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.

Curated by Larry Lee

This exhibition explores motherhood, emotional labor, and posthuman kinship, examining how these concepts evolve through the lens of personal memory, technological mediation, and feminist critique.

Wang poses questions with this show: Can motherhood be externalized through machines or systems, and what does that mean for the idea of care? What happens when love is separated from duty?

Curated by Larry Lee

This series is part of an ongoing exploration into how architectural containers shape the way we build, dwell, and belong. I’m drawn to the quiet power of built environments—how walls, thresholds, and boundaries influence not only how we navigate the world, but how we situate ourselves within it.

These geometric forms may appear empty, but to me, they carry deep spatial and psychological weight. I’m less interested in mapping exact places, but in 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. The title, Distant

View Nearby, speaks to a tension within the work: a closeness that remains elusive, and a distance that feels intimate.

For me, painting is a way of building. I treat the surface as a site where uncertainty is not a limitation, but a condition to inhabit. Each surface retains traces of decisions, adjustments, and erasures, foregrounding process over permanence. Within these gestures, spatial and temporal boundaries begin to dissolve—past and present, near and distant. In the act of constructing space, I’m reminded that to dwell is not only to occupy, but to become shaped by what we build and what we choose to hold.

Curated by 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.

Curated by Larry Lee

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.

Curated by Larry Lee

In this installation, Jiang’s work is a love letter to photography, focusing on overlooked, peripheral details in the landscape rather than grand, iconic scenes—poetic fragments that feel personal and familiar. By stepping into the frame and re-photographing their own work, the artist challenges the invisibility often expected of photographers, occupying the space between observer and participant. “Undisclosed locations—private, unmarked, and unseen—exist because I chose to withhold them,” and offer here a quiet inquiry into absence, visibility, and the complex relationship between self and landscape.

Portals of Kinship, Threads of Commerce features the work of artist Thandi Cai and new glimpses into the CAMOC archives. This show delves into the intricate relationship between kinship networks and commerce that shaped the spread of Chinatowns, which hold at their core a sense of disconnection–between generations, between those within and beyond Chinatown, and between museum collections and lived histories.

Curated by Larry Lee

In this installation, Chen’s work moves away from literal depictions of landscape. The work relies on abstract imagery that references natural environments, without representing specific objects like trees or mountains. The compositions are often drawn from memory, inspired by her reflections on remote places she has traveled to, particularly in the North Atlantic and Arctic regions.

Curated by Larry Lee

In the mood for love on the Chungking Express as tears go by happy together speaks of neon and noir…

Through an urban space romanticized on the Silver Screen, gazing upon a bygone and faraway era, are these reflections of ourselves: as if love letters composed to the postwar generation. From central casting in the spotlight as iconic images of a bouffant-styled Maggie Cheung elegantly clad in red silk qipao, to pixieish Faye Wong riding the moving walkway for public transportation, or a slick-haired Tony Leung nonchalantly dragging on his cigarette in a smoke-filled room listening to cool jazz or Cantonese pop.

That is the rose-colored lens that Spotlight Series artist, Chien-An Yuan looks through. Lovingly recreating, by way of Hong Kong and Roaring Twenties Shanghai, his own Miami Vice in “City of Light, City of Shadows.” Here to remind us of when Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa were once hailed by the general public as American Hollywood sex symbols.

Curated by Larry Lee

Tsen will be curating pieces from her ongoing series of books of the same name that explores the American narrative of perpetual expansion and the longing for home. The exhibition will be a mixture of artifacts, photographs, drawings, prints, and needlepoint, specifically focused on the history of the land of the Midwest.

Elaborating, Tsen says, “The open land west of here is the most American of places. In this land lies both our eternally expanding future and our original state. It is the lure of a new beginning and the timelessness of home, the edge and the interior, all at once. In Rain Follows the Plow, I use these contradictions as a starting point to explore the promise of empty land and related themes of time, memory, and migration. The resulting collection of artifacts and stories layers the land’s physical history alongside its imaginary realms.”

Curated by Ji Yang

On the afternoon of June 16th, the Chinese American Museum of Chicago (CAMOC) launched its inaugural Pride Month exhibition and event series with a roundtable conversation featuring trans artist Hai-wen Lin, trans leader Alexis Martinez, and a full audience. Martinez, who was born and raised in Chicago’s Chinatown, reflected on coming out as trans and negotiating identity in the community during the 1950s and 1960s. Lin shared the struggles and dilemmas faced by the younger generation of trans people and discussed how trans experiences shape their artistic practices and teaching. The guests also shared their thoughts on common challenges faced by the trans community, such as transphobia and public misunderstanding.

“I think it is wonderful,” Martinez shared. “It is a remarkable opportunity to be included in the history of the neighborhood, especially stories related to queer people.”

The Pride Month program, curated by Ji Yang, is a collaboration between CAMOC and 6018|North, a Chicago-based artist-centered nonprofit platform. The program aims to highlight queer experiences within the Chinese American community through art, storytelling, and conversation. Along with the conversation, CAMOC launched an LGBTQ-themed special exhibition featuring works from Hai-wen Lin, Taiwanese artist Eugene I-Peng Tang, and China-born artist Linye Jiang. The artworks experiment with various media and techniques, combining sculptures, video choreography, and AI technology to explore themes of acceptance, stigma, racialized bodies, and transitions.

Two more events will soon follow the opening. On June 30th, from 2–5 pm, Eugene I-Peng Tang will share his work experience with Hotline Association, a queer service and activist group in Taiwan. Tang will provide an overview of queer activism in Taiwan and offer personal reflections on solidarity building, community outreach, and challenges. He will also read an excerpt from Grandma's Girlfriends, the Splendid Youth of Elder Lesbians, a nonfiction collection of elderly lesbian life stories co-authored by Tang. He will further share the interview process and elaborate on the history of lesbian experiences in Taiwan.

On July 7th, also from 2–5 pm, Linye Jiang will share her father’s story and her own journey of queer exploration. At fourteen, Jiang accidentally discovered her father’s closeted identity when she found his account on Tianya forum, once the most popular online forum among the first generation of Chinese internet users. Using this account, her father had anonymously published a gay novel based on his experiences titled Shenzhen Stories. Jiang will reflect on queer experiences in digital spaces and online writings in early 2000s China through her father’s experience. She will also discuss her perspective as a daughter living with a closeted man and its influence on her own queer journey and artistic practices in the United States.

The Chinatown Museum Foundation (CMF) DBA Chinese American Museum of Chicago – Raymond B. and Jean T. Lee Center is governed by the Board of Directors of a 501(c)(3) non- profit corporation. Founded in 2005, CAMOC is dedicated to the advancement in the appreciation of Chinese American culture and its contributions as an important part of the American fabric. It does this through exhibitions, education, and research to preserve the past, present, and future of Chinese Americans primarily in the Midwest.

The Pride Month program will continue through July 13th, 2024. The Chinese American Museum of Chicago is currently open Wednesdays and Fridays from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Masks are optional.

Curated by Larry Lee

Ye’s work explores the tense relationship between objecthood and personhood and interrogates the complex discourse of cultural transformation within contemporary spaces that defy classical stereotypes. “I present original paintings that marry traditional Chinese iconography with modern techniques. My art grapples with the dynamic interplay between cultures, the ramifications of globalization, and the multifaceted intricacies of identity.” His paintings incorporate the use of photo transfers, cyanotypes and detailed air brushing that reflect a multi-layered dynamism. A series of over a dozen paintings will be shown including some large scale ones.

Curated by Larry Lee

Wang’s multimedia exhibition highlights selections from her series on textiles, print, painting and poetry. Wang captures astute observations of architectural landscape surroundings with its relationship to people while incorporating the creative process into the work itself. Empty lots and industrial façades make their way into large handwoven and painted textiles contrasted with its related human experience represented through the repetitive nature of weaving. Her letterpress-printed series, Palimpsests, writing modified from the original printed form, is a direct reflection of the layered nature of her poetry from the meticulous reset of the metal type printed over multiple times to the slightly altered titles themselves. Her anthology of poetry about frustrated love, YELLOW KNEES, will also be on display, as well as work with found items and visceral reminders of her life from recent years.

Curated by Larry Lee

CAMOC kicked off its artist Spotlight Series for 2024 with an exhibition from Mari Miller. Curated by Larry Lee of Molar Production, the Spotlight Series is embarking on its third year with CAMOC to showcase the works of local Chinese American artists. Mari Miller: The Land Loves Us sends us a timely and universal message of nature’s love for us. It was an exhibition featuring the alternative photography process of chromatography, with select prints also combined with cyanotypes.

Curated by Larry Lee

The painter James Kao loves to draw from observing and then imagining nature. For the Spotlight Series at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, he will show five drawings that reflect on how built and unbuilt (natural?) worlds confront each other; and three additional drawings which reveal how war cuts through both.

Curated by Larry Lee

Chinoiserie (Chinesey Things) brings together a disparate array of forms, colors, themes, and elements evocative of the artists’ Chinese American identities. Father-daughter team, Adrian Wong and Clementine Reid Wong (second and third-generation immigrants, respectively) collaboratively produced the works on view while reflecting on the question, “What makes a thing Chinese?” and further to the more intrinsic question of “What makes us Chinese?” The title of the exhibition, Chinoiserie, is drawn from the emergence of Orientalist motifs in 17th century European decorative arts, from Rococo frescoes to Delftware to Medici Porcelain – specifically, the imitation of Chinese artistic traditions built upon an imagined, romantic ideal of the Far East, or, as abstracted by Reid Wong in the parenthetical, “Chinesey Things”. The gifted 5-year-old Reid Wong, who grew up in a more multi-cultural society than her father, questions and brings to fore design elements imbued in what is seen as her cultural heritage.

Curated by Larry Lee

Spotlight Series Made in Taiwan | 台灣製造 temporarily re-brands the Chinese American Museum of Chicago into a product. Utilizing the “COOL” or Country-of-Origin-Label for ‘Made in Taiwan’ as a commentary on the social and material contexts of our contemporary digital connectivity, or lack thereof. As one of multiple interventions throughout the institutional space of the museum, Taiwanese-Chinese-American and Cuban artists Cathy Hsiao and Nestor Siré further re-imagine the Spotlight gallery as an alternative production studio for an iPhone supply chain, but one from the perspective of Taiwan and Cuba as particularly contested sites of technological production and access. They propose a horizontal model of the speculative, the serious, the absurd and otherwise. Taking porcelain and recycled plastic as material cues they reframe the supply chain of the iPhone into a socio-material one revealing in the process how social and cultural economies thrive under conditions of political and economic erasure.