Aimy Tien (she/they) is a Colorado transplant who fell into storytelling due to a combination of an irrational childhood fear of lions, a Val Kilmer film, and an overactive imagination. Now a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist, producer, and educator, Aimy focuses on bringing the stories of people of color and marginalized groups to the page, stage, and screen. They are a proud company member of 2nd Story and the Co-Director of Operations and President of the Board of Women of the Now, a womxn-run film collective. She makes art with Free Street Theater, About Face Theatre, and other organizations.

They received a creative writing fellowship from the Luminarts Cultural Foundation, and her collection, Mosaic, was one of the top entries for the Vine Leaves Vignette Collection Award. She is currently at work on a new collection, The Queer Joy Project, which will comprise of essays, poetry, personal narrative, and multimedia live performance. Previous work can be found in The Manifest-Station, WirehouseCo, The Wheel, The Character Project, and other publications.

Aimy’s work is driven by Viet Thanh Nguyen’s concept of narrative plenitude — the belief that there should be an abundance of stories so that no single story has to stand as monolith for an entire culture, group, or community. Aimy believes we are in need of stories that cover the range of our lived experiences, and, most importantly, that these stories already exist. We just need to tell them and to listen.

aimytien.com, @aimytien

My practice treats storytelling as a know in reality, seemingly small and defined, but dense and labyrinthine—my books and works on paper require close attention to be traced and intuitively understood.

Rooted in printmaking, graphic design, and literary criticism, my storytelling pulls together a variety of structures and materials: rhythmic, gestural aspects of comics, such as panel transitions, simple iconography, and special relationships of word and picture; poetic, iterative, and adapted writing and images; and conceptually driven forms that shape the audience’s experience. The resulting narratives are figurative, often non-linear studies of the role of language in how we form perceptions and understand the self, its hidden parts and possibilities, and its connections to others.

My practice still has echoes of my BA thesis on Virginia Woolf and the relationship between reader and book—what intimacy looks like when the self, like a story, is a complicated knot, something that can never be completely articulated and known, defined as it is both by itself and by external interactions. In my work, characters are often alienated, distant, or inscrutable because of a struggle to communicate what is essentially inexpressible. Instead, to lead the reader to the inexpressible thing, my work adapts, repurposes, or reimagines language, for example as obscure symbols, partial or oblique dialogues, and derivations of existing texts, for the reader’s interpretation.

I approach viewership as reading, itself an act of inhabiting liminal spaces, connective gaps between fragmented events, between gesture and understanding, between experience and fiction, between material and meaning. Often in my book works, sparse text and elusive images present traces of a story for the reader to follow. More recently, I have focused on parallels between comics and poetry in structure, evocative capabilities, and iterative creative process, and on using source material in my storytelling. It has pushed how my work shifts the reader between concrete and abstract, entangles reality and imagination, and invites the reader to intuit a whole from disjointed visual and textual pieces. A recent book Enchiridion, for example, imagines the actress Cate Blanchett as a figure between fixed reality and infinite possibility, through an amalgam of manipulated and original imagery, language tropes related to mythology and worship, and motifs repeating across four separate narratives.

What isn’t expressed is as important for me as what is, and I am always investigating ways to engage audiences in meaning-making through fragments of story. The work I make offer glimpses of something intangible that takes its clearest shape in the viewer-as-reader’s mind; reading completes the work, even as it offers multiple possibilities in interpretation.

brute-works.com, @meanwhile_alex

Axonography depicts the world through axonometric parallel projection, a drawing method which preserves all scales and dimensions and is often used in mechanical drawings. In my use of axonography, however, I subvert this notion of functional drawing to expose various layers of emotions, experiences, and memories through the juxtaposition of scales and figures, instead of showing and describing cities with data and texts. Axonography takes familiar everyday scenes and transforms them to various scales—big, small, stretched, distorted—to elicit new meanings and hidden stories from everyday appearances. Sometimes speculative, sometimes whimsical, these drawings allow us to express feelings and emotions about our spaces. For example, how do we express ourselves to another person? How do you describe your daily life? An individual series of drawings helps us think about what we do and how we spend a day. It includes time scenes through morning, afternoon, evening, and night. These drawings of our daily lives allow us to express things we haven’t really thought about before. Finally, because of axonometric drawing’s familiar role as functional drawing, it lends validity and credibility to the illustrations.

Axonography is an innovative design practice predicated by the belief that design can improve our society and culture. Looking for design opportunities in our everyday lives, Axonography works with projects of various scales and searches for design solutions to enable them to operate within their environments, societies and cultures.

Bumjin Kim is a designer, artist, and architect based in Chicago. He is holding the position of Co-Founder at Axonography. Prior to working at Axonography, he has worked at the MIT Design Lab, NADAAA, h2o architects, Gueringlass Architects, and UPSOP (currently, Studio RYTE). Trained professionally and academically as a designer, artist and architect, Bumjin Kim has working experiences in the U.S., France, China, and Korea, and his works were exhibited in the U.S., Spain, Italy, and China. His projects and images have received numerous awards from Red Dot Design Award, A'Design Award, International Design Award, etc.

Bumjin Kim has taught design studios and elective classes at MIT and Wentworth Institute Technology.

He attended MIT, where he received his Masters of Architecture. He also holds a Bachelors of Engineering in Architecture from the Hongik University in Seoul, Korea.

axonography.net

Caroline Liu​ is a painter, seamstress, and muralist living in Chicago, IL. 7 years ago, she experienced a severe concussion and her short term memory never fully recovered. Her work became a therapeutic practice for holding onto memories she’d otherwise forget, as well as a vehicle to explore her identity as a person with memory loss. She cultivates a mixture of happy and sad moments, fear, comfort, and intimacy all wrapped up in overtly saturated narratives.

Liu also experiments with three-dimensional soft sculptures that depict some of the characters in her paintings. These plushies act as therapeutic components to her two-dimensional work where viewers can experience a more intimate understanding of her  concepts, as well as a moment of personal respite. Occasionally, Liu bridges the gap between the two with interactive furry paintings that allow viewers to break the traditional art barrier and physically connect to the work. The added tactile sensations activate  memories and moments of healing beyond just what the eye can see.

carolineliu.com, @catsandart

"In nature, nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Trees can be contorted, bent in weird ways, and they're still beautiful.” -Alice Walker

Having outdoor allergies, I previously avoided being out in nature. In my recent return to painting, the outdoors has become my inspiration. Exploring nature from afar and up close, I seek out images that are perfectly imperfect. Embracing the diversity and balance that naturally occurs, I am drawn to intermingled parts, contorted and bent in various stages of their life. Capturing them with my camera so I can explore and isolate further. I enlarge, obscure, decontextualize, and reconstruct using pastels and watercolors. I use pastels for their purity and tactile qualities.

Working with watercolor forces me to be in the moment and adaptable to the unexpected results. The process is a means of catharsis and a path to understanding and awareness. The purpose is to align my spiritual nature with this world we live in.

artworkarchive.com/profile/cmoy, @c.moy_artist

Chris Gallevo is an artist, graphic designer, and photographer from Chicago. A first generation Filipino-American, his work is inspired by pop culture and a desire to create art as a counter-balance, free from the restraints of his primary job as an art director in the advertising industry. The subject matter of his work ranges from exploring Anime-inspired female figures to making Star Wars fan art. His mediums include acrylic, spray paint, watercolor, and ink.

chrisgallevo.art, @chrisgallevo.art

Cindi Jean Zdrinc is fascinated with capturing fast movement, the passion of musicians, and loves the challenge and backdrop of constantly changing light. She graduated from DePaul University with a Bachelor of Science in Digital Cinema. She fell in love with photography when she took a required intro to photography class. The rest is history.

persistentvisionmedia.com, @cindi_jeanz

Born in Pohang, South Korea and adopted by an Italian/Irish-American family in Princeton, New Jersey, Dan Castranova works in drawing, painting, print-media, and video. Mostly focusing on drawing these days, his work explores dreams, American identity, conformity, dualism, and ambivalence. Dan Castranova creates collage-like scenes often heavily influenced by much of the media he consumed at a young age, including various manga and anime, vintage cartoons, video games, music, and so on. From tracing pages from Akira Toriyama’s ​Dragon Ball to his face glued to the television set - studying ​Tom and Jerry cartoons, his work and style is also inspired by artists such as Edward Hopper, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Frank O’Hara, Neo Rauch, and Ashley Wood. Other sources of inspiration include Haruki Murakami novels, David Lynch, Takeshi Kitano films, kung fu movies, various film noir, mysticism, Post-War America, scouring antique malls, and random other things old people like.

Dan Castranova graduated from School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a BFA in Fine Art in 2017.

@drmcast

I grew up with a shrine in my family home—a statue of Buddha on a modest shelf framed in Christmas lights. This co-mingling and connection of finite and infinite, material and spiritual, was a visible part of daily routine. I watched my mother burn incense, arrange food offerings, and meditate. My own practice draws upon devotional acts of ritual and repetition to reconcile the tension between perceiving the material world as a subject and embodying it as a connected thing among other things in a complex system of moving parts and fluctuating boundaries.

Eastern spiritual practice intersects Western phenomenology. Spirituality for me is embodied using elements of play, structure, repetition, and accumulation to lose perceived boundaries of self to get to a place of connectedness with all matter.

I choreograph thought experiments, play apparatuses, obstacle courses, vision quests, rituals for mourning, remembering, and transformation, and create systems connecting objects, gestures, and bodies, to ask philosophical questions around knowledge and existence and to question dominant, Western belief systems that draw binaries such as between subjects and objects. In recent work, I consider situations for enabling agency in a phase of capitalism characterized by anxiety.

I am drawn to the in-between, the contradiction, the fuzzy middle, the shifting boundary that distinguishes a thing from another thing, where frameworks such as language begin to break down, opening up to possibility. My work considers particular sites, objects, and texts as starting points for response. The magic circle of a game or a set of instructions may become a site for transformation and resistance.

Dao Nguyen is a Chicago-based, interdisciplinary artist. Their name is a homophone for the Vietnamese word for knife. They are the compact, red Leatherman multi-tool your aunt gave you for Christmas ten years ago. On sale at Marshall’s. Versatility and hidden strength in a small package at a discount. Stealthy enough to pass through security checkpoints on three continents on four separate occasions. They can cut, screw, file, saw, and open your beer. Bonus applications include carving miniature graphite figurines, picking locks, and sculpting tofu.

They have exhibited and performed in backyards, bathrooms, stairwells, highways, white cubes, and black box spaces, including Sector 2337, Defibrillator, the MCA, Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Brea Art Gallery, The Foundry Arts Centre, and Irvine Fine Arts Center. They received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was Artist-in-Residence at ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, Ragdale, Elsewhere: A Living Museum, and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts.

daonguyen.com, @bluepupae

My goal with my paintings is to recapture the viewers of the feelings as a child exploring new places and objects. As we grow older we become busier with our lives and not spending the time for ourselves. So I make my pieces with the intention of having the viewers to react and respond in a way a child would do. Size is very important; as a kid everything that is unfamiliar seems large but it shouldn’t feel scary but more of an excitement and happiness. So on each piece there are little details that have the viewers come closer to take a look, as a representation of the feeling of curiosity and excitement as a child.

I create my pieces with watercolor with soft blending to create a whimsical and cute feeling to my painting. I am highly influenced by the film My Neighbor Totoro by Hayao Miyazaki, as that film always reminds me to enjoy life and keep being curious and creative.

chunchunart.net, @chunchunart

Born and raised in Chicago, Eric Mah received his first woodworking experiences in his Lane Tech High School shop classes. He continued his passion for woodworking through the Chicago Park District woodshop at Norwood Park and the Chicago School of Woodworking.

Today he maintains a studio shop in Evanston where he creates various items from wood, leather, and other materials. Currently he is concentrating on woodturning using locally harvested and found wood. Other interests include beekeeping and photography. On a personal level he is married with 2 sons and continues to run his electrical contracting firm Gim Electric.

@ericsprojects

My work centers around themes of belief, credibility, and the experience of discovery. It explores the construction of fact and knowledge, and the significance of a misalignment between outward appearance and underlying characteristics. I seek to create situations that provoke curiosity and investigation. My pieces borrow, reference, and build upon elements of functional objects and musical instruments in combination with my own invention and aesthetic sense. These become objects of play, a significance contradicted by an appearance of fine craft and use of materials like metal, wood, or leather, which speak to the various ways they can be seen as tools, instruments, or apparatus. Seemingly familiar and purposeful, while also inscrutable and slightly absurd, they are open to the viewers’ speculation.

gabrielmo.com, @mo_naikeen

Born in China, I immigrated to the U.S. at the age of four to join my parents in Bridgeport, Chicago. After teaching public school art for over four years, I left full-time teaching and took on the name InsomniaBird, to create art out of my apartment. Drawing from my education background, I believe the visual arts are a form of everyday expression, and should be accessible to individuals of various ages and backgrounds. My artwork mainly features acrylic and ink, with reoccurring motifs, including a large-eyed bird. My pieces are influenced by street art, surrealism, and Japanese kawaii, or cute, style and illustrate life’s challenges and triumphs.

insomniabirdart.com, @insomniabirdart

Longing turns to desire, mourning to melancholy, complacency to joy, liking to loving and passivity to action, but what is the boiling point?

Each of my works follow a similar process – there’s a pressure to look inwards and document information lodged within the psyche, but letting someone else in is hard.

I want to care for the surface, while trying to be in touch with what’s below.

Markings, text, and images come and go. Organisms, angels, demons, spirits comingle in a murky swamp. Stories and feelings are confused about what stories and feelings they tell. What to feel, what to sense? I have some narratives in mind at first, but it’s not about holding on that tightly.

It’s a journey through landscapes of my psyche, a voyage to find refuge and put roots down.

I want to have a one-on-one conversation. My work records this attempt with nervous optimism.

James, a son of immigrants from China, was born in Toledo, OH, spent most of childhood near Dallas, TX, and received a BBA from The University of Texas at Austin in 2015. He spent three years in the Bay Area, and is now currently living in Chicago, IL. In Fall 2019, James began the PostBaccalaureate Painting & Drawing Graduate program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Currently, James’ work explores Racial Melancholia, a term coined by psychotherapist Shinhee Han and critic David L. Eng in "Racial Melancholia, Racial Dissociation" (2019) that describes the unresolved process of "the compromised immigration and assimilation of Asian Americans into the national fabric.” The melancholic process is a means to preserve lost objects or ideals by incorporating them into the ego but in an indigestible, ambivalent way.

jamesjgu.com, @jamesguu

Joyce Jodie Kim is a Korean-Canadian artist, author, & poet, with a BFA in Fine Arts & Creative Writing from OCAD University.

Author of ​Caterpillar Portraits, she loves to write stories & poems loaded with metaphors of the human condition & the universal search for truth.

Joyce’s most recent obsession has been wearable sculptures made out of paper mache. An advocate for whimsical fashion & how this generation uses aesthetics to communicate & create space, she values vulnerability, raw self-awareness, & spiritual growth.

carposcollective.com, @joyceyjodie

Juliann Wang is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist, performer, and designer, whose work leverages various media.

Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including The Schoolhouse in Beijing (Solo Show), Hyde Park Art Center, Sullivan Galleries and Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, UB Art Galleries at University of Buffalo, Woman Made Gallery, The Art Center Highland Park, Minnesota Center for Book Arts, Center for Contemporary Printmaking at Norwalk, 808 Gallery at Boston University, Cetys University and Mexicali Cultural Center in Mexico, 33 Space in Shen Zheng (China), etc. She has performed at the Chicago Cultural Center, Hyde Park Art Center, 6018 North Gallery, Mana Fine Art, Old Town School of Folk Music, and others. Her work is often quoted as possessing a “magical” quality that imparts a thoughtful sense of play and wonder.

Juliann received an MFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA from The Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. She has been interviewed by CCTV and China Residencies (NYC). Her work has been featured in the bi-monthly publication «ShuDo» magazine (Shen Zheng, China), and permanent collections of The Schoolhouse at Mutianyu in China, Mexicali Cultural Center in Mexico, and other private collectors.

juliannwang.com

I am a Filipino-American Chicago-based visual artist and USMC veteran specializing in mixed media portraiture and figure painting. Throughout my career, psychology and identity have served as thematic axioms to my ongoing narratives of internal discovery. Through my art, I am deeply passionate about nurturing self-awareness, spirituality, and mindfulness.

My work blends elements of traditional realism with pop and urban art with the aim of creating an exciting and inviting visual aesthetic as a portal into introspective dialogues of a spiritual and psychological nature. It is my hope that by creating and offering alternative ideas, I can help diminish our capitalistic society’s over-abundance of for-profit consumption-oriented media designed to produce a longing for more.

The topics and dialogues most significant to me range from the spiritual (ex: Alan Watts, Eckhart Tolle) to the scientific (ex: Carl Sagan, Yuval Noah Harari). It is my belief that there are critically observable correlations between a culture’s habits of consumption and its peoples’ quality of life. In the case of the US, rising rates of obesity, violence, and suicide reflect a continuously growing sense of unfulfillment resulting from outdated myths and misperceptions pertaining to the pursuit of happiness.

The pursuit of happiness is inherently flawed. Pursuit implies lacking, and happiness is temporal. What results is a cyclical, recursive loop of escalating aims. While the constitution decrees the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, it does not decree the promise of happiness itself. It is the responsibility then of the individual to define for his or herself what happiness is, but in a capitalist society, that path towards fulfillment is corrupted by external influence motivated by commercial profit and political gain.

It isn’t inherently problematic that Capitalism is fueled by profits, but a lack of deep and masterful understanding of this is. Mitigating the rise of unfulfillment can improve by improving education of the consumer in consuming more responsibly and ethically. A surplus of self-help books, positivity seminars, and mobile therapy apps indicate an existing push in this direction. The next significant milestone to reach would be to unanimously define a cohesive definition of what ‘responsible consumerism’ is.

juliusdcbautista.com, @juliusdcb, @paintingwithbeast

Born on December 6, 1985, Suico is a visual artist from Chicago, IL. Pioneering the emerging Abstract Literature movement, Suico’s paintings have been shown all over Chicago, in Miami’s Art Basel, and in Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum. Recently, Suico made a return to Miami and immediately made a cultural and artistic impact with the top private closing event of Miami’s Art Basel week in South Beach titled COCO Miami. His artistic visions curated and produced his own event that also included co-artist Tom Franco, which begun to break the mold of the conventional artist presentation. After a series of intense competitive art battles throughout the year, Suico became a finalist in the 2018 Midwest Regional Art Battle final in Chicago. Suico’s piece ‘An Artist’s Heart’ was also ranked in the top 20 artworks at the 2017 AFLC exhibition, outranking 121 national artists as determined by prominent jurors Jerry Saltz (Senior Art Critic of New York Magazine), and Tony Karman (President & Director of Expo Chicago). His solo show at the Elephant Room Gallery has gained much attention from TV and radio interviews from WCIU's The JAM! and WBEZ Chicago radio, becoming the talk of the town.

Endeavoring to continuously reimagine his art through cultural immersion, Suico has painted in a number of international locations including Reykjavik, Barcelona, Montreal, Florence, Rome, and Paris. His natural artistic eye has allowed him to curate multiple successful popups such as the SCOUT’s VIP access party for Hollywood executives & agents from Comedy Central, ABC, Dreamworks, Netflix, WME, CAA, UTA, and Paradigm. In 2017 he became a key committee member for Art for Life Chicago, which recently raised $80,000 for HIV research. Furthermore, Suico is a committee member for Saving City Tails and is assisting in developing an art program for Karam, a NFP helping Syrian refugee children adjust to a new life in America.

justinsuico.com, @justin.suico

I am a multi-discipline artist. I am an immigrant, a naturalized citizen, a mother, a daughter, and a wife. All these facets of me may conflict and blend together. Therefore impact who I am and affect my work. How often do you communicate your deepest thoughts and desires, but chose not to? Is it because you fear that no one will understand? Is it because you share who you are and no one will listen? It is easy to concentrate on the ugliness of everything around us. I want to add beauty and hope.

It is easy to think we are alone and no one else understands. I create art to remind others that we are not alone. When you look at my work, I want you to think of that time or a time that will come. I want the art to evoke emotion, sound, disturbance, and memory. Even if it captures your attention for a nanosecond, your thoughts are no longer the same. I bring the viewer in to be part of that moment. It is your choice on how you want to proceed. We are both changed.

My goal as an artist is to take the mundane and evoke a conversation. How is that figure portrayed? Is that figure representing weakness or strength? Does it matter what time period or does it matter what colors are used in the painting? Is this more than a painting? Is this giving a voice? What happens when attention is given?

artdeconstructed.com/blog, @art_deconstructed

Through performance, sculpture, and site-specific installation I reflect on my experiences of immigration, trauma, memory, and storytelling. In working with materials relevant in Chinese culture, and through repetitive gestures, I highlight inter-generational complexities that arise from being a first-generation immigrant. In my work, I explore and create a platform from which to speak as someone who is part of the Chinese diaspora in the United States. While grappling with these complexities, I also realize that displacement is a necessary force for identities to evolve and transform in a place where many cultures coexist. As I search for a sense of self-assertion, as a first-generation Chinese artist, I constantly experience cultural and inter-generational clashes. In search and desire for belonging, I create work that alludes to the simultaneous experiences of belonging and displacement.

My use of materials is deliberate and essential in order to evoke both a sense of understanding and defamiliarization. The symbolic forms in my work are drawn from memory of my experiences and life in China as a child and from my present home in America. Because immigration is a major issue in our era, I see my work as a part of a larger global context. I believe that personal and familial relational gaps help us grasp transnational identities.

kikizhen.net, @qified

Kristel Becares is a Filipino-American illustrator and fine artist. Born in the Philippines, raised in Bahrain, and growing up in the Skokie/Chicago area, diversity and the storytelling behind culture heavily inspires her artwork. At a very young age she started experimenting with anime, graphic novels, and animation. Her curiosity for all different types of art allowed her to further her exploration through paintings, portraiture, and even tattoo work. Throughout her art you can see her signature line art and bold colors, touching on all themes such as spirituality, storytelling, pop culture, and much more. Kristel aims to keep expanding the limits of her creative capabilities, incorporating her various inspirations and all elements of beauty surrounding her life and experiences.

@kristel_inc

I’m a Chicago-based, SWANA-identifying artist. My artistic practice explores the intensely personal spaces where our lives intersect with others, considering questions of social justice and human rights, through photography, video, writing, and other media. My work often questions whose stories are told and why. In addition to my arts education, I trained as a lawyer giving me a unique perspective on the injustices and challenges that so many people and communities in our world face every day. Although I examine difficult subjects, I seek the beauty of humanity and the creative forces we gather in troubled times. I believe art can be a catalyst for change.

kristincass.com, @kristincassphotography

Mendy Kong was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois. As a child, she was fascinated with drawing and painting. This eventually led her to self-learn Adobe Photoshop in middle school, but it was not until she entered Walter Payton College Preparatory that she was able to fully explore her artistic side. During this time, she held graphic design and screen printing apprenticeships under After School Matters’ program with Gallery37. She now attends the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a freshman. Though she has not been able to take visual art classes as a political science major, she enthusiastically pursues nonacademic artistic ventures. Currently, she updates her cartoon series on Instagram (@mejournee) tri-weekly and is anticipating the creation of a lifestyle Youtube channel, as a way to pursue moving art and life in the form of videos.

My work exists to transmit my own experiences in order to foster platforms for discussion about where other people have been, what they have done, and who they are. Growing up as a Chinese-American girl in Chicago, I felt deeply isolated in my inability to connect to any of the media I consumed. Though it was beautiful, it was not true. I turn to my pencils, paints, and digital art programs in order to express the beauty of unseen stories, of myself and those around me. I tinker with what is seen as the mundane and the dilapidated. It is what my childhood was—of days of routine and decay. Yet, in spite of that, I am deeply sentimental, craving nostalgia in my food and in my experiences. It is because I seek to demonstrate potential that rises out of the “undesirable.”

My photographs primarily play with perspective and alluded stories. I examine the various scales of human experiences, from up-close to far-away, in order to understand my own occupation of space. In addition, the standstill a photograph, of the halted once-present, provides is a mystery: It asks what was of the past and what will be of the future. Our own memories are altered with every recollection and it begs the question of its legitimacy—perhaps it is better that we remember them with glorification. I am also riveted with the artificial play of colors—most notably pink. It is an enhancement of spaces and objects in order to most effectively convey the nostalgia and tenderness—be it imagined or concrete—that I derive from my own work. As I am “coming of age,” I find it more necessary to hold onto each passing year in this manner.

@mejournee

Muriel Christensen was born in Mandalay, Burma, of second generation Chinese parents and immigrated to the US to study at the University of Illinois.

She is an engineer by profession but under the influence of her father has had a passion for art since an early age. She takes art classes and workshops whenever she can to hone her skills. She has extensive experience with stained glass and fused glass media. She has been working in portraiture, using charcoal, pencil, watercolor, and oil media. She has been taking commissioned work since 2009. Lately she has branched out to do floral, landscape, and still life works.

She joined the Plein Air Painters of Chicago in 2018 and loves to paint outdoors capturing a variety of cityscapes. She is an interpretive realist, using color and light in innovative ways to illuminate her paintings, whether from live models or photographs. She is also an associate artist member of Palette and Chisel Academy of Fine art.

She has studied under Casey Baugh, Daniel J. Keys, Scott Tallman Powers, Rose Frantzen, Steven Assael, Nancy King Mertz, and Jim McVicker.

@murielannart

My Linh Mac is a multimedia artist, graphic designer, and art educator based in Chicago. Mac is best known for her digital paintings, traditional oil paintings, and her series of contemporary 'galactic/no-brush' paintings, Ranbu. As an accomplished painter, her works portray beauty in humble places with her signature style of deep and vibrant accent colors. While Mac’s paintings have varied genres, from conceptual, abstract, and figurative to contemporary, her digital and visual design works are commercial.

Mac discovered nontraditional techniques bring further variety to her paintings through the use of color manipulation and the manipulation of materials and presentation platforms. Her niche is the ability to produce art within one medium that looks as if it were created within a different medium. Each of Mac’s artworks “speak for itself”, her unique approach of combining elements and medium giving her the credibility of an inventive artist and visual designer. What makes her work stand out among young emerging artists is how she incorporates not only technical skills and knowledge from multiple creative fields of design, art, and technologies, but also her personal experience and cultural exposure from different parts of the world as a traveler.

Mac is originally from Vietnam and pursued her art education in Singapore, Australia, and the United States. Mac received her Bachelor of Art in Digital Media & Painting in 2016 from Valparaiso University and her Master’s in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2019. Mac's multimedia artworks are represented by En Foco and RubberNeck Gallery in Chicago, Brauer Museum- Indiana, Queen Victoria Museum and Gallery- Australia, INTACT international- Canada, and in many private collections internationally in the United States, Hong Kong, and South Korea. Through her creative works, she is currently a member of National Oil and Acrylic Painting Society (NOAPS), Oil Painting of America (OAP).

mylinhmac.com, @millie_d_mac

I looked around my studio. Old dusted ceiling structures, walls that showed accumulated thick layers of paints, and gaps between the walls and floor. They were the surfaces of the space that did not exist to me before, perhaps because I did not need or use them, even though they performed as parts of the building I was in. In every corner of the space, I began to see presences that did not have to remain unnoticed as if they were “secrets”.

I was very secretive. Such the tendency as well as my experiences made me more interested in reasons why some things that happened or existed had to remain as “secrets” than revealing “secrets” themselves. I think the architectural structures resemble the structure of society in many ways; I bring the skins of these structures together to question our relationships with the world.

For instance, in the on-going project Waving to My Foreign Ceiling and Walls, I attempt to interweave interior monologue with the architecture of a space to narrate the invisible boundaries between the meanings of “foreign” and “presence”. I layer live-feed video projections as they are cast on across the floor, ceiling, walls, and the various surface of exhibition space. An audience is invited to interact with the video projections along with their reflections in the live-feed projections and mirrors.

My recent work concerns the visibility of being that differ in each culture and society due to different values judgment and understanding. I explore the inherent and inevitable subject-object [self-other] relationship. Examining what binds boundaries of a body and society together or divide them into “I-you”, “we-they”, and “I-myself", I study how these different positions are recognized and founded in a society. With my work, I try to create various encounters and rearrange those positions to de-center the position of “I”.

Nayeon Yang is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. She moved to the US from S. Korea in 2006. Experiencing the implied status of a ‘foreigner’ in both countries, she explores the politics of ‘foreign’ and ‘presence’ in global society through her projects.

navelnayeon.com, @navelnayeon

Nini is a designer based in Chicago. She is currently a young UI and web designer, valuing seamless experiences throughout devices. She aspires to create simple, whimsical, and meaningful work while being a sucker for pixel-perfection. Outside of UI design, Nini has enthusiasm for logo design, painting, and hand-lettering.

@helloitsnini

My art is to find beauty in everyday life, and communicate what I see to the viewers. Since I found my passion in painting, I also found inspiration abounding in my everyday life. My paintings are the simple stories of the surrounding landscape, people, and places that unfold. My particular interest is how light transcends the ordinary into something extraordinary. I hope through my brushes, I am able to connect with the viewers of my art at an emotional level.

Born in Taiwan and coming to the U.S. in her teenage years, both heritages shaped her to be who she is today. Like many Asian families, parents prefer their children to become professionals such as doctors, lawyers, or engineers, and not “hungry artists”. Like her talented father, she contained her love for art as a hobby and abandoned it completely after the start of her career in the business world. Art was “rediscovered” when she started to think about her next phase in life. After taking classes sporadically in local art centers, she realized her love for drawing and painting was not a passing fever, and wanted to devote more time to become a serious artist. Now working primarily with oil, she is discovering excitement and challenges in art every day. She is a Chicago artist, lives, works, and creates arts in the city she loves.

priscillahuangartist.com, @huang_priscilla

Rialin José (pronounced RY-lin ho-ZAY) is a Chicago-based filmmaker and illustrator. In 2018, Rialin graduated from Columbia College Chicago, where she received a BA in Cinema Art + Science. Rialin’s film work primarily highlights her Filipino-American experience, whereas her illustrations capture the vibrancy of Philippine everyday life. As a multimedia artist, she has been published in The Lab Review and Hair Trigger, and her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions. Most recently, her illustration, Susmaryosep Express, was featured in the 2019 Filipino-American History Month Show at Zhou B Art Center in Chicago. Her short film, ANAK NA AMERIKANA (2019), was featured in the SYNERGY: From Manila to Acapulco Exhibition, in the same venue.

rialinjose.com, @rialin__draws

My interdisciplinary practice is informed by contextual differences between fine art and visual culture. In my process, I frequently employ analysis and narrative to serve as critical frameworks. Recently, I have been interested in investigating issues of globalization as experienced through popular culture. Through utilizing a common visual language, I take advantage of situations constructed between my audience and me.

@richardalvingessert

My artwork is hugely inspired by the figure drawing sessions I run and attend. My subjects mostly center around the female portrait with different visual twists. The entirety of my work is digitally painted. I use music to dive into my work and usually associate a song or songs with each piece I create. It sets the mood and pace for a particular painting. I was born here in Chicago, then spent quite a few years in the Philippines for high school and part of college where I learned to really appreciate art and what I wanted to do. I returned to Chicago and went to Columbia College for Art & Design. From that I have made a career out of being a toy designer that spans two decades, designing everything from Beanie Babies to Happy Meal toys. I also teach art on the side, mainly out of the Elmhurst Art Museum.

@robertapolinar.art

I am an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Through a space-oriented methodology, my practice is toward the relationship between the changing surroundings/environment and me as an artist, a citizen, and a living being. I create a transformed space through objects, sculptures, sounds, scenes, or narratives prompted by my surroundings. In this transformed space, material and place, history and present, detailed information and vague impression coexist. My work juxtaposes the macro human/non-human worlds and the repeated everyday world with these elements. I look into the friction created between them, and try to understand them as one world but sometimes get confused too. I want to deepen my connection with the world by creating and practicing various forms and materials which can bring this subject matter into my work and questioning how I live my daily lives in this precarious era and how I expand myself to another side of the world.

saebomyang.com, @saebomiyam

Sam Riesmeyer is a queer Chinese-American artist based in Chicago. She always had a fascination with drawing and has recently become interested in the dynamism of hands. She began exploring the niche world of embroidery in 2019. She got her start by embroidering small designs on clothing and slowly shifted her focus to hoop pieces. She then delved deeper into her practice as a way to express heartbreak and the subsequent healing and growing process. She subverts the idea of the Chinese “red thread of fate” in her work by cutting the thread between the hands or changing its form to something more malevolent such as a rope to bind.

thepunkrocksticher.com, @thepunkrockstitcher

Hi there! I’m Sierra Tuazon, an illustrator, painter, and calligrapher currently residing in Illinois. My work is a mix of digital and traditional media, with an emphasis on conveying the emotions that flow through us, like watery ink on paper.

I currently work full-time as a Production Artist at iCanvas.com and spend most of my nights and weekends working on sketches and paintings.

sierratuazon.com, @sierratuazon

Sophie Pokorny is a photographer from Los Angeles, California, currently residing in Chicago, Illinois. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Photography from Columbia College Chicago in 2019. Although she does commercial work for hire, her art primarily focuses on documentary subjects including issues of identity, family, and race. In her own practice she continues to use medium and large format film in order to focus on the process of making images in a world where digital photographs can be produced in the palm of our hands.

Jiang Xiaohua

Using the name given to her by Jiangmen Social Welfare Institute, an orphanage in China, Sophie Pokorny examines documents pertaining to her adoption in 1998 in relation to her identity as an adoptee, an Asian-American, and as a child in a multi-racial family. In order to show a complete picture, personal essays are paired with scanned documents, family photos, and contemporary images in order to show how Sophie Pokorny has come to think about her identity.

sophiepokorny.com, @sophpokorny_photo

These collages are my way of seeking to join the disparate pasts of my bi-racial heritage. They are made from photographs old enough that most of the people depicted in them have become lost to time. The photographs speak of ages more foreign than distant lands; colonialism, tycoons, plantations, samurai, the jazz age, poverty, and world war. They represent the legacy of two families separated by a vast ocean who had no idea that one day their destinies would intersect.

I try to make sense out of these faces peering at me through a sepia haze. They have become empty signs that point to people that are no longer. They are relevant to me only by the names scrawled on their backs and the albums from which they have fallen. Like the early paleontologists assembling the first dinosaur skeletons, I must use my imagination to fill in the gaps, taking liberties to build narratives coherent to me. These old photos are combined with other photos gleaned from thrift shops and garage sales, as well as my own photos to help me understand who I am in the surreal context of America. I am constructing a narrative of my ancestry that is imagined and fanciful, but it is my own.

The images are collaged digitally but finalized through an alcohol transfer process onto handmade watercolor paper.

staffordsmith.net, @mistahiroshi

My work demonstrates and complicates the politics of displacement through my experience as a second-generation Hmong-American woman. As a nation-less ethnic minority from Southeast Asia, I fear cultural extinction. I create work that reveals the diaspora of the Hmong, questioning the roles of site and place, and instead looking in-between. My work engages political and cultural space through multidisciplinary practices such as embroidery, installation, and social practice. I use color as a dialogue–a tool for bringing attention to space, claiming space and recognizing how spaces are claimed. I interpret the question of ownership, whether land or body, through the use of Hmong textile, language, material placement, and color mixtures. This work is part of the larger question of what it means to belong, and how I join the conversation about the history of political refugeeism in America. Art is a form that allows me to position my body and other bodies in relation to the Hmong diaspora, and to investigate the generative spaces between visibility and invisibility.

"The United States has forgotten about the Hmong people and what they did. We helped the Americans. We died for the Americans–and we still are, long after the war has ended. And isn't it ironic that most Americans don't even know who we are." -General Vang Pao, 1979

tshabher.com, @tshabher

My work explores my playful fascination with how history and contemporary media continue to portray children in art as romantic symbols. The characters I depict collectively inhabit their own imaginary dystopia. Through using dolls as metaphors in my drawings, I want to explore conformity, implications of the adult gaze, and what it means to have agency as an adolescent.

vivianleart.com, @levivianart

My name is Yuqing Zhu. I am an American artist of Chinese and Mongolian heritage, named after a mythological flood-tamer of the Yangtze river. I am also a neuroscientist. I study the computations involved in perception of the visual world. Perception is an active process – in every moment, what we see is an imposition of what we wish to see. It is also heavily shaped by past experiences. I create self portrait collages as a means of constructing a personal mythology based upon my past, my present vision, and my hopes for the future. In the absence of forthright dialogue with one’s heritage, as has been the case in my life, personal history takes on a myth-building quality. Real events, ornamentation, convenient falsehoods, and Chinese and Mongolian fables are cut-and-pasted together into sometimes surreal, sometimes hyperreal scenes in my artwork. They compose the truest story I can tell.

yqzhu.com, @papriqa_