Text: Jianing Lu, Asian Art Contemporary™

Li Tang presents Third Space Is a Verb International Juried Exhibition from August 17 to October 30, 2026. The exhibition approaches the third space as an ongoing condition that is continually produced. Within this framework, identity becomes a shifting process shaped by memory, language, movement, cultural experience, and one’s relationship with the environment.

Selected by guest jurors Matilda Lin Berke, Oorja Garg, and Abhishek Tuiwala, the exhibition brings together works by fourteen artists: Unimuke Agada, Andi Bierlein, Raisa Raquel Durandi, Hsiao-Chu Hsia, Yujin Hur, Ningyi Jiang, Leekyung Kang, Eunha Kim, Hoho Kuo, Colby Lamson-Gordon, Lu LEI, Chen Liu, Arete Xu, and Zixuan Zhao. Across these different practices, hybridity emerges as a method rather than a label, while belonging is understood as something actively created rather than inherited. Together, these perspectives reflect that identity is less a fixed category than a space of continual exchange and negotiation.

Diasporic experience is often described through nouns such as “migration,” “identity,” “home,” or “hybridity,” but lived experience is rarely static. People are constantly translating, remembering, adapting, negotiating, and reconstructing themselves. The third space, then, is not a place that naturally exists, but a process formed through these ongoing actions. This is the core of Third Space Is a Verb: it shifts attention from “who we are” and “where we are” to “what we are doing.” Identity is no longer simply an object waiting to be defined and classified, but becomes an ongoing practice. “Translation” and “memory” therefore emerge as important threads. 

Translation is not only a matter of moving between languages, but also of how individuals bring existing experiences into new cultural and social environments and continually adjust the ways they understand them. Memory, likewise, is not a stable record of the past, but something reorganized each time it is recalled. Colby Lamson-Gordon’s I Can See The Moon and Sometimes I Wonder places moving images within a temporarily constructed cardboard structure, turning an everyday object into a medium for distant scenes, memory, and imagination, and emphasizing how experience can be reorganized across different spaces.

Rather than asking, “What kind of identity does this person represent?”, it may be more useful to consider how a person navigates the relationship between identity, memory, cultural experience, and present circumstances. Lu LEI’s Untitled places hand-embroidered text on translucent organza, allowing the words to shift in visibility depending on light and background. Language no longer functions as a fixed carrier of meaning, but as something continually reinterpreted through environment, viewing, and relation.

These questions were further extended beyond the exhibition through Li Tang Panel: Third Space Is a Verb, held in New York on August 23, 2026. Initiated by Li Tang and co-produced with Accent Sisters and IMPULSE Magazine, the public program was moderated by Jenny Wang and featured Abhishek Tuiwala, Matilda Lin Berke, and Webson Ji. The support of Accent Sisters and IMPULSE Magazine also contributed to Li Tang’s long-standing nonprofit mission of connecting creative communities, expanding visibility, and fostering shared dialogue. As an extension of the exhibition, the panel transformed questions of identity, diasporic experience, and contemporary cultural practice from a curatorial proposition into a live public conversation.

This shift from exhibition to discussion is important. If the third space is truly understood as a verb, then it should not remain only within a theoretical or exhibition framework; it should also take place between people. The third space begins to form when individuals from different backgrounds exchange experiences, explain their perspectives to one another, or question a given definition. It is equally present when writers, curators, artists, and cultural workers search for new language to describe experiences that existing categories cannot fully contain.

The panel extended the exhibition’s central idea by allowing different experiences to coexist without forcing a single conclusion. Instead of defining “diaspora,” “identity,” or “third space,” the discussion kept these concepts open to reinterpretation. Ultimately, Third Space Is a Verb presents the third space as something continually shaped through communication, negotiation, and shared experience.

(Image courtesy of Li Tang Community)