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DTSTART:20260308T070000
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DTSTART:20261101T060000
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DTSTART;TZID=America/New_York:20260514T080000
DTEND;TZID=America/New_York:20260620T170000
DTSTAMP:20260613T175517
CREATED:20260417T194927Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260417T194927Z
UID:116278-1778745600-1781974800@artinamericaguide.com
SUMMARY:Tiffany Chung: traces
DESCRIPTION:RYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to announce traces\, an exhibition of embroidery\, installation\, sculpture\, video\, and works on paper by Tiffany Chung. Chung’s recent projects explore earth’s deep times\, Neolithic ditched and walled enclosures\, and ancient global connections through the 3\,500-year-old spice trade. Chung reorients the world through history\, disentangling and reweaving the environmental\, cultural\, economic\, and political threads that have created global narratives over millennia. Curator Orianna Cacchione has described Chung’s practice as an “insatiable search for knowledge itself.” Writing on Chung’s cartographic works\, Cacchione explained\, “The meticulously rendered infographics shuttle between legibility and illegibility\, recognition and erasure\, the poetic and the empirical\, setting up a dialectical tension that is threaded throughout Chung’s works.” \nChung’s conceptual framework is built upon two key pursuits. One is the multiplicity of history\, challenging accepted narratives by filling in the gaps left out of official accounts\, to shift and reclaim the discourse. The other is the entanglements of social\, political\, economic\, and environmental processes across times and terrains\, entwined in landscape archaeology and historical ecology – the intricate relationship between humans\, the built environment\, and the natural world. \nIn some of the work on view\, Chung explores the movements of plants and spices through space and time\, as they have been traded across the world from ancient times to today. In studies of exotic botanical organisms and spices from the ends of the earth in quest of market dominance (2025)\, Chung pairs embroidered illustrations of spice plants with jars displaying the spices themselves. The embroidered map Global Spice Trade: routes from ancient time to the age of exploration/exploitation (2024-25) casts an overview of the early global economic integration. Proposing that globalization began long before the 1400s\, the work charts ancient spice trade routes connecting Asia\, Africa\, Europe\, and the Americas. Chung says\, “The spices’ trajectories across time and space link commerce\, maritime development\, conflict\, and colonialism\, which led to modern capitalism. They tell stories about how globalization began – through trade\, migration\, linguistic movements\, culinary and cultural adaptation – and how it is inevitably intertwined with wars.” \nChung’s works on paper depict traces of Neolithic ditched and walled enclosures dating from 5000 BCE found across Central Europe and the Iberian Peninsula\, as well as Vietnam and Cambodia (2300-300 BCE). While suggesting possible prehistoric global connections\, Chung notes how these traces of our material culture also indicate the human-driven alterations of landscapes\, flora\, and fauna throughout history. Such traces take another physical form in Chung’s latest project\, the world through my mother’s cabinets of curiosities (cabinet no.2) (2026)\, with whimsical miniature sculptures created from discarded objects and materials donated to her by family and friends. As Chung seeks to bring new meanings to old objects embedded with personal history\, these sculptures depict and reflect on human experience of disasters and survival\, our impact on the environment\, and the rebound and taking over by nature in the aftermath. \nClosing the loop with traces from earth’s deep time\, Chung’s immersive 360° video\, Spheres of Time (2026)\, was screened at UCSB’s AlloSphere research facility. The artist has reworked the video for RLWindow\, viewable from the High Line at 26th Street. The video traverses across traces of different landscapes over stretches of geological and generational time. Contemplating earth’s deep time amid our social\, political\, economic and environmental processes\, the work situates human civilizations as part of an expansive natural history. traces as a whole reminds us that the imprints of our past are carried into the future\, and that we are responsible for the care of creation and sustainable ecology\, beyond human history. \nTiffany Chung (b. 1969 Da Nang\, Vietnam) is globally noted for her interdisciplinary practice cultivated through rigorous analysis of the history\, culture and topography of different locales. Based on painstaking research\, Chung’s work perceptively visualizes the entangled effects of geopolitical change on people and nature. Entwined in threads of landscape archaeology and historical ecology\, Chung uses cultural memories and lived experiences to weave interventions into the narrative produced through statecraft. Chung explores the interconnected layers of history that create globalized networks\, from the ancient spice trade to present-day patterns of migration to the future impacts of climate change.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/tiffany-chung-traces/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
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ORGANIZER;CN="RYAN LEE":MAILTO:info@ryanleegallery.com
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20260625
DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20260822
DTSTAMP:20260613T175517
CREATED:20260521T204125Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20260521T204125Z
UID:116504-1782345600-1787356799@artinamericaguide.com
SUMMARY:Niu Systems
DESCRIPTION:Including work by Kaili Chun\, Sean Connelly\, Pier Fichefeux\, Kainoa Gruspe\, Amber Khan\, John Koga\, Roland Longstreet\, Nicole Parente-Lopez\, Nanea Lum\, Dane Nakama\, Enoka Phillips\, Nalani Sato\, and Lawrence Seward \nRYAN LEE Gallery is pleased to present Niu Systems\, a group exhibition of contemporary artists from Hawai‘i. \nNiu is not a coconut. This distinction is not merely linguistic. Where “coconut” names an object for consumption\, niu holds layers of ‘ike (knowledge): husk\, shell\, water\, flesh\, each revealing itself only through time\, care\, and engagement. Niu is a relation\, not a resource. It carries genealogy\, voyaging histories\, ancestral planting practices\, and future sustenance. Every part has purpose; nothing is isolated; nothing is wasted. To encounter niu is to slow down\, to work with one’s hands\, to engage in process rather than extraction. It becomes kumu\, a teacher\, reminding us that knowledge is not taken but revealed through relationships. \nNiu Systems takes this framework as its ground. The exhibition does not treat niu as metaphor or decoration\, but as a model for how the works here coexist: as distributed\, interdependent parts of a larger structure\, each distinct\, each inseparable from the whole. On islands\, time does not move forward. It gathers. Histories accumulate\, materials circulate\, and relationships to land deepen. In Hawai‘i\, ancestral knowledge\, migration\, and contemporary movement overlap within a compressed geography. Land is not distant. It is encountered through use\, through memory\, and through the conditions of daily life. \nAmber Khan employs niu cordage alongside wood and metal\, binding organic and constructed elements where every binding carries both physical and cultural tension. Sean Connelly’s structures rely on lashing and compression\, holding form through balance rather than fixed joinery\, a logic the niu itself enacts. Kainoa Gruspe maps surface and accumulation\, where fragments of environment\, sand\, line\, debris\, become quiet records of movement and contact. In Dane Nakama’s panels\, shells\, pumice\, and sand are embedded directly into the work\, collapsing image and shoreline into the same plane. \nNanea Lum’s use of kapa and video extends material into duration\, making process and time visible within the work. John Koga and Enoka Phillips both engage the inherited weight of objects\, how things carry histories that exceed their surfaces. Nalani Sato positions pōhaku within domestic interiors\, shifting land into spaces of habitation and memory. Nicole Parente-Lopez isolates the form of a single stone\, rendering it as both object and field. Roland Longstreet and Pier Fichefeux approach Hawai‘i from positions shaped by movement and distance\, engaging the islands as sites of encounter\, observation\, and projection\, perspectives that do not resolve into a singular view but exist in active relation to the others. \nLawrence Seward’s contribution brings the niu into direct sculptural presence. His works are not literal coconuts but representations: painted\, assembled forms that invoke the niu’s physical layers while opening onto something stranger and more interior. Organic materials\, found objects\, and bold surface treatments accumulate on forms that read simultaneously as vessel\, organism\, and world. Where other works in the exhibition engage niu as structural logic\, Seward’s pieces make its body visible – the husk\, the opening\, the held interior – as sites of mystery and meaning rather than utility. \nThe conceptual grounding for the exhibition draws in part from the thinking of Kaili Chun\, whose work is also included here. Chun’s articulation of niu as a relational framework\, one that holds layers of ‘ike rather than a single extractable use\, shapes how the exhibition understands its own materials and positions. Her contribution to the show reflects this same integration of concept and form. \nTogether\, the works in Niu Systems do not argue for a single relationship to land\, material\, or time. Some are grounded in genealogy. Others arrive through migration or temporary presence. What the exhibition holds is not a unified narrative but something closer to what the niu itself demonstrates: a system where each part participates in the whole\, where use is inseparable from responsibility\, and where meaning is not extracted but revealed slowly\, through attention\, care\, and relationship. \nNiu Systems is curated by Jon Santos within Ontopo\, a platform spanning performance\, installation\, and exhibition formats across sites and disciplines. This presentation continues Ontopo’s exhibition track centering Hawai‘i-based artists.
URL:https://artinamericaguide.com/event/niu-systems/
LOCATION:RYAN LEE\, 515 W 26th St\, 3rd Fl\, New York\, NY\, 10001\, United States
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ORGANIZER;CN="RYAN LEE":MAILTO:info@ryanleegallery.com
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