Artist Registry
The White Columns Curated Artist Registry is an online platform for emerging and under-recognized artists to share images and information about their respective practices. The Registry seeks to create a context for artists who have yet to benefit from wider critical, curatorial or commercial support. To be eligible, artists cannot be affiliated with a commercial gallery in New York City.
To apply to the Registry, click here. Join our mailing list here to receive our open call announcement and other programming updates. For any further questions about the Registry, please contact us at registry@whitecolumns.org.
STATEMENT OF WORK
As Chinese immigrant artists, we strive to create artwork that can make a strong voice for the Asian immigrant community. Our experience as immigrants who struggled at the bottom of American society has informed and shaped our art, which focuses on human suffering and injustice in societies.
Since immigrating to the States in 2000, we have observed endless stories of Asian immigrants, their tragedies, pain, and resilience. These real-life stories of friends, families, colleagues, and community members are forever engraved in our memory and heart. Our years of experiences working as curbside artists at Times Square in New York City and Chinese restaurants have enabled us to resonate deeply with working-class immigrants/migrants. Our firsthand knowledge of racial and social class bias, hatred, and violence in Western societies has galvanized us to make artwork reflecting universal human sufferings.
In addition, the diligent and thorough research accomplished by Asian American scholars has inspired us to learn Asian American history, including the lasting societal effects of the anti-Asian immigration laws in the 19th and 20th centuries. Yet, through the course studying Western contemporary art, we realized there have been very few artworks addressing the Asian immigrant experience and its chilling history, and working-class Asian immigrant life is particularly excluded from representations, rendering them invisible in the American arts and cultural landscape. Bringing light to a blind spot in contemporary art, we are motivated to create art projects focusing on the life and history of Asian immigrants – at personal, historical, and cultural levels.
Visually, our work takes inspiration from Chinese traditional paintings, decorative art, opera costumes, and folk arts. We have been integrating Eastern aesthetics with Western realism painting tradition, developing a new style to unfold the Asian immigrant journeys. Eastern visual tradition is vital in our cultural memory; applying Eastern artistic styles is a statement of our identity.
Overall, we have received profound influence from European Renaissance art and Eastern arts, which led to the development of a unique visual language that integrates these two different traditions and speaks for today’s multicultural world. We believe that the communicative power of visual arts can inspire more dialogues between social groups.