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.

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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.

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.

Queer Asian Play Reading: The Trouble with My Hair
A solo performance by Ada Cheng
Co-organized with: Nothing Without a Company

Join us for a reading of The Trouble with My Hair, a new solo play by Ada Cheng—an intimate exploration of gender and sexual identity told through her evolving relationship with her stylist and her hair.

The reading will be followed by a conversation between Ada Cheng and Anna-Rose Ii-Epstein, co-founder of Nothing Without a Company, discussing the play’s themes, Ada’s creative process, and the broader landscape of queer women’s storytelling in theatre.

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Dr. Ada Cheng is a Chicago-based educator, storyteller, and performance artist who leverages personal narratives to illuminate structural inequities and amplify marginalized voices. Transitioning from academia to the arts, she has become a prominent figure in community-based storytelling and social advocacy.

*Thanks to the generous support of the DCASE Neighborhood Access Program grant.

We’re excited to invite you to an After Hours Pride event – Passing Through the Same House: LGBTQ Animated Shorts, highlighting the work of queer Chinese and Asian animators based in Chicago, on Friday, June 27, from 6:00 PM to 8:30 PM.

This special evening will feature a selection of animated short films curated by Jonni Peppers, followed by a conversation with participating artists Charlotte Hong Bee Her, Stella Chen, Shirley Zhong, and Elaine Yue. Historian Mian Chen will moderate the discussion.

Featured Artists:
Stella Chen, EXYL, Sherry Xie, Elaine Yue, Xingpei Shen, Asia Miller, Shirley Zhong, Jordan Wong, Vivian Hu and Charlotte Hong Bee Her

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Jonni Pepper-GoLions (Joan-ee Pepper Go Lions) is an award-winning animator and filmmaker from Los Angeles, currently based in Chicago. She is the lead animation programmer at Slamdance Film Festival and founder of Transfiguration International Film Festival, a traveling film festival focused on underrepresented voices in film and animation.

Mian Chen is a historian from Northwestern University. His research focuses on transnational history, sexualities, and media.

*This event is funded in part by the DCASE NAP grant.

China officially ended its international adoption program on August 28, 2024, marking the close of more than three decades of transnational adoptions that began officially in 1992. During this period, over 160,000 Chinese children were adopted abroad—more than half by families in the United States, many of them placed in rural or predominantly white communities.

Join us for an in-person and personal conversation, storytelling session with two local artists—both queer Chinese adoptees—as they share their personal journeys, creative work, and reflections on identity, belonging, and adoption.

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Katherine Plier, also known professionally as "Kai," is a multifaceted artist and community organizer based in Chicago. She is renowned for her dynamic roles as a pianist, vocalist, and arts leader, seamlessly blending her musical talents with a deep commitment to social impact.

Chun An Huai is a jeweler whose work explores their experience as a queer Chinese American adoptee, blending traditional Chinese aesthetics with contemporary jewelry design.

*Thanks to the generous support of the DCASE Neighborhood Access Program grant.

CAMOC is pleased to welcome its next Spotlight Artist, Ariel Zhang, with Distant View Nearby.

In this installation, painting becomes an act of quiet construction, tracing the invisible ways architectural spaces shape how we build, dwell, and belong. The artist’s work moves beyond capturing exact places, instead tracing what lingers: “the shift of light across a surface, the feeling of texture when leaning against a wall—the quiet impressions that remain long after the space is gone.” In constructing these spaces, the artist reminds viewers that dwelling is not just about inhabiting a place, but about being shaped by what we create and what we choose to carry.

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Ariel Zhang is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist working across painting, installation, and sculpture. Her practice explores the spatial and psychological dimensions of architecture through geometric forms and fragmented compositions. Zhang earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago after studying German and Economics, and has exhibited in Chicago, São Paulo, St. Louis, and Annapolis.

CAMOC’s ongoing Spotlight Series, curated by Larry Lee, exists to showcase the dynamic array of Chinese American artists working in the vibrant world of contemporary fine arts in Chicago and beyond.

This exhibition will run from May 4th to June 8th, 2025.

Join us for the reception of Race Making and a chance to meet the curator, Lenore Metrick-Chen!

This exhibition explores how the racial category “Chinese” was socially constructed and redefined in 19th-century America, leading the way to the images and stereotypes that persist in framing the perception of Asian Americans today.

Through curated selections of these American Advertising trade cards, the precursor to our postcards, Race Making offers a unique lens into how Chinese identity was imagined by Americans during a time of shifting social values, technological change, and national anxieties.

While themes like labor and nationhood directly influenced how Chinese racial identity was shaped, the exhibition also explores broader cultural dynamics. Gender, for instance, emerges as a recurring thread—then, as now, evolving ideas about gender were deeply entangled with larger social transformations, and Chinese imagery was often used to challenge or reimagine existing norms.

Race Making invites visitors to immerse themselves in a complex narrative, where past and present intermingle. The exhibition is not only about history—it is also about the ways race is continuously made and remade in American life.

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Curated by Lenore Metrick-Chen, Former Education Director and Curator at the Fort Des Moines Museum in Des Moines, IA., and an emeritus professor of Art and Cultural History at Drake University. Through teaching, writing, and curation, she explores art as a material object and as a language for memory and social change, especially in relation to race, immigration, and ethnicity.

We’re excited to share this off-site program as a part of EXPO ART WEEK, in celebration of the city’s incredible contemporary arts ecosystem.

This Sunday, April 27, curator/writer Cristobal Alday and gallerist Francine Almeda of Tala Chicago will be helping us close out the current Spotlight exhibition, Looking Out, with the show’s artist Jiaming You. Together, they’ll reflect on building creative networks and community care across Chicago’s BIPOC art scenes.

Join us for this special panel discussion, Walking the Joint Path.

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

CAMOC celebrates the dazzling artistry and unwavering spirit of our local Asian American drag queens. These talented artists embody strength, creativity, and joy, and highlight the diversity of brilliance within the Asian American community.

Love to DJ Club Chow & these iconic queens for the light they shine:

• Squeaky C. Banks

• Kenzie Coulee

• Dear Jamie

• Markiki Jones

• Cumli Cumari

CAMOC is pleased to present Spotlight Artist, Jiaming You, with Looking Out.

This exhibition explores the act of looking, something often done subconsciously, but a conscious drive for the artist. Figures in the work look into the picture as an act of personal revelation. Rather than obscuring faces to challenge stereotypes, now “their existence does not depend on being the subject of someone’s gaze,” and the work highlights their autonomy. Filling silhouettes with images of places and patterns, this show challenges the classic “figure-ground” relationship, inviting reflection on how self-presentation is shaped by social context.

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Jiaming You is a Chicago-based painter and installation artist with an MFA from SAIC (2022) and a BS from UW-Madison (2018). A recipient of the Carrie Ellen Tuttle Fellowship, Jiaming has exhibited in Los Angeles, New York, Shanghai Art021 2024, and featured in Soft Lightning Magazine, Emerge Magazine, CanvasRebel, Sina News, Artdaily, New City, Art Insider, and Chicago Reader.

CAMOC’s ongoing Spotlight Series, curated by Larry Lee, exists to showcase the dynamic array of Chinese American artists working in the vibrant world of contemporary fine arts in Chicago and beyond.

This exhibition will run from March 9th to April 13, 2025.

Join us for the Spotlight Series closing on February 23, featuring a special workshop by the artist, Linye Jiang.

Explore photography beyond technical precision through interactive exercises spanning portraits, landscapes, and self-portraiture. How do we connect with subjects, environments, and ourselves in a way that feels intuitive and natural? Inspired by Undisclosed Location, this session invites you to explore photography as an organic and personal practice that values presence, observation, and emotion over perfection

There will be three interactive exercises:
Portraits – Building trust, letting moments unfold naturally, and capturing presence
Landscapes – Observing light, embracing stillness, and lowering expectations for more authentic compositions
Self-Portraits – Using available surroundings, experimenting with timers, and expressing identity

*No professional equipment needed. Just bring a phone, camera, or whatever you like to capture images with.

From Disney’s Bambi to Hallmark greeting cards, explore the artistic legacy of the pioneering Chinese American artist Tyrus Wong.