From June 8–14, 2025 (New York) and June 18–22, 2025 (South Korea), City Gazes: Artistic Perspectives on Place—presented by Asian Art Contemporary in collaboration with Kyungsung University in Busan, South Korea and A Space Gallery in Brooklyn, New York—launched its dual-city exhibition.
A city is more than a physical space; it is a mirror of lived experience, cultural intersections, and identity. Co-curated by Webson Ji and Ju Hyun Kim, the exhibition brings together 15 Asian and Asian diaspora artists whose unique perspectives reimagine the perception and interpretation of urban and regional landscapes. Participating artists include Abhishek Tuiwala, Ami Park, Chengtao Yi, Doi Kim, Hee Jeong An, Hyunju Lee, Jinwoo Moon, Jun Ho Kim, Minjung Kim, Mok Ji Soo, Paul Mok, PTPC, Sao Tanaka, Xianglong Li, and Xiangni Song.
Through a wide range of artistic practices, City Gazes captures the subtle textures of urban life—from fleeting everyday moments to profound reflections on memory, migration, and belonging. Whether expressed through painting, photography, installation, or mixed media, the works invite viewers to reconsider the evolving symbiosis between people and place. In New York, the industrial setting of A Space Gallery offers a sharp contemporary frame, while in Busan, the academic atmosphere of Kyungsung University Art Museum provides a distinct interpretive lens. This dual-city format itself embodies the exhibition’s theme of “multiple perspectives,” encouraging visitors to reflect on both the diversity of artistic expression across cultural contexts and the shared emotional connections that transcend them.
Through the lenses of these Asian and Asian diaspora artists, we encounter a multiplicity of urban narratives—nostalgic, critical, celebratory—that together form a composite portrait of cities as more than landscapes: they are strata of history, sites of transformation, and stages for creative expression.
Sculptor Abhishek Tuiwala works across metal forging, woodworking, installation, and graphite drawing. By deconstructing everyday objects and reconstructing them into satirical narratives, he bridges the figurative and abstract to address themes of identity, cultural translation, and migration. His graphite drawings extend this language of fragmentation and reassembly, transforming object forms to reflect the cultural fractures of migrant communities. Chengtao Yi explores the cultural evolution of man-made objects and systems through painting, sculpture, and digital media, examining the technological and perceptual mechanisms that shape meaning in the interplay of the virtual and the real. Sao Tanaka, born in Tokyo and now based in New York, studied Japanese Painting at Tama Art University, earned an MA in Social Anthropology at Hitotsubashi University, and continued her studies at the School of Visual Arts. Inspired by myth, her works generate scenes from inorganic matter to investigate place and collective identity. She has received the POLA Art Foundation Overseas Study Grant (2024–2025) and the Shibuya Art Award (2019).
Xianglong Li appropriates symbols from pop culture and internet imagery to reconstruct social events and everyday life through painting, video, and 3D animation. His satirical and absurd visual language imagines alternative narratives beyond mainstream discourse. Xiangni Song, based between Beijing and New York, earned a BFA in Illustration from the School of Visual Arts in 2016 and an MFA in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 2020. Moving fluidly between two- and three-dimensional media, she uses painting, drawing, and ceramics to explore identity, self-reflection, and the boundless possibilities of imagination.
Korean artist Hee Jeong An draws on motifs of migratory birds and marine life to juxtapose Busan’s urban landscape with its natural environment, emphasizing the beauty of nature within the metropolis. Kim Min-jeong, a painter rooted in Busan, documents the cityscape with a focus on its shifting architecture and street textures, drawing inspiration directly from her urban surroundings. Mok Ji Soo meticulously documents and reinterprets Busan’s fading bathhouse culture, revealing its role as both a site of community and a contemplative space, renewing appreciation for this tradition. Jun Ho Kim uses Busan’s place names as portals to urban memory. Through his “Juno Tour” project, he revitalizes historical sites and builds a folklore database titled Freezer, transforming cold urban spaces into tangible gateways to collective history.
Curators Webson Ji and Ju Hyun Kim have long been active in New York and Busan, promoting cross-cultural artistic exchange and advancing the global visibility of Asian artists. City Gazes is more than an exhibition—it is a dialogue across the Pacific. When New York’s urban tempo meets Busan’s harbor atmosphere, the works reveal not only the mirrored images of two cities but also a shared parable for all cities in the age of globalization: between memory and the future, between rootedness and fluidity, art remains both witness and poetic interpreter.
(Image & text courtesy of Asian Art Contemporary, A Space Gallery, and Kyungsung University. Text by Jianing Lu)
