Reframing the Margins: Contemporary Works by AAPI Artists

Every May, Qualia Contemporary Art aims to build bridges of understanding within the local Bay Area community and foster a deeper appreciation and awareness of AAPI identities nationwide by celebrating the contributions of AAPI artists to contemporary art in America. The exhibition features the work of five exceptional Asian-American women and nonbinary artists: Ahn Lee, Zhang Chun Hong, Jesse Liu, Namita Paul, and gallery artist Stella Zhang.

This curated group of artists reframes the margins as fertile ground for storytelling and reclamation, utilizing emotional and physical tensions embedded in space and material, and employing a wide array of media and forms. Each artist responds to their heritage and identity, reflecting on the diverse perspectives and traditions within a diasporic community. Together, their works create a shared space of vulnerability and strength, where the past is both honored and reimagined, and where new possibilities for belonging and visibility can emerge. Collectively, the artists’ practices explore memory and history through a mix of bodily textures and ancestral architectures, emerging with the layered complexities of cultural and personal experience to reimagine stories often overlooked by dominant narratives.