CAMOC is pleased to present Fengzee Yang as our fourth Spotlight Artist of 2026.

Fengzee Yang: Cross Into Limbo explores transfiguration as the fundamental condition of the body that hold a suspended identity. She aims to capture the moment when they are neither what they began as nor what they are turning into. All three works hang on the wall, and all three come out of wood carving done by her own hand, which is a long, bodily process. To Fengzee, carving is a nomadic process: subtractive and irreversible. Coming from a nomadic experience, the nomadic process works as a succession of translations, of adaptations to changing conditions. The form emerges from that negotiation, continually becoming something else.

Fengzee’s work explores transfiguration as the fundamental condition of the body. She pushes the body toward the edges of organ, mineral, and myth, suspending it between flesh and symbol, caught, unresolved, between the desire to become other and the cost of doing so.

Fengzee Yang engages with wood, clay, and metal as somatic extensions, interrogating the materiality of the physical form. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited at spaces including The Plan, Slow Dance Space, Tala, ARC Gallery, Artruss, and Cochrane Woods Art Center of the University of Chicago, among others. She has participated in artist residencies at Jingdezhen International Studio, Jingdezhen, China;  Oxbow School of Art, MI;  Vermont Studio Center, VT; and ACRE Residency, WI.

Explore the rich, complex, and often hidden histories of sexuality in Chinese art through this engaging program led by expert and enthusiast Wendy Chuwen Xiao. Centered on the visual language of traditional Chinese erotic painting and its resonances today, the session invites participants to consider how desire, intimacy, and the body have been represented, imagined, and interpreted across time.

About the Lecturer
Wendy Chuwen Xiao is a researcher and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of art history, material culture, and the history of sexuality in early modern China. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in History and Art History in 2022, and her M.A. from Harvard University in Regional Studies—East Asia in 2024.

Her research focuses on how objects generate and mediate fantasies of desire, with particular attention to visual, textual, and sensorial forms that challenge normative understandings of gender performativity and sexual morality. In her M.A. thesis, she examined an eighteenth-century Qing dynasty erotic album, arguing that its idiosyncratic visual language suggests it may have been produced for a female audience, offering new perspectives on viewership and agency in historical erotic art.

Alongside her academic work, Xiao maintains an active artistic practice, creating illustrations and paintings that reflect her engagement with image-making, narrative, and the expressive possibilities of form.

Join us at the 2nd Annual Englewood Summer Book Fest. Bring your loved ones out for an afternoon of books, community, and fun at Wood St. Collective Farm. There will be local authors & book vendors, live performance, a literary showcase, free food, family activities, community resources, giveaways and more!

CAMOC will be tabling at the Book Fest. Make sure to stop by and say hi!

In a society governed by patriarchal norms, how did two women in early modern China manage to forge a marriage together?

Join us for a night of storytelling, where we reanimate a 17th queer Chinese opera: The Fragrant Companion 憐香伴. 

The event opens with a vivid oral retelling of the story, with its original arias reimagined in new poetic translations in English. From there, we turn to the visual world of the play, exploring woodblock prints and other historical materials while discussing the rich performance culture of early modern China that brought such stories to life. We will also reflect on the opera’s themes and legacy, tracing how this remarkable tale has been reinterpreted across time and media. The evening culminates in a live demonstration, featuring selected scenes and excerpts that bring the emotional and theatrical power of the opera into the present.

Synopsis:

The opera takes place between two witty and pretty women: a newly-wed wife named Cui Jianyun and a girl called Cao Yuhua. These two female protagonists exhibit incredible agency throughout the story: drawn to each other at first sight, the two women immediately express their admiration for each other through an exchange of poetry; by the end of their second encounter, they have already performed a secret wedding ceremony and pledged to be together forever––in this life and all future lives, as their vows say; then, in the rest of the play, the lovers successfully plot a marriage between Cui’s husband and Cao so that the two could accompany each other forever under the façade of being wife and concubine.

About the lecturer:

Yiwen Wu is an artist-scholar, who’s currently a PhD candidate at the University of Chicago, in the joint program between Theater & Performance Studies and East Asian Languages & Civilizations. Her research centers on early modern East Asian performance culture, with a special interest on translations and adaptations of classical works on modern stages. As a theater practitioner, her credits of original puppet plays include Sattva (Special Recognition Award at the 2024 Wuzhen Theater Festival), The Story of Lady Li (Recipient of Jim Henson Foundation’s Artist Grant), and Living Rock (Nasty, Brutish, & Short at the 2024 Chicago International Puppet.

Show your Pride in Chicago's queer Asian community here in the heart of Chinatown ✨

Presenting the second annual ✨👲💕Yellow Peril Drag Show 👯🌈✨

Saturday, May 30 | 6:00 - 9:00 PM | FL4

Join our Pride Kick-off Party to celebrate and show love to our queer Asian community right in the heart of Chicago’s Chinatown.

Space is limited. Ticket includes food, beer, and one specialty cocktail. While you're here, you can explore Language of Abstraction after-hours on FL1.

Dress code: 💃🌈🪩✨

This event is 18+

CAMOC is pleased to host a very special artist talk with our current Spotlight Artist, Jingqi Wang Steinhiser, on her exhibition Hanging Bird, Moving Castle and the art of world-building!

This artist talk will explore imagined inner worlds through painting, symbolism, and cross-cultural research. Through dreamlike houses and symbolic animals, Jingqi’s recent works investigate “home” as a psychological space shaped by memory, displacement and imagination.

This talk will also introduce The Symbolic Bestiary & Herbarium, an ongoing cross-cultural dictionary researching the symbolic meanings of animals and plants across folklore, literature, religion, cinema, and lived experience. Together, these two projects examine how storytelling, symbolism, and personal mythology can construct emotional and psychological spaces beyond physical geography.

Jingqi Wang Steinhiser is a multi-media painter born in China and raised in Mongolia. Jingqi received her MFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design(RISD) and BFA in painting at School of the Art Institute of Chicago(SAIC). 

Language was a central component of the Chinese American painter and poet Martin Wong from his first self-published book in 1968 until his death from HIV/AIDS in 1999. Across his poetry scripts, ASL scrolls, sky-poetry, and graffiti collections, Wong’s use of language was shaped by his family, friends, and the city around him—mutating from letters into characters and mudra-like gestures.

Join us for an in-depth panel discussion on Wong’s promiscuous relationship to language through hybridity and abstraction with scholar and curator Vivian Li, poet and novelist Lisa Hsiao Chen, and artist and curator Larry Lee, moderated by Caroline K. Ng. Then visit Wrightwood 659 on May 22, where the three speakers will discuss Wong’s hieroglyphic components in the galleries.

This program is organized in collaboration with Wrightwood 659.

Celebrate spring with music, dance, and native prairie planting at the Set in Stone Gathering Space in the Burnham Wildlife Corridor.

🌷🍃🌸🌱🌳🌻

Join us for a free, all-ages performance and stewardship event led by Irene Hsiao and collaborators, in partnership with the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, Chinese Fine Arts Society, the Field Museum, and Chicago Park District’s Night Out in the Parks. Come together as a community to welcome spring awakening and new growth through music, dance, and hands-on native prairie planting.

🪴 Dress comfortably for the outdoors. Gloves, native prairie plants, and planting tools will be provided.

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Artists:

Irene Hsiao

Antonius-Tín Bui

Hunter Diamond

How to find Set in Stone Gathering Space

By car: Enter the parking lot at 641 E. 31st Street and proceed to the south end of the lot. Parking is free with RSVP.

By public transit: Take the #3 bus to King Drive and 31st Street, then walk half a mile east to the parking lot at 641 E. 31st St. Enter the lot and walk south.

By bicycle: Set in Stone is near the lake front trail at 31st St beach, walk west over DuSable Lake Shore Drive to find the lot to your left. A Divvy station is located on the bridge above DuSable Lake Shore Drive at 31st St.

You’re Invited! Enjoy festivities, food, and prizes to support CAMOC at our 25th Benefit Dinner.

🎉 🥢 🎊 🎶 💝 🥂

🗓️ Saturday, April 18th, 2026 | 6:00 PM - 10:00 PM (Doors open 5:00 PM)
📍New Furama Restaurant

The night’s offerings include:

🥢 A traditional Chinese full-course meal
🪭 Live performances
🎟️ Raffle prizes
🌟 Silent auction
🍾 Cash bar
🪩 Live DJ and dancing

Tickets on sale now! Become a CAMOC Partner by purchasing a Sponsorships Package or Ad.

CAMOC is pleased to present Li Yao as our second Spotlight Artist of 2026, with Maldives.

Rooted in Li’s experience as an international student, Maldives is a coming-of-age tale exploring the surrogacy of love and desire, and the journey of reclaiming one’s identity. Rather than submit to these forms of erasure, Ma’er embraces the work of repairing himself on his own terms. The graphic novel frames this personal repair as a radical act of resistance against systems that demand assimilation, perfection, and silence.

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Li Yao is a visual artist based in Chicago. Born in China and educated in the US, Li trained as an illustrator before venturing into fine art and technologies.

Li has exhibited in various online and offline venues including TingDAO, Altered Festival, The Wrong Biennale, Ars Electronica, and Mykonos Multimedia Festival. Li has presented work at SIGGRAPH Asia 2021, and been interviewed by the Chicago Reader. Li has designed and taught several virtual reality design curricula in various organizations including the University of Chicago and OF Course Shanghai. He received his MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and his BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2016.

Curated by Larry Lee.

We are excited to announce that ALL MY LOVE is opening this Valentine’s Day!

This exhibition presents the intimate correspondence between the Chinatown legend Bernarda “Bernie” Lo and her (then) boyfriend Albert Wong during the early years of their relationship.

While known as a force behind transformational community service work decades later, these letters show the quotidien beginnings of this American couple: two immigrants from Hong Kong whose love blossomed as they navigated life in the American Midwest during the 1960s. Through their ordinary letters—each one signed off “All my love”—this exhibition traces how love was understood, negotiated, and practiced within a shifting social landscape. Their private exchange invites us to imagine how they navigated the physical, social, and emotional terrains of transnational migration.

The exhibition brings the original letters, photographs, and personal artifacts from the CAMOC archives, and a video installation by Yuge Zhou. Along with new donations from their daughter, Jacinta Wong, they together create a space that invites intergenerational dialogue about love, memory, and the ongoing search for home.

P.S. RSVP to the opening reception!

Tongji Philip Qian presents, if i may, an exploration of how entrances, paths, and symmetry shape perception.

The installation invites visitors to notice how a starting point shapes what they see and how they move through the space. Designed with two entrances, it questions whether a room that appears “balanced” actually changes the experience for different visitors—or only signals that it does.

Through graph-paper drawings, layered text-based works, and gestural paintings that partially obscure underlying lines, Qian examines thresholds, implied paths, and the difference between a layout that looks equal and an experience that feels equal.

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Tongji Philip Qian is a multidisciplinary artist and the co-founder of TPQ Studio. His artistic practice extends the limit of artmaking through conceptual lenses such as speed, labor, internationalism, and immigration. Rooted in images and words, Qian’s research investigates knowledge production in contemporary art with a scholarly focus on movements such as Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and Conceptual art. He is currently a Collegiate Assistant Professor in the Department of Visual Arts and a Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago.

Curated by Larry Lee.

Join us for the closing reception of Hai-Wen Lin’s exhibition on December 21st.

Scored by Steven Hou, the afternoon will feature a performance by Chicago-based dancers, extending the work beyond the space.

This reception offers a chance to experience how Hai-wen explores the performance and movement-based aspects of their practice. View Steven’s interpretation of drobe as it comes together on the body and in motion.

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Performers:
Mue Wu aka eg0d34th
Kate
Yixiao Yao
Chun An Huai
Steven Hou

Performance starts at 3 p.m.

Content Advisory: This performance includes partial undressing. The performers will remain in undergarments at all times.

Hai-Wen Lin presents drobe, a playful look at cultural patterns, care, and what we choose to dress and protect in our world. Curated by Larry Lee.

This exhibition playfully riffs on the “dressing” of chairs, beds, or floors – the “chair-drobe”, “bed-drobe”, “floor-drobe” where clothes are tossed rather than properly placed in a “wardrobe” – observing the meaning of common fabric motifs and how the world should be cared for.

The show explores familiar cultural patterns in Asian culture, worked into clothing and protective coverings. Lin’s past kite-making, which she sees as “dressing” the sky, expands here into a larger question of what should adorn the world and what deserves protection.

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Hai-Wen Lin is a Taiwanese American artist living somewhere beneath the sky. Their work explores constructions of the body and the attunement of oneself to the environment, often moving through metaphor, etymology, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day. Lin holds an MDes from SAIC and is a Skowhegan alum. Some honors include the Burke Prize and Luminarts Fellowship, and they have held residencies at places such as MacDowell, Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts, and many others.

This exhibition will run from November 16th to December 21st, 2025.

As a proud partner site of Open House Chicago 2025, we are excited to debut Percy Lam's “Light Light Light Show” this Saturday, October 18!

Lam's depictions of Hong Kong, through diverse techniques and materials, explore his complex relationship with a city he still thinks of as home, even long after immigrating to the US. By recreating the city’s buildings and skylines in his laborious weaving, sewing, and neon works, Lam builds bridges between his past and present as a member of the Hong Kong diaspora, gazing back to his homeland from afar, and repeatedly revisiting the connections.

Lam's current work highlights Hong Kong’s disappearing neon culture, unique housing phenomenon, and recent social unrest. The weaving gestures towards mending, a symbolic redress for the keen sense of lost identity that comes from a long-term disconnection.

Percy Lam was born and raised in Hong Kong, and he immigrated to the U.S. with his family as a teenager. Lam is a fiber-based artist, and his practice focuses on explorations of his remote relationship to Hong Kong while he is currently located in the U.S

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Open House Chicago, one of the largest architecture and urban exploration festivals in the world, is happening this weekend! Visit us and more than 200 other sites in 25+ neighborhoods. Check out architecture.org/open-house-chicago for more details.

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Featured Work:
Millions of Neon Show: The Light of Hong Kong 萬䊹霓虹綉：香港之光
Hand-embroidery on paper, 3 x 3 in (each), 2017-present

The 50 States Journey: HI  五十州之旅：夏威夷州
PEZ wrapper, thread, 33 x 55 in, 2016

Light Light Light 光 光 光
neon, 16 x 24 x 3 in, 2019

The New Milk exhibition featuring artist Jenyu Wang 王人玉 opens next week, our upcoming Spotlight show curated by Larry Lee.

New Milk is the magical substance that brings life. Not only life, but also the full force of a new life. The body goes through radical changes—both beautiful and horrifying—to create milk, and then more change reaching its postpartum reality—a new reality. New Milk meditates on this powerful substance and expresses its manifestation in milky, glossy fantasies, with eyes that peer back.

jenyujenyu is an artist and researcher, interested in temporal and spatial relationships largely due to growing up in a fractured cultural-political environment. Born in Taiwan and immigrating to the United States as a teenager, Jenyu perceives her world in disjunction instead of continuity. She received her MFA in Photography from the University of Illinois at Chicago.

By utilizing photography, video, and sculptural objects, Jenyu interrogates the gap between thinking and feeling. In pursuit of such gap, her work concentrates on the moments that show the vulnerable body, the traumatic body in the psychology of the 'everyday.' Jenyu's projects provide indexical content where she constructs and magnifies moments of dissonance and resonance.

Her other projects include writings published in criticism websites Chicago Artist Writers and LA-based art blog Temporary Art Review, and curating an exhibition on pluralism in contemporary Asian visual culture, titled Plural Vision, at the Gene Siskel Film Center.

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Featured Work:
Everything Everywhere All At Once 媽的多重宇宙(diptych) 2025,
poplar frames, resin casts, Dell monitors each 24", media player

This exhibition will run from September 20th to November 2nd, 2025.

Join us for the closing reception of Finding Our Way (through a triple double) featuring an artist talk by Dan S. Wang on the Syntax of History.

In his talk, Wang will trace themes of mobility, belonging, and transnational identity through a personal lens. Framed as a reintroduction to Chicago after years away, Wang will reflect on his lifelong cycles of movement and return, weaving them into the larger fabric of his family’s diasporic history.

Dan S. Wang is an artist and writer whose practice began with letterpress printing and evolved to include drawing, sculpture, and video. He co-founded Chicago’s Mess Hall and has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo projects in Los Angeles, Montreal, and at Dartmouth College, where he was the 2025 winter Artist-in-Residence. Wang co-edited LASTGASPISM: Art in the Age of Survival, named one of Hyperallergic’s top 20 art books of 2022. He splits his time between Chicago and Los Angeles.

CAMOC is proud to partner with artist Irene Hsiao to bring Guardians of the Earth and Sky to Chicago’s parks this summer!

This is an interactive, all-ages journey with the Four Celestial Guardians: the White Tiger of the West, Black Tortoise of the North, Azure Dragon of the East, and Vermilion Bird of the South.

Through storytelling, music, dance, tai chi, and art-making, you’ll explore connections between seasons, elements, colors, and constellations. Led by Irene and a multicultural ensemble of artists — fluent in languages from Mandarin and Cantonese to Spanish, Korean, and Swahili — this performance invites you to not just watch, but participate: walk alongside the Guardians, sing, move, and create your own headpiece to wear in the procession.

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Art supplies provided | Dress for walking ~1 mile

Learn more about this experience and the artists behind it!

How do everyday objects like advertising from the 1800’s help shape ideas about race we live with today? Join guest curator Lenore Metrick-Chen for an in-depth alternative “walkthrough” of Race Making.

This event begins in the main gallery, where visitors will explore the show independently and photograph a card or artifact that resonates with them. Then we will convene upstairs in the Reading Room to dive into the history, inscriptions, and meanings embedded in the selected cards.

Whether you're curious about media history, cultural identity, or just want to see what can be uncovered in the margins of print ephemera, this is a rare chance to hear directly from the curator and join a thoughtful, open exchange.

This event is free, and all are welcome.

Is your garden as healthy as it looks?

Soil can tell a deeper story. Join us for a bilingual workshop to explore the environmental history of Greater Chinatown and its impact on the Asian American community.

In this workshop, you will:

• Learn about soil contamination in Greater Chinatown neighborhoods

• Discover safe gardening practices to protect your health

• Connect with Asian American and environmental justice communities in Chicago

• Take home free Asian vegetable seeds to start your own garden

Presented by Chicago Asian Americans for Environmental Justice, this workshop will be taught in English and Cantonese.

We are welcoming friends, family, and members of the community to join CAMOC in celebrating Ed at the museum. Ed’s family will help us memorialize his life, work, and commitment to the museum with a glass brick dedication. Light refreshments will be served.

Showing this August, we are pleased to share our upcoming Spotlight Artist: Dan S. Wang with Finding Our Way (through a triple double), curated by Larry Lee.

This exhibition explores themes of mobility, belonging, and transnational identity through a personal lens. Framed as a reintroduction to Chicago after years of living elsewhere, Wang reflects on his lifelong patterns of movement and return, connecting them to his family's diasporic history.

Rather than honoring blood ancestors, he pays tribute to three “chosen ancestors” of Chinese America—Grace Lee Boggs, Wing-tsit Chan, and Martin Wong—each of whom embodied hybrid identities and crossed cultural, intellectual, and geographic boundaries. Their influence forms the conceptual foundation of the show, which embraces ambiguity, layered meaning, and the ongoing search for place and self within overlapping worlds.

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Dan S. Wang is an artist and writer whose practice began with letterpress printing and evolved to include drawing, sculpture, and video. He co-founded Chicago’s Mess Hall and has exhibited nationally and internationally, with recent solo projects in Los Angeles, Montreal, and at Dartmouth College, where he was the 2025 winter Artist-in-Residence. Wang co-edited LASTGASPISM: Art in the Age of Survival, named one of Hyperallergic’s top 20 art books of 2022. He splits his time between Chicago and Los Angeles.

This exhibition will run from August 3rd to September 7th, 2025.

Join us next week with Susan Blumberg-Kason as she discusses her book “When Friends Come From Afar: The Remarkable Story of Bernie Wong and Chicago’s Chinese American Service League.” The afternoon will feature a conversation with longtime civic leader CW Chan, moderated by Grace Chan McKibben, Executive Director of CBCAC. At once intimate and broad in scope, this book traces one woman’s life to reveal the story of a vital Chicago institution.

Born in Hong Kong, Bernie Wong moved to the United States in the early 1960s to attend college. A decade later, she cofounded the Chinese American Service League (CASL) to help meet the needs of the city’s isolated Chinese immigrants. Susan Blumberg-Kason draws on extensive interviews to profile the community and social justice organization. Weaving Wong’s intimate account of her own life story through the CASL’s larger history, Blumberg-Kason follows the group from its origins to its emergence as a robust social network that connects Chinatown residents to everything from daycare to immigration services to culinary education. Blumberg-Kason also traces CASL activism on issues like fair housing and violence against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Susan Blumberg-Kason is the author of When Friends Come From Afar (2024 Zibby Awards winner) and Bernardine’s Shanghai Salon (2023 Zibby Awards finalist). A regular contributor to Asian Review of Books, Cha, and World Literature Today, her work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books and PopMatters.

Grace Chan McKibben is Executive Director of the Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community, focusing on civic education and leadership in Chicago’s Chinatown. With a background in higher ed, government, and policy, she has earned honors including the University of Chicago Alumni Diversity Award, the Mayor’s Medal of Honor, and Crain’s 2025 Notable Leaders in Philanthropy.

CW Chan 陳增華 is a retired entrepreneur and longtime civic leader with over 50 years of service to Chicago’s Chinese American community. He founded or led major organizations, including the Chinese American Service League, the Chicago Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, and CBCAC. His leadership has advanced civic engagement and helped make Chicago’s Chinatown one of the most thriving in North America.