We are excited to be hosting the CSL Chicago (Chinese as a Second Language), who has outgrown their current space, for their Chinese-English Language Corner in the FL4 Reading Room every other Saturday morning! The meetup welcomes learners of varying levels in both Chinese and English. At each session, participants will be paired up to play word games and study selected readings together.

About CSL Chicago
参加我们的活动
This group is for individuals looking to make new friends and improve their Chinese or English speaking skills. We welcome language learners of any level to come out and participate in our events. Whenever possible we will have participants pair up for conversations with native speakers of their target language. 
该小组面向希望认识新朋友并提高自己·中文或英文口语能力的人。我们欢迎所有人参加我们的活动，不管语言水平能力。在条件允许的情况下，我们会让参与者与他们的目标语言的母语者进行对话。

Join us for the opening reception of the upcoming exhibition A Plot of One’s Own 一亩三分地 as part of the Chicago Exhibition Week 2026!

The popular image of an American Chinatown is defined by dragons, pagodas, and replicas of a transportative portal to Chinese-ness and the “Far East” of the American imagination.

This show redefines this gaze with a look into a somewhat ubiquitous cultural phenomenon in Chinese American communities–the farm-gardens.

We are excited to be hosting the CSL Chicago (Chinese as a Second Language), who has outgrown their current space, for their Chinese-English Language Corner in the FL4 Reading Room every other Saturday morning! The meetup welcomes learners of varying levels in both Chinese and English. At each session, participants will be paired up to play word games and study selected readings together.

About CSL Chicago
参加我们的活动
This group is for individuals looking to make new friends and improve their Chinese or English speaking skills. We welcome language learners of any level to come out and participate in our events. Whenever possible we will have participants pair up for conversations with native speakers of their target language. 
该小组面向希望认识新朋友并提高自己·中文或英文口语能力的人。我们欢迎所有人参加我们的活动，不管语言水平能力。在条件允许的情况下，我们会让参与者与他们的目标语言的母语者进行对话。

We are excited to be hosting the CSL Chicago (Chinese as a Second Language), who has outgrown their current space, for their Chinese-English Language Corner in the FL4 Reading Room every other Saturday morning! The meetup welcomes learners of varying levels in both Chinese and English. At each session, participants will be paired up to play word games and study selected readings together.

About CSL Chicago
参加我们的活动
This group is for individuals looking to make new friends and improve their Chinese or English speaking skills. We welcome language learners of any level to come out and participate in our events. Whenever possible we will have participants pair up for conversations with native speakers of their target language. 
该小组面向希望认识新朋友并提高自己·中文或英文口语能力的人。我们欢迎所有人参加我们的活动，不管语言水平能力。在条件允许的情况下，我们会让参与者与他们的目标语言的母语者进行对话。

Kun Zhao’s Metamorphosis is a collection of digital collages, in which she transforms recognizable symbols and images into breathtaking patterns and textures.

Zhao is a visual artist and educator based in Chicago, whose practice spans painting, drawing, printmaking, and material expression. She has a passion for exploring the intersection of art, culture, and environmental issues.

We are excited to be hosting the CSL Chicago (Chinese as a Second Language), who has outgrown their current space, for their Chinese-English Language Corner in the FL4 Reading Room every other Saturday morning! The meetup welcomes learners of varying levels in both Chinese and English. At each session, participants will be paired up to play word games and study selected readings together.

About CSL Chicago
参加我们的活动
This group is for individuals looking to make new friends and improve their Chinese or English speaking skills. We welcome language learners of any level to come out and participate in our events. Whenever possible we will have participants pair up for conversations with native speakers of their target language. 
该小组面向希望认识新朋友并提高自己·中文或英文口语能力的人。我们欢迎所有人参加我们的活动，不管语言水平能力。在条件允许的情况下，我们会让参与者与他们的目标语言的母语者进行对话。

We are excited to be hosting the CSL Chicago (Chinese as a Second Language), who has outgrown their current space, for their Chinese-English Language Corner in the FL4 Reading Room every other Saturday morning! The meetup welcomes learners of varying levels in both Chinese and English. At each session, participants will be paired up to play word games and study selected readings together.

About CSL Chicago
参加我们的活动
This group is for individuals looking to make new friends and improve their Chinese or English speaking skills. We welcome language learners of any level to come out and participate in our events. Whenever possible we will have participants pair up for conversations with native speakers of their target language. 
该小组面向希望认识新朋友并提高自己·中文或英文口语能力的人。我们欢迎所有人参加我们的活动，不管语言水平能力。在条件允许的情况下，我们会让参与者与他们的目标语言的母语者进行对话。

We are excited to be hosting the CSL Chicago (Chinese as a Second Language), who has outgrown their current space, for their Chinese-English Language Corner in the FL4 Reading Room every other Saturday morning! The meetup welcomes learners of varying levels in both Chinese and English. At each session, participants will be paired up to play word games and study selected readings together.

About CSL Chicago
参加我们的活动
This group is for individuals looking to make new friends and improve their Chinese or English speaking skills. We welcome language learners of any level to come out and participate in our events. Whenever possible we will have participants pair up for conversations with native speakers of their target language. 
该小组面向希望认识新朋友并提高自己·中文或英文口语能力的人。我们欢迎所有人参加我们的活动，不管语言水平能力。在条件允许的情况下，我们会让参与者与他们的目标语言的母语者进行对话。

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.

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). 

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.

—

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.

—

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.

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.

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.