Curated by Larry Lee

The Chinese American Museum of Chicago’s (CAMOC) Spotlight Series presents Metamorphosis, a new exhibition by Chicago-based artist Kun Zhao, curated by Larry Lee, on view on the museum’s fourth floor. Working with discarded commercial materials — barcode labels, product tags, and packaging — Zhao reconfigures the barcode, one of the defining visual systems of contemporary consumer culture, into a set of symbols stripped of their original function. The exhibition runs August 23 through October 4, 2026, with an opening reception on Sunday, August 23, from 2 – 5 p.m. CT. Admission to the exhibition is included with a suggested museum donation.

Across a series titled Barcode Glyph, Zhao reassembles barcode fragments into the shapes of punctuation marks and symbols — an exclamation point, a question mark, a comma, a colon, the infinity symbol, the dollar sign, and the Chinese yuan sign among them. Rendered through digital print, hand-drawn mark-making, and collaged fruit and product labels, the seventeen works range from 24-by-17-inch prints to large-scale pieces reaching 64 by 48 inches. Removed from their original context, the barcodes lose their function as scannable data and take on the appearance of language — familiar in form, illegible in meaning.

The barcode, Zhao notes, marks a turning point in how goods are identified, distributed, and consumed — a sharp departure from the consumer culture of half a century ago in both China and the United States, when objects were more often repaired, reused, and passed down, accumulating memory through use. Metamorphosis considers what is gained and lost in that shift: as the barcode reduces objects to data, Zhao’s work reclaims the same visual system for something closer to language, disrupting its readability through repetition, collage, and changes in orientation. The exhibition’s Chinese title, 蜕 变 , points to that transformation — from function to form, from code to symbol.

Curated by Larry Lee

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.

Curated by Larry Lee

In the exhibition, Steinhiser presents large-scale paintings in which the house appears as a recurring, unstable form—tilting, floating, dissolving, resting on clouds, erupting, or wrapped in hair. Interior and exterior collapse into one another; structures that once signaled shelter now behave as living images that gather the dispersed fragments of inner life.

Alongside the painted houses, animals inhabit the interior spaces. Drawn from daily encounters, poetry, song, mythology, and ornamental forms, they accumulate into a personal symbolic language—not simply placed within the works but dwelling in them, moving through rooms. They function like figures within a dream: familiar and estranged, carriers of memory and instinct.

Curated by Larry Lee

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

This exhibition 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.

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

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 they see as “dressing” the sky, expands here into a larger question of what should adorn the world and what deserves protection.

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. Lin holds an MDes from SAIC and is a Skowhegan alum. Honors include the Burke Prize and Luminarts Fellowship, and they have held residencies at places such as MacDowell, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Art.

Curated by Larry Lee

Milk is the magical substance that brings life. Not only life, also the full force of a new life. The body goes through radical changes, both beautiful and horrifying, to create milk; and it goes through more radical changes 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.

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 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.

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 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

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.

Mari Miller’s approach is interdisciplinary, often combining creative processes with science and history. The work is unique in its use of two alternative photographic techniques to connect us with nature. Chromatography is used by farmers to determine the components and health of the soil. A series of chromatograms of various plants ranging from Miller’s favorite tea grown in Taishan, chives grown in a local community garden plot, to pears grown in a cousin’s garden will be on display. Miller has also used chromatography to tone cyanotypes, which are a type of photographic blueprint, producing a novel combination of the two processes.

This show helps us to visualize what she sees as the qi of the soil and the plants that nourish us. As consumers of what grows from the land, we are the beneficiaries of nature’s love for us which transcends, at times as history informs us of, our difficult diasporic nature regardless of where we are. It is this love from the land that Miller believes will save us, our freedom, and the earth.

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.