One benefit of living in a city, even a small one, is the always-real possibility of stumbling onto some new neat thing, even if that thing is just about to go away forever.
A door flung open to the world invited me inside To-Gather, a two-week group show that ended an hour after I found it yesterday at Yale’s 32 Edgewood Gallery. It seemed I had the long, tall room filled with MFA student works to myself, until the sounds of creaking and shuffling revealed a resident of the far corner. A young woman—an artist? A curator? Both, it turned out—walked over to welcome me and explain what I was looking at: an exhibition meant to demonstrate the diversity, and thereby dissuade the stereotyping, of Asian and Asian-diasporic artists. She handed me a pamphlet, then returned to her seat, where I could now see her sneakers poking out from behind an intermediate plant, resting in a sunbeam like intertwined cats.
Her name, she later told me, is Hongting Zhu, and she co-curated To-Gather with fellow Yale School of Art MFAers Xiangyun Chen and Rebecca Cheng. From the gallery’s hyper-modern sandbox, they scooped out loose domestic spaces—a parlor, a bedroom, a living room—to create a kind of superposition establishing both a gallery and a home. The parlor’s red floor cushions, the living room’s earthy blue couch and the bedroom’s orange-blanketed bed were enticements to take a load off and to take it all in.
Not that I needed any. The first work just inside the door had already captured me: Grace Han’s quilt-like translucent banner sewn from purple, green and yellow plastic. Handled edges and cheerful customer-service sayings—“Thank You! Have a Nice Day” and, echoing the piece’s title, “Take Care”—invoked takeout bags, a vessel by which so many of us experience what we most readily and deliciously can of Asian cultures. The overall shape reminded me of a battle flag, the kind some squire long ago might have carried into war. But war was also the last thing on my mind as I watched it gently sway with the wind.
Some of the show’s many other delights: Wenqing Zhai’s painting of frogs bathing almost like hot-tubbers in a clay fountain pot; Xing Zhang’s Return, a deceptively simple silkscreen of black dashes and gray triangles evoking plains and mountains; Shagnik Chakraborty’s mesmerizing VHS audiovisual collage, On Thin Ice; and Mingge Zhong’s Rats, featuring a toy version (with a soundtrack) of the tragically misunderstood rodent, plus a book with anatomical photographic typography and a spiral binding that turns into a tail way past the end of the punch holes.
The argument that Asian and Asian diaspora artists approach art with as many approaches as exist isn’t one I needed to hear. But it was fun and gratifying to listen all the same.
Written and photographed by Dan Mims. Image 1 features the open door to the gallery. Image 2 features Wenqing Zhai’s Painting (beyond a partial blurred view of Priscilla Young’s Rice Container). Image 3 features detail of Mingge Zhong’s Rats. Image 4 features Shellie Zhang’s Arrangement #1. To view all 15 images accompanying this story, check out the email edition.
