February 6 - February 13, 2026
Royal Beef Gallery
Exhibition Curated by Agnes Lin, Rebecca Holt, and Ming Chen
Curatorial Text by Ming Chen
For the Time Being emerges from a condition of uncertainty, one shaped by postmodern relativism and a proliferation of meanings from which artists must choose. The exhibition seeks to address multiple uncertainties: those of art historical narrative, meaning, aesthetics, and the future, through sculpture, painting, drawing, and photography. This exhibitionuses art critic Raphael Rubinstein’s writing on provisional aesthetics as a point of curatorial departure. In his 2009 article “Provisional Painting,” Rubinstein characterizes the provisional aesthetic as “casual, dashed-off, tentative, unfinished or self-cancelling,” drawing from ideas like Gianni Vattimo’s “weak thought” and Arthur Danto’s declaration in the 1980s of the end of a teleological art history.
“For the time being”means to embrace contingency. One manner in which the works on view do this is through the act of collecting. Some of the artists here are urban foragers, collecting beer bottles and scrap metal, curious about these objects’ liminal status. Some maintain a childlike sensitivity to color and textures, arranging materials like bowerbirds build their nests. Others collect experiences, such as spending time drawing a friend’s portrait, or holding in mind the way a pair of underwear just happened to land on the ground. This collector sensibility positions the artist not as a hoarder of random things but of a person attentive to the world around us, awake to the agency of objects and aware that a reality exists beyond the one that we’ve exhausted through interpretation. The found objects used in many of the works risk interchangeability and by doing so, question their own significance.
The paintings and drawings embody the concept of contingency with particular intimacy. In her essay “Shit Happens: Notes on Awkwardness,” Amy Sillman comments on how each stroke or line in a painting or drawing culminates in a work that is highly contingent: each work a record of numerous specific individual choices made during a certain time and mood. Like laughing after an awkward moment, humor is used throughout the show as another way to handle contingency. A general ethos that anything goes serves as a way to seriously avoid seriousness and grand narrative claims. The wavering, tangled, sweeping gestures in this exhibition carry the record of choices, always oscillating between intentionality and spontaneity, embracing uncertainty for the time being.
The Cha Cha Festival was a free, month-long immersive exhibition in February 2025 at WSA, celebrating AAPI tea culture, design, and tradition. Conceived by Karen Wong in collaboration with Curatorial Assistant Ming Chen, it featured five artist-designed tea houses, culinary vendors, Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) exhibits, and hands-on workshops related to the theme.
Read more about the project at these select press links:
May 1-23, 2024
Curators: Lora Appleton and Karen Wong
Curatorial Assistant: Ming Chen
CRAFTING SELFHOOD celebrates thirteen female AAPI artists who integrate heritage, identity, and, oftentimes, sly humor in ceramics, textiles and sculptural objects.
Featured Artists: Janny Baek, Julia Chiang, Cecile Chong, Phaan Howng, Lena Imamura, Sonya Yong James, Myung Jin Kim, Antonia Kuo, Eunji Jun and Halin Lee, Eny Lee Parker, Linda Sormin, Steffany Trần
Photography by Angela Hau
September 28 - October 12, 2023
Co-organizer: Ming Chen
The UCLA Undergraduate Juried Exhibition was the first undergraduate curated juried show at UCLA’s New Wight Gallery.
