Past Exhibitions

September 4, 2024–January 26, 2025

Throughout Southeast Asia, various belief systems and cultural practices make the consideration of life and death—and the permeability between these worlds—a daily exercise. In Thailand, a commonplace mode of engagement with the spiritual realm comes in the form of spirit houses, dollhouse-size devotional structures rooted in Buddhist and animist beliefs and found outside virtually every home or building. 

Inspired by these structures, Spirit House surveys how thirty-three contemporary artists of Asian descent are exploring modes of making that exceed rational understanding and enter haunted dimensions. Challenging the privileging of data-driven, scientific methods of understanding the world around us, the artists represented in Spirit House instead foreground inherited, embodied, and psychic forms of knowledge.

August 21, 2024 - February 22, 2025

Livien Yin: Thirsty is the first museum solo exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Livien Yin, a 2019 Stanford MFA. This single-gallery exhibition showcases new and recent paintings by Yin and their sensitive, researched-based approach to creating scenes of contemporary subjects alongside historical Asian Americans and their environments. In their paintings, Yin often casts their friends as models, collapsing the distance between the past and present to create new connective threads between Asian Americans across generations.

June 19 , 2024- December 1, 2024

This single gallery exhibition features two video works and two complementary series of small handmade objects and works on paper by San Francisco Bay Area-based artist TT Takemoto. Takemoto’s videos Looking for Jiro (2011) and On the Line (2018) uniquely center queer experiences of intimacy in prewar and WWII contexts. The Gentleman’s Gaman series (2009–23) and an installation of handcrafted kokeshi dolls (2023) offer sculptural, expanded modes of engagement with challenging and overlooked narratives in Asian American history, as reimagined by Takemoto.

May 31–November 12, 2023

Taking its inherent theatricality as a jumping off point, Kenneth Tam’s video All of M re-stages the high school prom—often understood as a rite of passage in the transition to adulthood—as a vehicle for examining the affective spaces created by men in groups and how men perform their identities in spaces of social ritual.

December 14, 2022–May 14, 2023

A young Yu’s work engages with Korean folklore, ritual, and dance, reinterpreting and regenerating it for contemporary, diasporic contexts. Mourning Rituals is a performance-based video reimagining the Korean ssitkimgut ritual, during which the spirits of the deceased are cleansed and guided into the afterlife.

August 31, 2022–January 15, 2023

One of three inaugural exhibitions of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI), At Home/On Stage: Asian American Representation in Photography and Film, curated by Maggie Dethloff, assistant curator of photography and new media, explores how Asian American artists’ work participates in conversations around identity and representation.

September 28, 2022–February 12, 2023

For thousands of years, people have made treacherous journeys across bodies of water. Apart from Indigenous and First Nations peoples, all inhabitants of North America are the product of such transoceanic movement. This exhibition considers the ongoing artistic impact of many peoples’ migration across a particular body of water: the Pacific Ocean. What would it mean to understand the United States as being situated not just west of the Atlantic but east of the Pacific? How would this understanding reorient our perception of American art and its significant participants? 

June 30, 2021–November 13, 2022

Emissary Sunsets The Self explores cognitive evolution and the conditions that shape it. Created with a video game engine, the work generates open-ended animations without fixed outcomes—a format the artist calls “live simulation.” Ian Cheng—who studied cognitive science and art practice—utilizes a range of artificial intelligence (AI) models to mimic humans’ complex brains and enable unpredictable encounters between a character with a narrative goal and an erratic environment.

November 14, 2018–November 19, 2020

Stephanie Syjuco’s (Art Practice MFA ’05) monumental handmade banner, I Am An ..., is a powerful meditation on the connection between identity, protest, and political legibility in contemporary society. When completely expanded, the stark white block letters read I AM AN AMERICAN.

May 9, 2018–September 28, 2020

In this exhibition, artist Do Ho Suh uses a chandelier, wallpaper, and a decorative screen to focus attention on issues of migration and transnational identity. Using repetition, uniformity, and shifts in scale, Suh questions cultural and aesthetic differences between his native Korea and his adopted homes in the United States and Europe.