Spotlight Series

Dan S. Wang: Finding Our Way (through a triple double)

August 3 – September 7, 2025

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.

  • 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.

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Ariel Zhang: Distant View Nearby