In the backroom of Pearl River Mart, the exhibition “Just Between Us: From the Archives of Arlan Huang” is showcasing a selection of artworks and ephemera from the collection of Arlan Huang. An artist and founder of the framing business Squid Frames, Huang was involved in two key Asian American art collectives: Basement Workshop in the 1970s and ’80s and Godzilla Asian American Arts Network in the ’90s.

“The mission of the gallery is to show work that matters to the Asian American community,” Joanne Kwong, the company’s president, said in an interview. Staging “Just Between Us” was one way to meet that goal.

The daughter-in-law of Pearl River Mart founders Ming Yi and Ching Yeh Chen, Kwong began the store’s exhibition program in 2016. To visit the gallery requires walking through the retail displays of paper fans, tea, sweets, and other sundries. “It is always open to people who are in the retail shop, so you catch different eyeballs than you would at a traditional gallery,” Kwong said. 

“Just Between Us” is no traditional art exhibition. Alongside artworks that more obviously read as artworks—prints, paintings, and more—there are artifacts meant to chronicle Huang’s life.

“The earliest objects in the show are my grandfather’s restaurant menu from his Chi/Am restaurant called the Pekin dated 1926 and my grandmother’s irons from Bangor, Maine,” Huang told ARTnews.

The collection progresses from these family mementos to small works in a variety of mediums: Hoty Soohoo’s black-and-white photographs of Huang and other members at Basement Workshop in 1971, a calendar page from 1991 designed by Martin Wong for the Lower East Side Printshop, Byron Kim’s contribution to the print portfolio From Basement to Godzilla from 1999, and Danielle Wu’s acrylic still life Arlan’s Oranges (2020). 

Wu is a co-curator of the show with Howie Chen. She attributes the genesis of the exhibition with the downfall of another: the canceled 2021 Godzilla retrospective at the Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA) in 2021.

“It was going to be a group show unifying all works by members of Godzilla for the first time. But local activists had uncovered [MOCA’s] involvement with building local jails and receiving concession money,” she said. “Arlan was one of the first artists who withdrew.”

Arlan and Wu connected in their efforts to encourage the museum to invite community discussions about the impact of the jail on neighborhood businesses and culture. While those efforts didn’t progress, their friendship did.

“I was really taken with his story about how the frame shop was a way that he made friends in the art world and built this alternate economy outside the art market,” Wu said. “It really goes to show you that through friendship and not through accumulation of capital, you can still access art and have your own collection.”

A counter-show to MOCA in both concept and scale, the exhibition at Pearl River celebrates this scrappy, hand-to-hand form of collection-building. The hang of the works—in a tight line, at eye level, looping around the walls—points to this connectivity. 

“This show probably produced more emails than any other show I’ve ever worked on,” Chen told ARTnews.

Having held posts at the Whitney Museum and MoMA PS1 before becoming the director of 80WSE at New York University, Chen said he was unused to the process of representing a personal rather than an institutional collection. Wu and Chen let Arlan have almost full authority over the checklist, as they whittled down the selection from his storage.

“We did give a little bit of guidance in terms of suggesting some key anchor points,” Wu says. “I thought it was really important to have Sol Lewitt in the show—he was one of his most important clients, and art historically, it is a fascinating encounter.” 

Wu was referring to an illustrated postcard sent to Huang by the late Minimalist and Conceptualist, who was a loyal customer of Squid Frames. The curators argued to include it, as it suggests Huang’s network in the city—the artists he befriended, whose work he helped produce, and Huang’s impact on them and vice-versa. But, Wu admitted, “Arlan could care less.”

Wu, Chen, and Huang offered their distinct perspectives while forming the show, which brought to light their generational differences.

“It was really interesting to go into Arlan’s archives, which provide one perspective on what it was like pre-internet,” Wu said. “You realize that artists really relied on print material and large-scale posters in order to stay connected.”

Huang’s activism from the 1970s features in the exhibition with printed posters from 1977 for African Liberation Day and May Day protests, the latter in Spanish. These were produced at Basement Workshop, which offered printing resources to downtown artists and activists at the time. The ephemera also speaks to the solidarity that existed between Asian Americans and other communities.

This interconnectedness even extends to Pearl River Mart itself. According to Kwong, intergenerational collaboration is core to the store’s identity. Her mother- and father-in-law, who are in their late 70s and 80s, still work the register. When they ran Pearl River in the 1970s, it was in the same building as Basement Workshop on Elizabeth Street, so they have decades-long relationships with Huang, Corky Lee, and others involved in the show. 

Artists such as these have formerly been the subject of research by Chen, who published an anthology about Godzilla through Primary Information in 2021 and will return to the group in 2024 for an 80WSE show called “Legacies,” which will also focus on Basement Workshop and the Asian American Art Center. And, with Wu and Huang, Chen published a catalogue for the Pearl River show, so the archive can be accessible long after the show is de-installed on September 10. It’s all part of a curatorial effort Chen describes as way to find “new ways of representing histories that don’t feel detached from the people who were there.” 

For Wu, the legacy of the exhibition is also personal. “Arlan is a role model for me, as somebody who abstained from the blue-chip art world, but has made it in my eyes, reaching an audience and living the kind of moral and ethical life that many will call idealistic or impossible,” she said. “He showed me that it’s possible.”

Its packed openings stand out among those of many other downtown New York galleries for a variety of reasons. One is that it isn’t just a gallery. Yes, it does sell and show art, but the space has a tendency to feel like an ongoing party as well. Now, it’s set up as a makeshift eatery too.

The founders, painters Jamian Juliano-Villani and Billy Grant, have now relocated O’Flaherty’s to the former home of a theater run by the Upright Citizens Brigade. Their first presentation there could be seen as an exhibition, but you might call it a performance as well. You can eat there, you can buy art there, and, most importantly, you can hang out there.

At the entrance, Juliano-Villani and Grant set up a table with a pair of sleek Apple monitors, a vase of flowers, and printouts introducing the show’s latest concept, the typical things you might expect at a gallery reception desk. Inside, the offerings diverge significantly from anything traditional.

“We were told we could never get this restaurant legal,” an ironically worded press release reads. “We can’t, but that doesn’t matter. Just taste our food before you hurt yourself.”

Grant, who manned the desk as roughly 400 guests filtered in to fill the space to capacity, was coy when asked about the write-up. Were there really permit troubles? All he would say was: “This is poetry.”

There is a rich tradition of artists launching food ventures. “The Café” owes something to the spirit of Gordon Matta-Clark’s 1971 collective FOOD, a restaurant in SoHo that served bone marrow and live brine shrimp. It also owes something to Los Angeles–based artist Kim Dingle, an O’Flaherty’s alum who ran a vegetarian restaurant out of her studio.

In “The Café,” the art was on the periphery. All of the seven artists participating have at some point worked in New York. One guest posed for a photography with his arm stretched around a 1984 plaster piece by American sculptor George Segal featuring a woman, legs splayed, sitting in a wicker chair. It’s the sort of work you’d expect to see in a blue-chip gallery, not in a smoke-filled East Village diner, and it was priced at $200,000.

There were works by artists more familiar to the downtown scene, like a sculpture by Brandon Ndife, whose work appeared in the 2021 New Museum Triennial. But then there were stranger additions, like a 2001 Catherine Murphy painting of the artist’s name written backward in a frost-covered window. The work, which critic Roberta Smith once called a “tour de force,” is on sale for $160,000. At the opening, it became the backdrop for a photo-op for a server modeling a chef’s hat and apron printed with black text that read: THE ODIOUS SMELL Of TRUTH.

O’Flaherty’s has been written about as a reaction to the commercial art world’s wide-scale marketization. Yet Juliano-Villani seemed serious about selling the art on view anyway. In an email to ARTnews, she said, “We are looking for the right people, as the works are coming from artists and collections that are close to us.”

As for the opening itself, the party brought less mayhem than previous ones held at O’Flaherty’s. Perhaps it was a sign of a newer, slightly more cleaned-up O’Flaherty’s—the emphasis, of course, being on “slightly.” Cigarette smoke still filled the space, and guests still spilled everywhere. The art remained unusual too. One TV mounted high on the wall played Cory Arcangel’s Pollock and American Pickers (2012), a 16-minute-long video that, despite being made a decade ago, barely appears in any reviews, suggesting that it remains a deep cut in the practice of a well-known artist.

Add to all this strangeness the artists and other creative types who were working as servers in this café, doling out bar food and Frosé drinks priced between $5 and $10. Served circulated between the main room and a minuscule kitchen in the back to bring food out, though few people actually ordered anything. One waiter, the artist Devin Cronin, said she had discovered the gig via a targeted ad on Instagram stating that O’Flaherty’s was hiring. She was hazy on the details of how she’d come to known O’Flaherty’s, and quoted fashion photographer Terry Richardson, saying, “It’s who you know and who you blow.”

As the night went on, the air inside became increasingly unbreathable as cigarette smoke filled the space. “You know how I know they didn’t get a permit? They’re passing out ash trays,” said Robert Girardin, one attendee at the party. “They’re trying to get shut down.” Girardin and others who spoke with ARTnews felt the space has provided a break from the art world’s formalities. “It’s nice to have a spectacle, not everything being so tight.”

At a table in the café, some gathered to recall other artists that contained the same ethos. One was the artist Sven Sachsalber, who died of heart failure at 33 on the verge of stardom, having just begun to receive positive notices for works such as one in which he searched for a needle hidden in a haystack by a curator. His 2020 work Untitled (Schweiz), a yellow ski-suit mounted to a blank canvas, hung on one of the cafe’s walls.

“He wanted what I had, I wanted what he had,” mused the artist Armando Nin, who reminisced on a period of time before Sachsalber died, when the two worked together in his Brooklyn studio. As he spoke with Nick Farhi and Andrew Kass, Nin seemed to view Sachsalber as belonging to a bygone New York art scene, when their work and their social world felt more intertwined. Nin said he now paints the walls at the Guggenheim Museum.

There were signs that the O’Flaherty’s that opened in 2021 may be different from its 2023 iteration. Private security manned the door, to avoid the cops showing up to overcrowding, as has happened in the past. Artists expressed a collective anxiety that the gallery might be at risk of becoming overexposed. “I feel like if this space was open all the time, it would be filled with NYU kids with their laptops, said Kass.

Others embraced O’Flaherty’s commitment to not caring about tastes. Albert Samreth, another artist in attendance, described the gallery as filling a social void for reluctant insiders. He called O’Flaherty’s “the Museum of Ice Cream for people who went to RISD.”  

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But his drawing practice has been just as important to his development as an artist. Those works on paper the subject of his latest exhibition, “Drawings 2003-2023,” at Karma in New York (on view until August 18). One-hundred works on paper are displayed in chronological order in a salon-style format showcasing the artist’s wide breadth of subject matter, color, and mark-making. Bright and colorful, this show will also travel to Karma’s Los Angeles space in November 2023.

To learn more about his exhibition, ARTnews spoke with Wood by phone from New York. During the conversation, Wood spoke about his biographical roots, his trajectory through academia, the working world, and the advice that shapes his career and legacy. Wood also discusses the materials he employs and the process behind his vibrant body of work.

This article has been edited and condensed for clarity.

ARTnews: This exhibition focuses on your drawings from 2003 to 2023. Why did you want to focus on this 20-year timeframe?

Jonas Wood: Well, this July will be 20 years of living in Los Angeles as an artist, post-grad school. I created an installation of drawings from over the years. I am happy to work with [Karma founder] Brendan Dugan and Karma on this project. Brendan does such incredible historical shows, and I wanted to do something different. I have never exhibited a collection of only drawings.

There are a lot of people that work to find themselves after grad school. Can you tell me a bit about your life then?

I graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2002. My wife, artist Shio Kusaka, and I briefly went to Martha’s Vineyard before moving to Los Angeles six months later. I asked myself, “Do I want to live in New York? Or do I want to live in LA?” So, I moved to LA because I had one friend there and started painting and drawing. I kept thinking, “How do I keep practicing? How do I get better?” Making drawings was a big part of that. I received excellent advice about how to keep working post-academia from a few of my teachers in grad school and how to practice outside their watchful eyes. When you’re in school, you have your peers and professors who observe and critique what you’re doing. My professors asked me, “What artists do you like? What did they paint? How did they practice?” I focused on the word practice to keep practicing painting.

What was some of the advice they gave?

My grad school professor Denzil Hurley, who died a couple of years ago, was incredible at activating young minds. He just had a show up at Canada Gallery in New York. He advised me to challenge myself because the University of Washington wasn’t a finishing school, like UCLA or all the great art schools in California, where the grad students are so exceptionally talented that they’re almost ready for the bright lights of gallery exposure. In Seattle, they focused on how to have an art practice and most likely apply to be a professor of art—teaching painting was more like a ceiling. The idea that you would be painting somewhere by yourself was more what I was focusing on. That was great advice, even in an atmosphere like Los Angeles, where many outstanding artists surrounded me. Also, the job I subsequently had when I first moved to L.A., assisting [artist] Laura Owens in her studio, paved my path.

How did that job come about?

I worked with Laura for almost a year and a half. The one friend that I knew in California was artist Matt Johnson, who is a fantastic sculptor. He and I went to high school together. Matt was already working for artist Charles Ray, and then he had taken a class with Laura at UCLA. After I was in LA for a couple of months, she was looking for an assistant and asked if some students were interested in the job. She asked some grad students if they were free, and Matt said, “I’m not. But my friend who just moved here is a painter.”

The first thing I was working on for her was a painting that she was making for the [2004] Whitney Biennial, and then, subsequently, in the weeks that followed, I realized who she was. Everybody was like, “You got that job?” But I just got lucky and met this unbelievable genius of a person. The learning experience was next level. I retained as much valuable information from Laura as I had learned in grad school. She painted a variety of things, which was liberating for me to discover, along with her mastery of drawing and painting. And in the mid-2000s, my wife worked for Charley Ray for almost four years, who is an extraordinary sculptor, so we both had great jobs.

I was an assistant, too. My first job after UCLA was working for David LaChapelle. Working closely with someone like that makes you realize what it takes to be an artist. You said you and your wife decided to move to L.A. together. Do you bounce ideas off each other within your art practices?

I was focusing on making still-life paintings. Since Shio made all these vessels, it was natural that I was borrowing her objects and putting them in my pictures, just out of practice. When I had a solo show at the Black Dragon Society Gallery in 2006, and then one in 2007 at Anton Kern Gallery, people began asking me, “What are these vessels?” And I said, “Oh, these are my wife’s vessels.” She’s super supportive of me being a maniac painter, and we have been sharing a studio since 2005. We are not in the same room but working under the same roof. We have worked together for a long time, so we’ve been cross-pollinating and giving each other feedback and healthy criticism.

Regarding your drawing and being a draftsman, do you keep a sketchbook?

I don’t keep a sketchbook. I think of drawing as sketching with anything on paper, whether that be pen, watercolor, or colored pencils. I evolved to call it drawing, but only some call it that. For example, Laura Owens considers anything with paint on it a painting. I think about anything that is on paper as a drawing. I make a considerable amount of drawings to rigorously prepare my paintings or a detailed study that I use as a model to paint. When I paint, I paint a lot from sketches I’ve made. I read and try to interpret them in painting.

When a drawing translates into a painting, the image becomes more powerful in so many instances.

Right, drawing, personally, is facilitating how to make the best possible painting.

You have such a wide breadth of objects and places in all your works, and I find that so enriching and thrilling to see. What you capture so well is the light in LA.

On the West Coast, it’s not just the light but also the people and how my life changed. I’m from Massachusetts, and the East Coast can be gritty and hardcore. While the West Coast is pretty laid back and sunny. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I noticed plants I had never seen and got into painting them. I was already in this mode of thinking, “How could I better myself?” and “How could I transcend my current situation as an artist?” I fell into the beauty of the space as a young adult. They all coincided.

L.A. was the first city I was happy to land in, and I felt I was coming home. The light is excellent for a studio, but I have always been obsessed with colors. I’ve always thought about how colors work together. And all those things collided with my interests and what I focused on in painting. All those things activate my mind.

I see a lot of sports references in your works. Where does that come from?

One of the things I was telling you, in the beginning, as the advice from one of my professors, is to pick subjects you’re genuinely invested in making. I’m a huge sports fan and played multiple sports growing up. I like the idea of athletes achieving or accomplishing something. It mainly started with practicing portraiture because I was sick of convincing a friend to let me take a picture and paint them. It is interesting to paint people you know, but it was like a different set of rules to paint somebody you didn’t know or idolize as someone who takes pictures or appropriates everything. I began to paint tennis courts, which came from photographs of turning the lights off and taking pictures of my TV during tennis matches and loving how it looked.

Oh, that’s so awesome. I love that it came from an everyday moment in your life.

In the tennis courts, it’s more about composition, abstraction, and repetition. The floating basketballs, tennis balls, or anything else makes me happy. I paint things I enjoy: plants, interiors, portraits, sports, and landscapes. All those things fascinated me from day one, and then I succeeded with it in the studio and continued pursuing it.

I think it’s sincere that you have kept a focus on subjects that you are genuinely passionate about.

Yeah, nobody had any expectations for me when I moved to LA, so I could do whatever I wanted. Second, I always thought of painting as needing to be more accurate. I’m a figurative painter who paints things from life, but I’m not a photorealist. I’m more like an abstract painter in that a painting could be anything. I didn’t cave into collector interest or curator interest. And I’m glad I didn’t have any success the first three or four years that I was in LA, so I could establish my identity without having too much feedback. I felt more comfortable with the idea that painting could be a variety of things not defined by one type of painting or one look, and I was very conscious of not wanting to get pigeonholed when I was younger. I intentionally showed a variety of motifs working together all the time, and I still do.

What type of materials do you use? Artists, I’m sure, would love to know.

I use a lot of light wash and watercolor as an underpainting. And usually, that’s Windsor Newton, or sometimes it’s a little bit nicer. And then, for colored pencils, I love Prismacolor.

Do you have the giant Prismacolor set?

I mean, I have every flavor under the sun of Prismacolor and anywhere in between—honestly, every color they’ve ever made. And some of them they don’t make anymore, so I have to find deadstock.

For oil paint, I like to use Gamblin, and for acrylic paint, I like Nova Color. I paint primarily on canvas or linen, and I use a certain kind of paper that doesn’t wrinkle or wave, no matter how much watercolor you put on. It’s the heaviest hot press-like watercolor paper you can get, almost like cardboard. I get it shipped from a French company as a giant piece of watercolor paper, 61 by 40 inches. (I don’t want anybody else to know the name so they don’t steal my paper spot.) I either make something that big or cut it down. I trace many things onto transparencies and project them because I still use an old-school projecting device and take photos, and I trace parts of the pictures and seam them together to make a particular image. On this trip to New York, I brought a couple of little notepads if I wanted to make some sketches, and then I bought some transparencies to trace.

As a final question, what does it mean to be showing all these drawings in New York?

It’s fantastic. I can’t wait for people to see this show. It’s immersive and compelling. My wife told me last night that if people have followed my work for the previous 20 years, they probably have seen all the works in the drawing show. Almost all of these works in this drawing show have been seen in the form of a painting. At a minimum, 60 drawings have all been made into paintings. I’ve had drawings sprinkled in my shows or in a room full of drawings, but I’ve never really had it as the primary focus. So, I’m eager to share this because it is the backbone of my studio practice.

Titled “SEVEN,” the latest version of We Buy Gold takes the form of two-venue show spread across two galleries in New York’s Chelsea district: Nicola Vassell Gallery and Jack Shainman Gallery, where Bellorado-Samuels serves as director.

We Buy Gold is a roving project space launched in 2017 that has presented exhibitions, commissioned projects, and held public events that broadly dissect and deconstruct systems of power through art. This latest iteration explores the ways that artists “disrupt the politics of space, time, and language to constitute another world,” according to a description for the show.

“It’s about the in-between,” Bellorado-Samuels told ARTnews in a recent video interview. “We Buy Gold has always been about malleability, and I’m really interested in the ways that artists employ that in their own practices and the conversations that they have with each other about that in between space.”

The artists featured in the show, which will stay up until August 11, include Max Guy, Renee Gladman, David Hammons, Nandi Loaf, Abigail Lucien, Kerry James Marshall, Lorraine O’Grady, Ashley Teamer, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye.

Learn more about the project and Bellorado-Samuels at the video above.

Now 65, Cai has been using his signature materials, gunpowder and fireworks, for more than three decades, arraying and igniting them in ingenious ways to create sprawling performances and paintings that awe and beguile. His efforts have graced not only many of the world’s most august art spaces—the Guggenheim in New York in 2008, the Palace Museum in Beijing in 2020, and the National Art Center in Tokyo this summer—but also some of the era’s most important political pageants, perhaps most notably the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games.

Realizing his elaborate displays is not aways simple. Cai’s most dramatic events require formidable financial resources, negotiations with various authorities, and patience, but he seems well-suited to such matters. In the moving, intimate 2016 documentary Sky Ladder: The Art of Cai Guo-Qiang, he is indefatigable as he navigates setbacks. One revealing moment comes as he conceives a fireworks display for the 2014 Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation in Beijing and meets with Communist Party officials—all men—who have been nixing elements of his plan. Cai, who was born in Quanzhou, China, and has been based in New York since 1995, extolls the advances that have been made in environmentally friendly fireworks, and one the men tells him, between drags of a cigarette: “The innovation is great, but as I mentioned, security and stability are equally important.”

“I’m telling you, the government is here to help you,” the man goes on, explaining that “you have to figure out something creative with all these chains on you.” Off-camera, we hear Cai bemoan, “Why am I still here?” But he sorted it out, and proceeded to light up the night sky above international dignitaries. Even in a grainy clip from Chinese TV, it is tantalizing. The bureaucrats must have been reasonably satisfied, too, since Cai was tapped to do fireworks for the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympic Games.

This year, Cai’s major patron has been the luxury brand Saint Laurent. The label (take note, future scholars) has co-organized his Tokyo survey, “Cai Guo-Qiang: Ramble in the Cosmos—From Primeval Fireball Onward,” and last month, its creative director, Anthony Vaccarello, commissioned a fireworks display on Japan’s east coast, along Yotsukura Beach, in the city of Iwaki, about three hours by car north of Tokyo.

The fireworks took place in broad daylight, at noon, on a Wednesday. “Nighttime fireworks rely on light for their effects; their brilliant bursts will return to darkness,” Cai said in an email interview. “Daytime fireworks rely on smoke to take shape; although there is also a poetic purpose, they are superimposed on social realities and nature.” In his view, “daytime fireworks are closer to paintings.”

Saint Laurent produced a crisp three-and-a-half-minute video of the 30-minute display, which Cai titled When the Sky Blooms with Sakura. One after another, a series of irresistible events transpire via some 40,000 fireworks shells, vaguely suggesting botanical delights: thin white columns rocket upward and then burst into countless lines, strange black waves streak skyward at a diagonal, and finally the cherry blossoms promised in its title come into existence, a glorious, gigantic expanse of pink as pure, fluffy, and delicate as cotton candy. Thanks to high-res drone footage, the video is a richly immersive experience, and it has racked up a cool 3.4 million views over the past four weeks.

The piece and the retrospective represent a kind of homecoming for Cai, who moved to Japan in 1986 and lived there for the next nine years, as he honed the practice that would make him an international superstar. In 1993, he took up residence in Iwaki to prepare for a solo show at the Iwaki City Museum of Art, and on March 7, 1994, he staged an astonishing gunpowder performance along the same coast he used last month. The Horizon from the Pan-Pacific: Project for Extraterrestrials No. 14 (no one does titles quite like Cai) involved gunpowder fuses measuring 5 kilometers long (about 3.1 miles); lit in darkness, they traced the curve of the earth.

While residing in Iwaki in the mid-’90s, Cai became close with many in the community. Residents raised funds for the gunpowder fuses, and “they even initiated a collective action of turning off lights in every household during the event, to make the earth’s outline more beautiful for the universe to witness,” Cai told me. They have helped him realize other pieces since then, and “over the years, we witnessed each other’s hair becoming grey and our movements less nimble,” he added. “This long-lasting friendship, conveyed through art, has transcended the political and historical differences between nations.”

In the wake of the 2011 Japan earthquake and Fukushima nuclear disaster, “many residents—including my friends from Iwaki—were displaced from their homes,” Cai said. He auctioned artworks to raise funds for rebuilding, which people instead decided to use for an initiative to plant 10,000 cherry blossom trees. “The project envisions that in the future, the land once contaminated by the nuclear plant incident will appear like a pink ocean of cherry blossoms when viewed from afar,” Cai said.

Through the fireworks display, Cai was also trying to reckon with the tragedy. Some of his shows have been fantastically over-the-top, bringing to mind the art critic (and pyromaniac) Peter Schjeldahl’s belief “that proper fireworks should be all the good parts of war and none of the bad parts.” But in Iwaki last month, he wanted to make something “more simple, solemn, and monumental, evoking the feeling of Zen,” he said. His aim was “to commemorate the victims and pay tribute to the awe-inspiring power of nature, while drawing upon Eastern philosophy, where rebirth is attained through transcending trauma, to convey a theme of hope.”

Creating a memorial out of materials that are designed for spectacles is a complicated and thorny notion. But at least judging by the documentation, Cai pulled it off. The forms that he conjured are achingly beautiful, but they are also fragile and fleeting. Born of humble ingredients, they begin to vanish just as they coalesce, brushed away by the wind.

Despite the apparent precision of his art, Cai is never exactly sure how his chosen tools will behave. “The charisma of gunpowder lies in its uncontrollability and spontaneity,” he told me. Out on the beach, some of what he had envisioned ended up not taking place. Two acts that were to be staged by more than 400 drones outfitted with firework shells could not be realized because of issues communicating with them. “It is true that I was upset by the setback,” Cai said, “but I was also relieved, because I am still young and still around!” (That Cai, midway through his 60s, can still see himself as young probably explains some of his success.)

Cai was also feeling thankful. He said that staging the Tokyo exhibition (which runs through August 21) has been a way “to express my gratitude. My first few years in Japan were both extraordinarily difficult and immensely rewarding.” They have stuck with him. “I often feel that I am an adored child of the God,” he said at one point. “I grew up under the support of the whole world, while so many hardworking artists still end up in poverty. But where is the God? It has been important people and opportunities that have helped me and shaped me into who I am.”

When England decided to let go of its crown jewel 75 years ago, its rushed departure resulted in the unceremonious division of its Indian territories into three parts, with the Hindu-majority mainland becoming India, flanked by two Muslim-majority regions which became West and East Pakistan. The two ends of Pakistan were further partitioned in 1971, leading to the birth of Bangladesh in the East.

Lines drawn on maps decided the fate of millions and caused untold death and destruction. A region known for centuries of peaceful communion despite differing religious beliefs, cultures, foods, dress, languages, and rulers, was suddenly and arbitrarily torn asunder overnight.

In the wake of these violent acts, artists from the region drew, painted, designed, embroidered, and creatively reimagined their homeland’s numerous configurations for posterity.

Three-quarters of a century on, this has resulted in a rich legacy of work that can be loosely classified as “Partition art,” a tendency that captures both the negative and positive aspects of life after the traumatic events of 1947.

On the one hand, artists have focused on the discomfort of migration, the anxiety of displacement, the emotional scars caused by exposure to abject violence, hatred and fear, and the subjugation of women and other social minorities in propagation of false notions of honor. On the other, artists have also shown how invisible similarities between various communities exceed geographical divisions, exploring the deep and unfettered ties to the land of one’s ancestors and relationships that endure beyond religious splits.

At first, the mantle of documenting this phase of history lay with those who experienced Partition firsthand. Many could not bear to speak of it, but some captured what they witnessed in detail.

On fragile scraps of paper, Sardari Lal Parasher sketched the despair evident on scores of refugees he supervised in a transit camp in 1947. Satish Gujral caught the angst of survival in a haunting 1959 self-portrait where his sharp-featured visage, replete with furrowed brow, peeks out from a shroud-like garment, behind a skeletal figure. Pran Nath Mago sensitively painted the anguish of veiled women mourning a deep loss in Mourners (1950). Krishen Khanna showed the mental and physical despondency of sudden displacement from one’s home, through his painting titled Exodus (2007), where a tonga (horse-drawn cart) carries his family and all they hold dear, over “difficult and uncertain terrain,” as he once described it.

While those artists worked in a figural mode, others after them would take up Partition using the language of abstraction. S.H. Raza returned to the wound in his “Zamin” (Land) series from the 1970s, in which he painted in angry swathes of reds, browns, and yellows. Even without any figures present, these paintings manage to evoke an open wound. It’s a mode not entirely dissimilar from what appears in Zarina’s Dividing Line (2001), which denotes a contested border and a festering gash in equal measure.

A related wound appears to have barely scarred over in Jogen Chowdhury’s 2017 painting Partition 1947, in which a shaky line recalling the border drawn between East Pakistan and Bengal strikes a writhing body. Chowdhury is among the many artists who lived through Partition and has since returned to it in his art. His family moved from East Pakistan to Bengal, and in this painting, he alluded to the economic hardship faced by Bengalis forced to make their lives from scratch in West Bengal.

Artist Nilima Sheikh effectively drew on Urvashi Butalia’s oral history collection of survivor stories published in the late 1990s for her paintings titled Questions of Martyrdom 1 and 2 and Panghat Stories in the early 2000s. Here, Sheikh portrays startling images such as the well in the village of Thoa Khalsa that became a burial pit for hundreds of Sikh women and children who chose death over dishonor, as well as the decapitation of a girl by her father for similar reasons. “Urvashi questions whether this decision to be sacrificed was taken by the women themselves or forced on them in the guise of ‘honor’ of the family? Did the women have a choice?” Sheikh asked while speaking to ARTnews.

There is no doubt that firsthand accounts of Partition offer the richest detail, yet time and distance have the advantage of allowing objectivity. Therefore, in later years, second- and third-generation migrants have determinedly changed the artistic narrative in which Partition is portrayed by widening that lineage’s scope and redefining the messages relayed.

Manisha Gera Baswani conceptualized her cross-border Partition project “Postcards from Home” in 2015, on her second visit to Pakistan. She called on artist friends from both sides of the border to create 47 postcards, one end of which had a photograph of the artist taken by Baswani for another ongoing decades-long project “Artist Through the Lens,” and the other end recounted a story related to the partition. This also inspired her to create a series of works on paper that had pins driven through them, as well as a grouping of embroidered works, to highlight aspects of pain and healing.

Baswani said, “I often wonder what prompted me to create these huge projects on Partition, when I had never explored the subject earlier. Then I realized it’s always been part of my DNA, and it was just a matter of time. Whenever I have visited Lahore, I have felt a strong connection. Everything that was in my heart about separation has found its way into my work.”

Complementing this narrative of shared histories is Arpana Caur’s body of work, which is steeped in the visual imagery of destruction yet shows the power of love and hope in transcending divisions. In a painting titled The Great Divide (1997), she depicts two Indian freedom fighters, Bhagat Singh and Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, who seem to merge as one despite their diametrically opposed political views (the former advocated strong means to assert one’s message, while the latter ascribed to a policy of non-violence). They are flanked by the blood-soaked Partition trains of Caur’s childhood dreams. Lions rendered in the folk art style of Godna appear in the foreground, alluding to the strong character of the Singhs, who are members of the Sikh community to which Caur belongs. They were arguably some of the worst affected by the Partition in North India.

“Amid the culture, language, songs, and love stories that we share, one wonders: where does Partition figure?” Caur asked. “A line on paper that an Englishman drew erupts like a bleeding wound from time to time as some people want to keep the embers burning so that more pressing questions of hunger and poverty are pushed to the background.”

One of Caur’s most moving depictions of 1947, however, is of her own grandfather trudging on foot to Delhi from his native Lahore, surrounded by the same Godna lions. On his head, he carries the holy book of the Sikhs, the Guru Granth Sahib, with the stark imagery calling to mind the loss of everything he couldn’t carry with him.

In her ongoing series “Project Home: The Word for the World is Home,” begun in 2019, Seema Kohli also presents her family’s pre-Partition story. Inspired by her father Krishnan Dev Kohli’s autobiography, Mitr Pyaare Nu (To My Friends and Loved Ones), she put together a series that included a narrative performance, photographs, books on traditional medicine, and a sound installation extracted from songs sung by her aunts and father, along with ambient sound in Tamas (Inertia), a famed TV series about Partition from 1988. These pay ode to the memory of her father’s hometown, Pind Dadan Khan, and the medicinal knowledge which was lovingly preserved and practiced in her family of hereditary hakims (traditional doctors) for generations.

“The idea of expressing my family’s history possessed me,” Kohli explained. “At first, it was about sharing my inheritance with the rest of the family but as the social order of things were changing, it became about sharing the role my family played in the creation of a new nation—India.”

The preservation of the historic legacy of this period is a concept that resonates with young artists as well. The US-based Pritika Chowdhury’s series of “Anti-Memorial Projects” focus on feminist historiographies. Jiten Thukral and Sumir Tagra, both from India, find solace in documenting the plight of traditional akharas (wrestling grounds) and poor farmers in Punjab—groups that were affected by the Partition and continue to be slighted by people in power.

Bangladeshi artist Sarker Protick’s nationwide projects—the first called Crossing captures the industrial ruins of the railway network built under the British regime and their lost glory, and the second, Jirno (Ruins), documents abandoned houses which belonged to wealthy landowning Hindus who moved after Partition—aim to preserve a history that has been largely ignored since the birth of Bangladesh.

Protick said, “With the passage of time, I can stand at a distance and look at the subject objectively, instead of feeling overwhelmed by the architecture or its sense of space.”

Sudipta Das’s family moved from Sylhet in present day Bangladesh to Assam in India, where the artist is now based. She compares the displacement her ancestors faced after leaving their cherished homeland to her personal experience of escaping the floods of the Brahmaputra River every year. Referring to her Korean dakjee doll installations which illustrate this movement, she says, “My work brings out my struggle—the loneliness and insecurities of migration.”

Encouraging interest on the subject in children is another consideration that drives Partition art. The ReReeti Foundation, an organization from Bengaluru that works to make museums accessible to everyone, has launched the Retihas project to educate students through a number of interactive modules. In one of these, users navigate animated storylines of people who experienced Partition, to reach a number of possible endings, both tragic and hopeful. The animation recreates exacting details of dress, food, and cultural traits to bring that time of history to life. 

From being a cataclysmic event that evaded serious documentation for many years to becoming a fixture in popular culture: when it comes to art, Partition’s legacy has changed many times, and will likely continue to do so as time goes on.

Pakistani artist and activist Salima Hashmi said of the continued attraction of the subject, “The issue of Partition keeps re-emerging with the third and fourth generation today. Even though they don’t have those immediate memories, they do carry the stories that were handed down to them.”

This past March, the Ghanaian artist had his New York solo debut with the mega-gallery Gagosian. Boafo, who is known for finger-dipped paintings depicting himself and Black people from Africa and its diaspora, said he’d received praise for the show, but he came out of the experience feeling as though something was missing.

“I was happy with the [reception] and how it turned out, but not having the family or people that I work with to enjoy the paintings as well—for me, it wasn’t enough,” Boafo said in an interview with ARTnews, speaking from Vienna. He wanted to find a way for “family to be able to be part of the conversation.”

His solution was to bring some of the pieces from the show this May back home to Accra. The show, which closed earlier this month, featured these works, as well as some new ones, at dot.ateliers, the art space he founded in 2022 that also hosts residencies and maintains an art library and studios.

“It’s important that the people that I make the painting for or with should have access to the painting,” Boafo said. “And also, for them to be part of the experience.”

Held in collaboration with Gagosian, Boafo’s dot.ateliers show is being billed as the first time that a Western commercial gallery has hosted an exhibition with an African artist on the continent.

Andrew Fabricant, chief operating officer of Gagosian, said that the Accra exhibition was borne out of Boafo informing the gallery of his decision not to sell one of the paintings in the New York show—with the intent to show it at an upcoming exhibition at his foundation in Ghana. They both thought it’d be a great idea to create some new works in addition to the particular painting, with Gagosian sponsoring the show alongside Boafo’s foundation.

“Too often, it’s been the case for almost all artists coming out of Africa recently. They get taken out of Africa and they get shown in the West, but there’s never any reciprocity, so we thought it was a great idea,” Fabricant remarked. “There was a huge audience in Accra, of course, so it was an idea that came about very easily, and it’s been very, very successful.” (At the moment, Boafo isn’t formally represented by Gagosian, but Fabricant shared that they are planning another show.)

Boafo’s quest to show his work in Ghana attests to his dedication to his home country, which tends to get lost in discussions of his art, the prices for it, and his celebrity. Rather than coasting by on fame, Boafo is using his star power to support Ghana’s art scene.

dot.ateliers is providing resources and access to opportunities for up-and-coming and emerging artists like Crystal Yayra Anthony, Zandile Tshabalala, and Dzidefo Amegatsey through its residency program. Yet even beyond that space, Boafo is leveraging his status to help other Ghanaian artists, like his friend Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe, whose representation with Roberts Projects was made possible in part because Boafo encouraged him to spend some time in Los Angeles, away from his Portland, Oregon, base, so he could connect with more art world stakeholders.

“My feeling is, from the first time I met Amoako, he’s the kind of person that shares his success. Meaning if he’s successful, more people around him become more successful,” said Bennett Roberts, cofounder of Roberts Projects, which has represented Boafo since 2018. “This is a very unique character trait. I learned from the very beginning that he is a very particular person who does not want everything for himself.”

A Rise Abroad

Before he became a superstar artist, Boafo was a ball boy at the Accra Lawn Tennis Club, then a tennis player. Born in 1984 in the Ghanaian capital, he fostered his interest in art mainly on his own.

Boafo, who lost his father at a young age, taught himself how to paint at home while his mother worked as a cook. He loved drawing and painting, partaking in competitions to sharpen his skills, even though the possibility of career success in the field was low—something that some of Boafo’s peers have spoken of, referring to the lack of a commercial art infrastructure in Ghana.

He was ultimately offered a scholarship by a man his mother worked for, leading to his studies at the Ghanatta College of Art and Design. In a sign of what was to come, he won Best Abstract Painter of the Year in 2007 and Best Portrait Painter of the Year in 2008, his final year at the school.

In 2014, he relocated to Vienna with the Austrian artist Susanda Mesquita, whom he met in Accra and whom he later married. (They are no longer together.) The year before, they cofounded WE DEY, a platform for and by artists of color and under-represented communities.

Boafo went on to pursue an MFA degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Attempts to further his practice in the country were met with roadblocks, partly because of his race. Those experiences led him to create “Body Politics,” a series largely credited with being his first mature grouping of works. One painting in that series shows the artist holding the book The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon’s 1961 treatise about the dehumanization effects of colonialism on individuals and nations. Because of “Body Politics,” Boafo was discovered on Instagram by American painter Kehinde Wiley, who bought some of his works and put forward Boafo’s name to some of the galleries representing him, including Roberts Projects.

Roberts and his team there reached out to Boafo, later organizing his first exhibition in the United States, “I See Me,” in 2019.

Later that year, Boafo was named the first artist-in-residence at the Rubell family’s newly reopened private museum in Miami. That residency program is closely watched because it often jumpstarts the careers of young artists—other past participants have included Sonia Gomes and Cy Gavin—and the Rubells proved prescient once more with Boafo.

But widespread success did not come instantly. In a 2020 Artsy interview, Boafo said, “If I get museum placement and shows, I am guaranteed longevity.” He made that remark in May of that year. Seven months later, in December, one of his paintings sold at auction for more than $1 million. The year after, his art appeared on Dior’s clothes, and was even sent into space by Jeff Bezos.

Boafo’s success means that at any given time, he is travelling or engaging with people around the world, but he always has the continent in his sight and thought.

“I think everything that I will do in the West, I will try my possible best in my small way to bring it back home,” he said.

‘It’s All About Sharing’

Boafo’s first museum survey, curated by ARTNOIR cofounder Larry Ossei-Mensah, opened at the Museum of African Diaspora in San Francisco in 2021, two years after they first began discussing it. The exhibition, which features works made starting in 2016 and also formerly appeared at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, is still traveling; it is now on view at the Seattle Art Museum; after that institution, it will head to the Denver Art Museum. According to Ossei-Mensah, the point of the show—titled “Soul of Black Folks,” after a W. E. B. Du Bois book—was to offer a context for Boafo’s work that went beyond the market.

Boafo’s work “was assessing Black lives through his lens, whether it was people he met during his time in Vienna, whether it’s people in Ghana—people that he admired,” said Ossei-Mensah, who first met Boafo in the late 2010s. “So I was trying to use this exhibition as a platform to kind of understand: Why has he been able to cut through all the fads, all the noise? And he’s been able to create a sustainable practice that’s inspiring a new generation.”

Part of Ossei-Mensah’s purpose was to show how Boafo has centered the narratives, stories, and bodies of Black people. Bennett Roberts, the Roberts Projects cofounder, said that Boafo’s portraiture was likely to stand the test of time.

“I think [Boafo] is making paintings that would hold up next to the most important paintings in history. That’s just my opinion—I am sure people will think that I’m foolish for saying that, but I believe that with all my heart,” Roberts said. “The reason is because he is able to capture a portrait of someone that is the essence of that person, not necessarily that person.”

Boafo’s focus on people has extended beyond his art. He’s provided financial support to organizations such as Black Girls Glow, an Accra-based feminist nonprofit that supports women artists. The poet Poetra Asantewa, the organization’s founder, noted that Boafo’s donation “made a huge difference,” allowing it to expand a residency program beyond just Accra-based artists. “It meant that there were people from different backgrounds even within Ghana who were also present,” she said.

The artist himself seems focused on giving back. “That’s how I want people to remember me,” he said. 

His next goal is to get his traveling survey to come to Africa. “It’s always important to have my paintings be in spaces where more people can experience them,” Boafo stated, adding, “Obviously, I will want that show to end somewhere on the [African] continent, which I’m still thinking about. I haven’t found the space yet. For me, it’s all about sharing.”

Correction, 7/18/23, 10:10 a.m.: A previous version of this article misstated where Boafo is based. He is based in Accra, not Vienna, where he formerly lived.

The Drexciyan mythos proposes that the unborn children of these women emerged from the womb with the ability to breathe underwater and that their descendants form the aquatic metropolis of Drexciya. As with most origin stories, the details seem implausible, but the tale is an empowering account of resistance in the face of oppression.

The creators of the Drexciya legend weren’t writers but a Detroit electronic music duo of the same name who released three studio albums between 1999 and 2002. The collaboration, comprising Gerald Donald and the late James Stinson, might have intended for their invention to be militarized, as evidenced by the album art and the music’s aggressive drumbeat. But a number of Black women artists, inspired by their creation, have seen the potential for feminine energy to be a central part of the story. These artists complicate the Drexciya myth by adding depth to the often-bellicose conceptions of its creators. In robust interrogations of the tale, the five Black women artists below employ various genres and media to depict Drexciya as a sophisticated outpost of African culture.

How did you go about choosing the works for the show?

Originally, I started with the idea of making a few new works and primarily having some loaned pieces, as the show is a continued investigation of themes I have been working with. But I started to realize that there was a slight variation and something new was happening. I decided to let it pour out and ended up making all new works for the show within a few months’ time.

The new works continue to prod at the ways structures of power can be resisted, transgressed, and dismantled. We’ve felt a swift lockstep move collectively that has permeated this work. I conceptualized this show as I was making it in response to the vibrations of our collective psyche.

How do you see these new works as different from previous ones?

They are still dealing with themes of radicalization through the transformative powers of performance, but that sort of resistance to legibility has gotten a bit stronger. There’s a more focused force constantly at play that feels like a response to an immediate threat. There’s a more urgent bodily response to the way the forms are moving in this work.

How did you conceive this show?

I usually start with rough sketches. Sometimes they focus more on form and other times they’re more concentrated on a specific moment of tension. Some are more figurative, while others are more of a general form. From there, I tend to turn them into works on paper.

This is where things start to get more interesting as I think through mark-making and through moments where forms come together and dissolve into the next. There’s a kind of choreography that I figure out in these works. They’re usually monochromatic and I don’t tend to finish them. Once I’ve made some general decisions that I think will get me to the painting, I turn those works into digital sketches where I then begin to think through color.

In these digital sketches I collage in my reference imagery. I conceptualize the work by bringing in images from the world, akin to a blueprint of what the paintings will be. The works on paper and paintings are finished separately. The paintings usually become more about responding to the materiality of the medium, though I usually color match on a screen, which can create a kind of flatness in the paintings. Utilizing a different set of tools has helped me invent my own world. There tend to be a lot more process-based decisions in the paintings than in the works on paper.

It’s interesting to get a better sense of your process because even though the paintings have this flatness to them, they are also quite tactile.

I’m really interested in having multiple things that aren’t meant to be together coexisting within the works. The varied lighting conditions, for example, stem from my research into microscopic photography of organisms such as parasites. When I collage all these disparate elements together in the digital sketches, these different sets of conditions are brought into the work.

Yes, you draw from a range of environmental sources. How has that influenced your work?

That answer is always shifting because it’s so subjective to each piece and any given moment of time. But a lot of the works really pick up on how we contend with the monstrosities of being human. I’m interested in inducing a sense of the uncanny in this work and this theatricality as it relates to the carnivalesque. The works deal with this release of impulses and inversion of social norms, where distortion and the grotesque exist as forms of mockery. I come from Baranquilla, Colombia, which is home to one of the biggest carnivals in the world. I grew up surrounded by the carnival and, though each have overlapping themes, those in Latin America have come to respond to colonization. This brought a whole different kind of conversation to the carnival around death, horror, and resistance. These are also looming and inspiring aspects within my work.

There’s a quality to the works that is simultaneously enticing and sickening—these flamboyant color palettes and moments of tension and release that are at play.

Color has become this interesting way for me to seduce a viewer into looking at something they might not quite be looking for or that they’re not expecting to look at. It is situated in the space of the uncanny where something is both familiar and unfamiliar and has never quite resolved. There’s an agency and power in the ability to provide a sense of desire and longing that can never be resolved. These feels are induced through both so much excess and lack. This drives a lot of formal decisions in the paintings.

How do you see this in relation to the present moment?

We are in a moment—and we’ve been in this moment—of knowing that there is an underlying threat. There’s a plan at play by people with intentions that aren’t benevolent. There have been so many attacks against marginalized groups of people that form a kind of chokehold. All signs are pointing to an impending threat that isn’t impending anymore because it’s here. It’s wrapped its tentacles around us. There have been attacks on pretty much every group that could potentially come together to expand the potentiality of this country and of the people, which poses a threat to those in positions of power.

We are living in a time of collective dread and anxiety about where things are going politically, environmentally, socioeconomically, and there’s exhaustion in the collective psyche. We’re all struggling to find a space of vulnerability in our rage. I’ve been channeling this into painting. In the studio, I’m an exposed nervous system and it comes out in this work. But we’re all experiencing a sort of similar exhaustion. And I hope that I can connect mine to yours through the work.

There’s a kind of entanglement and an inability to resolve a single form from start to finish. Each piece is always kind of in a state of becoming, in a state of flux, in a state of growth and shifting form that speaks to a very tumultuous way of existing.

“Radical Contractions” is on view at the Whitney Museum through October 29, 2023.

Last week, Charing Cross Photo announced that the image, submitted by Suzi Dougherty, an Australian actor and amateur photographer would be disqualified. The Guardian reported earlier this week that CCP’s owner, Ian Anderson, who oversees the cash award reviewed the image’s metadata and was unable to determine if the image was AI-generated.

Dougherty has said that she took the image of her son Casper using an iPhone, telling the Guardian, “I wouldn’t even know how to do an AI photo, I’m just getting my head around ChatGPT.”

The traveling showcase “Gucci Garden Archetypes,” an immersive exhibition put on by the Italian luxury label to mark its 100th anniversary, first opened in Florence in May 2021. It then traveled to the Powerhouse Museum in November 2022.

In an Instagram post published Tuesday, Charing Cross Photo confirmed the photograph was indeed real and corrected its mistake after Doughterty had clarified how the image was produced and identified the man in the photograph was her son.

In a previous post published last week, CCP had described how the competition was intended to highlight images from “real life experience.”

“It is a great play on what is real and not in our world indeed,” CCP said in the statement. “Sadly for the entrant the timing was not great considering that AI is such a hot topic, and without the background info we felt the need to question the entire image.” CCP thanked Dougherty for making the correction, despite being passed up for the prize ultimately, and for “helping to create the conversation about AI.”

Disputes around the authenticity of AI-generated images in various fields are ongoing. Some artists have argued AI breaches legal standards around copyright. In April, German artist Boris Eldagsen forfeited a Sony award designated by the World Photography Organization after an image he produced using artificial intelligence was questioned by the award’s judges. The image, The Electrician, appears like a vintage photograph depicting two women donning midcentury styles. The photography organization said talks around Eldagsen’s method ended in discord after questions were raised about the use of AI and transparency, saying it tried and failed “to engage in a meaningful and constructive dialogue” with the artist.