Text by Webson Ji, Asian Art Contemporary™

Migration continues to shape the practices of many Asian diaspora artists long after geographic movement itself. Changes in place, environment, material, and working conditions continually reshape how an artist observes and understands the world around them. Artistic practice moves through these conditions as well, carrying established languages and personal histories while responding to new sites, resources, and ways of making. This movement can become especially visible within the temporary conditions of an artist residency, where experimentation often takes place within a compressed period of time.

Horizons in Rhyme, a one-week collective residency at the basement of Nguyen Wahed Gallery in New York, brought together Sao Tanaka, Shuai Yang, and Tina Lam from August 17 to 22, 2026. Curated by Xiao Liu, who helped found TaThaTa Gallery and currently serves as its Curator, the project treated the gallery as both a shared studio and an open exhibition space. Its short duration became an important condition of the project. Each artist arrived with an established practice, while the residency created a temporary setting in which materials, ideas, and existing methods could be tested. As the curatorial statement describes, “Rather than moving toward a predetermined exhibition, the artists allow their work to develop through the circumstances of making together.”

Japanese artist Sao Tanaka has developed an international practice across New York and Japan. Having followed her work for several years through multiple collaborations, I noticed a subtle shift in Horizons in Rhyme within a visual language that has remained distinctly her own. The works extend her recurring attention to landscape and human-made forms in nature while introducing different systems through which a place can be observed, recorded, and reconstructed.

In Esopus Creek, Tanaka references a historical painting of the Hudson River landscape, returning to an earlier artist’s perception and record of a particular place. Horseshoe Bend Ranch, Idaho (left) / Long Valley Land, Missouri (right) turns instead to contemporary real estate materials depicting properties in Idaho and Missouri. Photographs of mountains, rivers, and open land present nature through the standardized visual language of American property marketing. Tanaka responds to these sources through sumi ink, oil, and acrylic on mulberry paper, dissolving their photographic specificity into shifting forms. Historical painting, commercial imagery, and Tanaka’s own interpretation become different layers through which landscape is perceived. Their movement across time also reveals how the natural environment can be repeatedly reframed through changing cultural and material conditions.

Shuai Yang is a New York–based artist with an established presence in the city’s contemporary art community. Her research-based and theory-driven practice moves across sculpture, printmaking, and painting, with measurement and multiplicity recurring throughout her work. One reference within this practice is the coastline paradox, in which the measured length of a coastline changes according to the scale used. Measurement therefore becomes more than a technical operation. It raises questions around how apparently objective knowledge is constructed through particular scales, bodies, technologies, and systems.

During the residency, Yang brought this investigation directly into the gallery. In For Mare, layout paper extends across the floor before being folded into a sculptural form. Yang describes the process as a kind of “folding up the land”: a mapped surface loses its original dimensions and orientation while acquiring a new physical body. The residency also became an opportunity for material substitution. Map Pa Mun Di, made with cardboard, wax, and steel, and And once names appear, you should know when to stop, made with cardboard and wax, extend this experimentation into smaller sculptural forms. Through folding, compression, and joining, these materials can visually recall the structural qualities of welded or compressed metal. Yang’s recognizable precision remains present, while the change in materials opens another way of considering measurement, space, and the physical construction of form.

Montréal-based artist Tina Lam works across sculpture, installation, land-art intervention, drawing, and performance. She holds a PhD in Chemistry from McGill University alongside an MFA in Creative Visual Arts from Cornell University. Her scientific background informs an artistic practice attentive to material transformation, natural processes, and forces that do not always assume a stable or immediately visible form.

During the residency, Lam worked across ink on silk and sculptural materials. Void in the Storm, made from black aluminum foil, was shaped by the wind and her body in motion as she ran with it across the grounds of Storm King Sculpture Park while participating in its artist residency programme. By contrast, a plain of pure distance across which everything is swept and wanderers estranged from the cartography of longing are made of ink delicately but resolutely drawn on crepe de Chine silk. All these works respond to gravity, movement, touch, natural forms and patterns, and the surrounding architecture, allowing the materials themselves to register processes of change. Beyond the works on view, Lam connects these concerns to her parents’ experiences of forced displacement, memories carried from childhood, and her own evolving relationship with the natural world. Her reflections also returned to childhood experiences of fear and resistance toward nature, which she later reconsidered through her study of science and her artistic practice. Nature consequently appears across her practice as something continually encountered, observed, remembered, and misunderstood again.

The compressed timeframe of a one-week residency can hardly offer a complete view of practices that have developed over years. Horizons in Rhyme instead captures three established practices during a particular period of experimentation. The curatorial statement describes them as rhyming “through proximity, repetition, and difference.” Tanaka examines changing ways of observing and representing landscape; Yang works through measurement and the physical reorganization of space; Lam considers material transformation and changing perceptions of nature. Their approaches remain distinct, while the residency places each practice within a temporary set of spatial, material, and practical conditions.

For Asian diaspora artists, these conditions can shift repeatedly from project to project and site to site. New environments bring different histories, materials, resources, limitations, and relationships to one’s surroundings. An established artistic language travels through these encounters without remaining entirely unchanged. The uncertainty embedded within migration can therefore extend into the development of artistic practice itself, shaped by personal experience alongside the environments in which work is produced. What migrates is not only the Asian diaspora artist, but also the practice itself.

About the Writer

Webson Ji is a New York–based cultural producer, nonprofit arts leader, and curator. As the Editorial Director of Asian Art Contemporary™ and Founder and Director of Li Tang Community, he focuses on contemporary Asian art, Asian diaspora cultural ecosystems, nonprofit and institutional development, public programming, and the evolving relationships between artists, institutions, and communities.