Curated by Emily Houssart 

The works of Lee, Zheng, and Navarra bring together three contemporary responses to diverse cultural traditions. This exhibition celebrates commonalities and differences between the artists’ individual languages, all of which are based on the manipulation of loaded cultural material. Combining the current and past in both form and technique, they create new meanings along with opportunities to explore avenues for collaboration. 

Hayoon Jay Lee makes use of rice as object, motif, and metaphor as a building block for civilization; but also as a basis to address fundamental social inequities. Through deep meditative labor, Xuewu Zheng works everyday found objects into new forms that contain obscured life data, connecting the personal and simple with the universal. Doug Navarra retrieves lost human histories, transforming minor historical records over a century old with new layers of mark-making, in dialogue with the original content and physical traces of the past.

For viewer and artist alike, these works prompt reflection on the complex relationships between history and identity. In different ways, each artist confronts questions of how to engage with historical media today, creating new dialogues across time and space. The exhibition will consist of wall works, 3D installation and performance, with dominant materials being paper, rice and paint.