5 Asian American–Led Galleries Building Inclusive Art Communities | Artsy (2024)

May 22, 2024 12:51AM

Since the term “Asian American” was coined by activists in 1968 to foster a sense of community among a diverse population, those identifying as Asian American or Pacific Islanders (AAPI) have found ways to embrace, challenge, and organize around this expansive social category.

The AAPI gallerists featured here offer insights from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago into their efforts to cultivate inclusive and impactful communities around their programs. Their approaches include working directly with nearby AAPI-owned businesses, taking risks on previously marginalized voices and perspectives, supporting artists’ projects that treat exhibition spaces as social laboratories, and actively pushing back against the model minority myth and other harmful stereotypes in their day-to-day interactions.

Here, we speak to the names behind five AAPI-owned galleries about how they are creating inclusive communities around their programs.

Echo He, Lynn Hai, and Iris Zhang

Fou Gallery, New York

Advertisem*nt

Fou Gallery is an apartment space ensconced in a classic Brooklyn brownstone. “The space mixes the old and the new,” said Echo He, who founded the gallery in 2013 with the mission to champion a new generation of contemporary Chinese artists, diaspora artists, and artists from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds.

He and the gallery’s partners, Lynn Hai and Iris Zhang, believe that art can promote internal well-being, a sense of communion with nature, and positive interpersonal relationships. “Our space has a homelike feeling,” said Hai, the gallery’s artistic director. To further nurture this intimate atmosphere, Zhang, the gallery’s communications and events director, organizes events such as mushroom cultivation workshops and improvisational concerts with underground musicians. The aim is for these gatherings to be inclusive and collaborative. “When we put on special events at the gallery, it is to build a diverse cultural community,” Zhang said.

Fou Gallery’s roster consists of artists who transform the world’s pressing issues into poetic propositions. In 2014, for instance, artist Lin Yan called attention to air pollution in Beijing by pouring black ink onto handmade Xuan paper. Painter Saba Farhoudnia, whose first solo exhibition with the gallery opened in March 2024, sublimates her memories of war and gender discrimination into dreamlike, monumental canvases. Aside from sharing a meditative sensibility, the gallery’s artists also tend to express their contemporary concerns through traditional techniques and imagery. “We like to describe our artists as old souls,” He said.

Kavi Gupta

Kavi Gupta, Chicago

Kavi Gupta, who established his eponymous gallery in Chicago, Illinois, in 2000 and in New Buffalo, Michigan, in 2020, is a self-described idealist. Gupta’s father immigrated to Chicago from India in the 1960s, and Gupta believes he owes it to the Midwest and its communities of color to find a platform for its people, culture, and history in an art world that still overlooks smaller cities and marginalized viewpoints.

Gupta is also a pragmatist. “Artists come to our gallery first because we’re problem-solvers, and we don’t say no,” he explained, referring to the massive amount of labor and negotiation that goes into fabricating works to artists’ specifications. He recalled, for instance, the making of Tomokazu Matsuyama’s Nirvana Tropicana (2020), a 16-foot stainless steel sculpture that resembles an outsized bouquet of metallic vegetation, as well as finding a fabricator to produce Suchitra Mattai’s Osmosis (2022), a colossus of fabric, cords, and wood encrusted in white salt.

Working in the Midwest comes with its advantages, including time and space. His geographical positioning also presents him with unique opportunities to help artists in time-sensitive situations. As a point of pride, Gupta enjoys being involved in every level of planning and organization at his gallery and assisting others whenever possible, although he is keenly aware of stereotypes that cause arts workers from marginalized backgrounds to shoulder more responsibility than is fair. “AAPI people have consistently been called hard workers,” he reflected. But rest assured, he said, “there will be a time when we are allowed to move past that.”

Helen J. Park

Helen J Gallery, Los Angeles

Helen J. Park began as a collector of Dansaekhwa paintings—abstract, monochrome canvases made in post-war Korea—but soon discovered an abundance of emerging Korean artists who’d never exhibited in the U.S. “I wanted to give them a platform to show their work here,” Park said. Since 2020, she has been running Helen J Gallery, an expansive, streamlined, and modern exhibition space in Hollywood, Los Angeles, where she promotes the art and design of Asia and the Asian diaspora to audiences in Los Angeles and beyond.

“I want to show different materials and mediums,” Park told Artsy. “My personal taste is a big part of that decision.” At first glance, the gallery’s roster is filled with artists working in traditional mediums such as painting and sculpture, but upon closer inspection, their materials turn out to be highly eclectic. Artist Woo Byoung Yun, for instance, uses plaster to make his paintings, and Yee Sook Yung makes vessels out of ceramic shards and gold leaf in her own formally experimental style of kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery.

“As a gallery, I think it’s most important to listen to the artist and to understand what their practice is,” said Park. Sometimes, this means being open to showcasing unconventional installations. In February 2024, for a show with Ai Jing, the gallery installed a live garden, reminiscent of a meadow in Ai’s hometown, among the artist’s paintings and sculptures. In this case, Park’s mission to provide a “dynamic and inclusive roster of exhibitions” led her to reimagine the white cube as a green space. “We brought in strips of potting soil, plants, and flowers,” she recalled. “We watered the garden and kept it alive.”

Cecilia Zhang Jalboukh

Yi Gallery, New York

“I’ve always asked myself: What does an art gallery do?” said Cecilia Jalboukh, the founder of Yi Gallery. For Jalboukh, who established her program in Brooklyn and online in 2018 with an eye for both conceptualism and craft, the main purpose of her space was to expose visitors to art in a creative and site-sensitive way.

Jalboukh is drawn to artists who work with difficult materials. The first artist Jalboukh chose to show was Annesta Le, who creates minimalist sculptures from neon tubes. Such sculptures demand an intense production process involving technicians and complicated transportation logistics. Although neon is not often the first material a gallerist chooses to handle, it prepared Jalboukh for the hands-on research required of the job. “It’s since been an ongoing learning experience,” she said.

Yi Gallery is situated in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, a neighborhood that is home to a diverse array of middle-class immigrants. “We have amazing small businesses in Sunset Park,” Jalboukh told Artsy. The proximity of these businesses has been beneficial to the gallery. For example, to realize an immersive installation for artist Sun Young Kang’s first solo exhibition, the gallery needed metal frames made, so Jalboukh took one of Kang’s drawings and walked through the neighborhood knocking on the door of every metal shop she came upon. She eventually connected with a Chinese fabricator who took on the unconventional project. According to Jalboukh, her gallery’s success is in part “thanks to the Asian community in Brooklyn.”

Emilia Yin

Make Room, Los Angeles

Make Room, a 4,500-square-foot gallery in Hollywood, Los Angeles, seeks to create space for artists with diverse backgrounds and practices. “What I think about programming, I think about how to support and champion artists without pigeonholing them,” the gallery’s owner and director, Emilia Yin, told Artsy. “As someone who is diasporic, coming from Hong Kong, I’m interested in how people navigate intersecting and overlapping aspects of culture.”

Yin is willing to take risks with underappreciated but historically significant artists. Yeni Mao, for example, a queer Chinese American artist based in Mexico City, has long been overlooked in the U.S. At the 2024 edition of Frieze Los Angeles, Yin presented seven of Mao’s steel, stone, and leather sculptures and successfully reintroduced the artist’s work to a U.S. audience.

Since Make Room is located near a commercial production studio and a residential neighborhood, Yin tends to blend art and everyday life in the gallery’s flexible and creative programming. The installation of Terence Koh’s KOHFEE (2024) in Make Room’s project space, for instance, required covering the interior of the room with mud and planting an olive tree indoors.

Inspired by L.A.’s coffee culture, Koh would appear at the gallery on weekends to serve his own brew to visitors, who took time out of their days to chat with one another. For Yin, this is exactly the purpose she wants her gallery to serve. “I’m interested in building an ecosystem, a community that becomes a support system for its members,” Yin said.