDE Gallery New York

This Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, we’ve selected 6 shows to see by AAPI artists. There are also other art initiatives to pay attention to, such as Art for Change’s monthlong spotlight of prints by Asian American artists. From fashion-inspired, hyperreal paintings to small ceramic sculptures, these shows reveal the breadth of AAPI art across the U.S. today.

“Painting As Method”

Alisan Fine Arts

Through June 21

Suddenly September, ca. 1990
Mimi Chen Ting

Alisan Fine Arts

The trio of Asian American painters featured in Alisan Fine Arts’s new show spans generations and engages with a range of art historical traditions, such as Surrealism, hard-edge abstraction, and Chinese album painting. The eldest of the group, the late Mimi Chen Ting, distilled the organic shapes of the landscape of New Mexico—where she lived part-time in the latter half of her life—into colorful, minimalist contours. The Chinese Canadian artist Yifan Jiang’s more conceptual practice encompasses animation, sculpture, and performance, but it is her paintings of mystical, dreamlike landscapes that take the spotlight here. Kelly Wang’s practice, meanwhile, is grounded in materiality; she uses Chinese ink painting and layers of minerals and ground metals to create diaphanous, monochrome abstractions. Despite their varied approaches, all three artists bring lyricism and fluidity to their work.

—Olivia Horn

Ellie Kayu Ng, “Bloom!”

Latitude Gallery New York

May 7–June 7

Fitting Room Visions, 2025
Ellie Kayu Ng

LATITUDE Gallery New York

My Fair Lady, 2025
Ellie Kayu Ng

LATITUDE Gallery New York

Inspired by a personal encounter with an infinity mirror in a dressing room, Ellie Kayu Ng’s latest works render the city and herself with hyperreal precision. These scenes, on second look, dissolve into dreamlike spaces. Fitting Room Visions (2025), for instance, features a woman wearing a purple dress who is multiplied in mirrors. Hands on hips, she appears like a ballerina on stage—but hidden away in a curtained, behind-the-scenes spot. Elsewhere, city streets and nighttime interiors become settings to explore shifting identity through fashion-inflected imagery. A gauzy patterned scarf encircles a subject’s face in Nighthawk (2024), and chic pointed red shoes strut the street in My Fair Lady (2025). On view now at Latitude Gallery New York, Ng’s “Bloom!” features 11 new paintings that explore identity as something fluid, continually refracted through the act of performance.

Ng, who was born in Hong Kong and now lives in Brooklyn, earned her MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2021. She presented a solo exhibition with VillageOneArt in New York in 2022.

—Maxwell Rabb

Yunfei Ren, “Latitude Unknown”

Jonathan Carver Moore

Through May 31

Scorched Into Memory, 2025
Yunfei Ren

Jonathan Carver Moore

Stars Return in Fragments, 2025
Yunfei Ren

Jonathan Carver Moore

In tender, blooming paintings, emerging Chinese artist Yunfei Ren explores global migration and its impact on people over time. The New York–based artist presents billowing color field paintings, reminiscent of tie-dye blotches. He adds fluid ink marks to his canvases in a process intended to capture the natural phenomena seen by migrants on their journeys. In Scorched Into Memory (2025), for instance, moody purples and yellows create an emotional backdrop for flame shapes that echo across the canvas. The work gestures, perhaps, to the warmth of a burning hearth or the danger of a raging wildfire.

“Latitude Unknown” is Ren’s first solo show with San Francisco tastemaking gallery Jonathan Carver Moore. He has previously exhibited at the de Young Museum and Stanford Art Gallery and received his MFA from Stanford University in 2024.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Calvin Kim, “Departure Before Arrival”

Harper’s

Through June 14

Keeping, 2025
Calvin Kim

Harper’s

Calvin Kim’s paintings gesture toward thresholds—horizons, sightlines, and moments before a climax. In “Departure Before Arrival” at Harper’s, his luminous paintings pair a hazy style with surreal, symbolic imagery, rendered in soft gradients and glowing colors. In Keeping (2025), a yellow flower is held between two colossal thumbs under a scarlet, cloud-ridden sky—its delicate stem precariously held in place. In The urgency of feeling (in the morning there is meaning) (2025), a translucent paper airplane is caught mid-air, an ephemeral moment turned into an emotional metaphor by the painting’s evocative title. Across his paintings, Kim evokes the ache of departure and the weight of arrival, often folded into one moment.

Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Kim holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he graduated in 2023. This marks his first solo exhibition with Harper’s. His first solo exhibition in New York was mounted by Situations in 2024.

—MR

Shuto Okayasu, “Okku/Beyond the Light”

PLATO Gallery

Through May 11

New Dream Land, 2025
Shuto Okayasu

PLATO Gallery

Anyone who’s spent time in New York will be able to tell that Shuto Okayasu’s paintings draw from real life in the city. His meticulous, realist works feature typical neighborhood sights: bodegas with aisles full of soft drinks (New Dream Land, 2025) and chess games in the park with rapt audiences (Chess at Union Square, 2025). And yet, there is a slightly warped edge to the artist’s works, a sprinkle of magic that reveals the artist’s optimism. Of his works on view now at PLATO Gallery, this is most visible in Love is Okku (2025). The piece references the titular Japanese word “Okku”: originally a Buddhist term, meaning hundreds of eons, it has now come to mean “tedium.” In this painting, the artist portrays himself and his wife amid a bountiful landscape, surrounded by a laptop, speaker stack, and other modern day trappings. Love, he suggests, is both eternal and everyday.

Okayasu apprenticed with two of the best known Japanese contemporary artists: Takashi Murakami and Tomokazu Matsuyama. His works have been exhibited in New York and internationally, including in a group show of Japanese artists at Tang Contemporary Art’s Hong Kong space in 2024.

—J T-J

Noormah Jamal, “Meena / Veena”

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Through May 11

Zarbaba, 2025
Noormah Jamal

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

WEEDS 31, 2025
Noormah Jamal

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

In the show “Meena / Veena,” Pakistani artist Noormah Jamal unpacks her childhood memories of Peshawar, the capital and largest city of Pakistani province Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, known colloquially as the ‘city of flowers.’ Jamal filters these memories through a fantastical and wistful lens in small ceramics, paintings, and works on paper. “At the core of my work is a desire to create space for dialogue—between past and present, between individual experience and collective memory,” the artist said in a statement.

Fuzzy, warmly composed figurative paintings draw on Mughal miniature painting and Pashtun folklore. The result is deeply evocative scenes, such as Zarbaba (2025), which shows a woman atop a sun against a backdrop of mountains, with flowing acrylic and pencil marks creating a sense of swirling movement. In Jamal’s ceramics, meanwhile, amorphous heads emerge from weed stems in a playful twist on identity and its rootedness to nature. The show is presented by Los Angeles gallery Rajiv Menon Contemporary, which opened its doors in Hollywood in February, which has a “particular—though not exclusive—focus” on artists with origins in South Asia.

—Arun Kakar

Through his embroideries of “divas,” Vezzoli disrupts the fantasy of iconic movie stars and opera primadonnas by exposing the delicate reality beneath the surface. Spanning 25 years of Vezzoli’s artistic production, each embroidery work in this show is matched with the poster of a significant film featuring the actor portrayed—such as Anna Magnani, Sophia Loren,

Dara Birnbaum, a pioneering video artist whose work deconstructed television and mass media, died on May 2nd at 78. Marian Goodman Gallery, which has represented her since 2001, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.

Birnbaum rose to prominence in the 1970s, at a time when television was largely dismissed by the art world. She spliced and manipulated footage from game shows, sports broadcasts, soap operas, and internet videos to examine the construction and transmission of information. Her work scrutinized the visual codes of mass communication and their effect on identity, politics, and power.

Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, 1978-1979
Dara Birnbaum

National Museum of Women in the Arts

Born in 1946 in Queens, New York, Birnbaum studied architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, graduating in 1969. She moved to San Francisco shortly after and worked at major landscape architecture firm Lawrence Halprin & Associates. She later shifted toward art and video, using the medium of television to address broader social and political themes.

Perhaps her best-known work is Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman (1978). This video work isolates and repeats moments from the titular superhero television series starring Lynda Carter. Birnbaum spliced together scenes where Wonder Woman transforms, combining them with explosions and a disco soundtrack to question the feminist image presented by the show.

Transmission Tower: Sentinel, 1992
Dara Birnbaum

Marian Goodman Gallery

In the 1980s, Birnbaum released the three-part series, the “Damnation of Faust,” which reimagines the Faust myth as a meditation on the self and society. By 1985, she was tapped to participate in the Whitney Biennial. She became the first woman to be awarded the Maya Deren Award from the American Film Institute in 1987.

Birnbaum’s work in the 1990s and through the aughts continued to criticize global politics. For instance, Transmission Tower: Sentinel (1992), commissioned for Documenta IX, features eight stacked televisions each playing different styles of political speech following the Gulf War. Later in her life, her work Journey: Shadow of the American Dream (2022) mused on her past, incorporating 16mm family footage shot by her father.

Her most recent exhibition, “Four Works: Accountability,” was mounted by Marian Goodman Gallery in 2024. The show revisited works from the 1990s concerned with the media’s role in shaping public opinion—a theme that’s increasingly pertinent in today’s political landscape. Other major solo exhibitions and surveys have been presented by The Belvedere in Vienna in 2024, Tokyo’s Prada Aoyama in 2023, and the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh in 2022.

Here’s what we’re reading this morning, folks.

A Picasso show in 2025 has to do a lot to feel fresh.

Massimiliano Corteselli                                                                         Massimiliano Corteselli’s Website Massimiliano Corteselli on Instagram

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The gallery decided against opening in Tribeca, which did not fit its ethos.