In conjunction with our current exhibition How Asian Is It?, Lilly Wei will co-moderate with Kelly Ma an intergenerational conversation about cultural histories and abstract painting.  

Exhibition artists Emily Cheng, David Diao, and Charles Yuen will discuss their experiences along with guest artist Yuan Fang. 

* Doors open at 6:00PM. Seating is first come, first serve.

Moderator Bios: 

Lilly Wei is a New York-based art critic, art writer, journalist, and independent curator  whose area of interest is contemporary global art. Deeply committed to not-for-profit  art organizations that support emerging artists, artists at risk, and art writers, she  serves on the board of trustees of several such institutions, as well as on the advisory  committee of others. Wei was born in Chengdu, China and has an MA in art history  from Columbia University, New York. 

Kelly Ma is a curator and writer based in New York. She held various curatorial and leadership positions at Asia Society Museum, New York; M+, Hong Kong; and Para Site, Hong Kong. She has organized exhibitions and educational programs internationally to broaden historical narratives. 

Artists Bios: 

Emily Cheng is a painter living and working in New York. She has a degree from Rhode Island School of Design and  spent three years studying at the New York Studio School. She has had more than forty solo museum exhibitions and has received numerous awards, among them one from the  National Endowment for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner award. She taught art history and studio art at the School of Visual Arts, Cooper Union, New York University, and California Institute of Arts, to name a few. 

David Diao was born Chengdu, China, and has lived in New York since 1955. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Kenyon College in that year. His first exhibitions were at the Paula Cooper and Leo Castelli galleries in 1969. Diao is represented by Greene Naftali Gallery. A retrospective of his work was presented by the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, in 2015. 

Yuan Fang was born in Shenzhen, China, in 1996. Growing up in a major metropolitan city and later relocating to the United States shaped her global and cross-cultural perspective. Working primarily in large scale abstraction, Fang’s paintings are characterized by lyrical, expansive gestures and densely layered surfaces. Her compositions often evoke distorted bodily forms, unfolding through an intuitive and improvisational process that embraces risk, movement, and transformation. Her practice reflects on the tension between global interconnectedness and diasporic identity. Fang has received numerous accolades and exhibited internationally. In 2024, she was named to the Forbes Asia 30 Under 30 list and held a solo exhibition at the Long Museum, Shanghai (Flux). 

Charles Yuen was born in Hawaii and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He holds a master’s in fine arts from Rutgers University and a bachelor of fine arts degree from the University of Hawaii. Yuen has been awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship, an Adolf and Esther Gottlieb Foundation grant, and a Joan Mitchell Foundation grant. His work has also been  included in exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, and the Anhui Modern Art Museum in Hefei, China. “I view my art as part catharsis, part poetics, and inherently iconoclastic,” Yuen says. “It is connected to a social and civic vision that includes a founding membership in Godzilla, an Asian American arts organization.”