New York, NY – On Thursday, November 19th from 6–8 pm, Li Tang Community, Open Kitchen, and CUE Art open Bellhop, a group exhibition curated by Phil Zheng Cai as the first project of Li Tang Cypher. The exhibition will remain on view at CUE’s gallery space at 137 West 25th St. until December 12, 2026. Attendance during gallery hours (Wed–Sat, 12–6 pm) is free; no reservations are required. The opening reception is free and open to all; RSVPs are encouraged.

From November 20th–December 11th, service requests can be made for a portion of the exhibition to be delivered for viewing to private homes, places of work, cultural organizations, public spaces, and other offsite locations as requested. Service requests are free and fulfilled by staff and volunteers on the exhibition team; capacity is limited and advance booking is recommended.

About the Exhibition
“It is necessary to forget entirely one’s intellectual culture, not in order to assimilate the work of art, but to deliver one’s self up to it, heart and soul.” — Italian Futurist Painters’ Manifesto, 1912

More than a century after the Italian Futurists called for the complete surrender of oneself to art, the language of delivery has acquired another, decidedly less transcendent meaning. We deliver meals, groceries, packages, and almost anything we desire, expecting the distance between wanting something and receiving it to be as short as possible. Behind each seemingly effortless transaction is an elaborate choreography of bodies, infrastructures, and obligations. Someone must answer the calls.

Open Kitchen 004: Bellhop takes this logic to its absurd, and perhaps inevitable, conclusion: an exhibition that can be summoned to your doorstep. Bringing together works by nine artists from the Asian diaspora, Bellhop operates simultaneously as an exhibition and an on-demand delivery service. Visitors may encounter the works at CUE or request that a portion of the exhibition be brought to them by making a service request. A bellhop cart stationed in the gallery serves as mobile infrastructure. When a delivery is arranged, the curator, artists, staff, interns, or volunteers pack selected works onto the cart and transport them to their destination. In their absence, the exhibition remains incomplete.

This arrangement unsettles several assumptions about the format of an exhibition and who it serves. The visitor who travels to the gallery may find that the work they came to see has been dispatched elsewhere, while the caller who stays home commands its movement. The collective experience becomes contingent upon individual requests. Availability for some produces absence for others; convenience is purchased through the time, movement, and attention of other people.

The humor of this proposition depends on a familiarity that is difficult to escape. We inhabit contemporary cultural, political, and economic systems in contradictory ways, moving between dependence, authority, accommodation, and demand. We are not simply consumers or subjects of these systems, nor are we innocent observers of their consequences. We may recognize exploitation embedded in technological services while continuing to use them; insist on fair labor conditions while expecting immediate responsiveness; advocate for broader cultural access without accounting for the people and resources required to sustain it. Our participation is seldom reducible to a single position, and awareness offers no automatic exemption from complicity.

For Asian diasporic artists and cultural workers, the figure of the bellhop carries particular social and historical weight. The racialization of Asian labor in the United States has long invoked contradictory expectations: industriousness and invisibility, technical competence and political deference, exceptional productivity and unquestioning service. These associations flatten profoundly heterogeneous communities into an imagined disposition toward work, assigning value to their productivity while limiting recognition of their agency over its conditions.

Bellhop inhabits this contradiction with deliberate discomfort. Artists become both producers of the work and, potentially, the people tasked with delivering it. The curator and gallery staff become dispatchers; the exhibition becomes an inventory available for temporary circulation; the organization becomes a service point. The project invites its participants to perform the hierarchies it examines, without assuming that making those hierarchies visible places anyone outside them.

Nor is the audience exempt. To request a delivery is to activate the exhibition while making a claim on someone else’s labor. To visit the gallery is to expect that art should be waiting, available, and ready for our encounter. Both positions presume an infrastructure of care and work often acknowledged only when something fails. The empty space left by dispatched artworks records these competing claims.

For CUE, the project raises questions about the responsibilities and limits of a cultural organization. Making art accessible requires decisions about whose access is prioritized, who determines the terms of participation, and who bears the labor of extending the gallery beyond its walls. An exhibition cannot be everywhere. The people who work with and for a small cultural organization cannot answer every call. Yet the expectation that they should try is often celebrated as generosity, innovation, or public service.

The Futurists imagined delivering oneself to art as an act of ecstatic surrender. Bellhopreturns that ambition to the material world, where surrender is rarely innocent. Bodies tire, objects are carried, distances traversed, requests answered, and the freedom to give oneself over to something is not equally afforded to everyone. To deliver oneself, to deliver art, to deliver a service: these gestures share a vocabulary but inhabit vastly different relations of power.

How can we sustain a shared cultural life without taking for granted the availability of other people’s labor? How can our commitments to art, to access, and to one another extend beyond the moment of our own satisfaction? Bellhop holds these ideas together, asking how much of ourselves we are willing to give, how much we expect from others, and whose devotion we have mistaken for obligation.

Venue
137 West 25th Street, New York, NY 10001

Opening Reception
Thursday, November 19th 6–8 pm

Artist
Paria Ahmadi, Clare Hu, Andrew Luk, Maya Nguyễn, Z.T. Nguyễn, Rujuta Rao, Enkhbold Togmidshiirev, Abhishek Tuiwala, Jiannan Wu

Exhibition Dates
November 19 – December 12, 2026

Gallery Hours
Wednesday – Saturday | 11 AM – 6 PM

Book a Delivery (Limited capacity)
rsvp@cueartfoundation.org.

Website
https://cueartfoundation.org

Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/cueart

Contact
info@cueartfoundation.org

About the Curator
Phil Zheng Cai (American, b. Shanghai) is a New York-based curator and writer, and is a partner at Eli Klein Gallery. His research focuses on systematic critique, extending institutional critique through recontextualization, focusing on the inseparability of framework and context. His curated exhibitions have received recognition from Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, AMP Magazine, and others. His writing has appeared in IMPULSE Magazine, T Magazine China, WhiteHot Magazine, and many others. He has served as a panelist and visiting critic at institutions including Asia Society Museum, Columbia University, Parsons, School of Visual Arts, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and NARS.

About the Collaborators
Li Tang Community is a New York–based, artist-run nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting creative practices across the global Asian diaspora. Founded in 2020, the organization works with artists, designers, and cultural practitioners across disciplines to develop opportunities for presentation, exchange, and collaboration.

Open Kitchen is a curatorial initiative founded by Phil Zheng Cai that examines the social, institutional, and economic systems shaping contemporary life. Building on traditions of institutional critique, the initiative extends its inquiry beyond art institutions to consider the structures and conventions through which culture is produced, circulated, and experienced.

CUE Art is a nonprofit organization that works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas.

About Li Tang Cypher
This project is the first program presented as part of Li Tang Cypher, a new initiative by Li Tang Community built on the idea that meaningful projects can emerge when people come together, share what they have, and build upon another’s strengths. Bringing together community members and friends, including artists, curators, cultural practitioners, arts organizations, and galleries, the program develops opportunities for collective creation through shared ideas, talents, knowledge, networks, and resources.

Inspired by the cypher tradition in hip-hop culture, the program offers space for individual voices to be heard, perspectives to be exchanged, and collaborations to take shape. Each participant brings something of their own while making room for others. One collaboration can spark another, allowing ideas and resources to move forward through the community.

About CUE Art
CUE Art works with and for emerging and underrecognized artists and art workers to create new opportunities and present varied perspectives in the arts. Through our gallery space and public programs, we foster the development of thought-provoking exhibitions and events, create avenues for mentorship, cultivate relationships amongst peers and the public, and facilitate the exchange of ideas.

Support
Programmatic support for CUE Art is provided by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation; the Arison Arts Foundation; Evercore, Inc; and members of CUE. Programs are also supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature; and the National Endowment for the Arts

(Text and images courtesy of Li Tang Community, Open Kitchen, and CUE Art)