The Cantor Arts Center presents Spirit House, a major group exhibition foregrounding how contemporary artists of the Asian diaspora challenge the boundary between life and death through art. On view from Sept. 4, 2024, to Jan. 26, 2025, the exhibition comprises nearly 50 works of art by 33 artists, including large-scale paintings, digital media, ceramic sculpture, photography, and significant new acquisitions within the museum’s permanent collection.
“This exhibition comes from an observation gleaned over the last few years: that many contemporary artists are intentionally addressing some of our most challenging existential questions through their artistic practices,” said Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander, the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) co-director and the Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “These artists deftly interweave family narratives within larger global contexts to show that the stakes of our diasporic lives are cosmic. Motivated by their vulnerability and my own diasporic experience, I framed the project through Thai spirit houses, an omnipresent force during my childhood in Bangkok.”
Spirit House asks: how can art help us to speak to ghosts, inhabit haunted spaces, be reincarnated, or enter different dimensions? The exhibition uses spirit houses as its interpretive framework. These small devotional structures found throughout Thailand provide shelter for the supernatural. Like the art represented in this show, they collapse the distance between the past and present, as well as this world and the next. Here, contemporary artists reckon with the spiritual and spectral in our visual culture and question the many forms that ghosts can take. In foregrounding intuitive and inherited forms of knowledge, these artists challenge the importance of data-driven, scientific methods of understanding the world around us. Alexander said, “I aim to capture and say something about art in our present moment and how we might think about art and death to lead a more meaningful life.”
There are five thematic sections in the exhibition – “Spirit Houses,” “Ghosts,” “Hauntings,” “Shrines,” and “Dimensions” – that survey how the featured artists are exploring modes of making that exceed rational understanding. Taken together, the works in Spirit House demonstrate how artists have the transformative capacity to act like spirit mediums, materializing prayers and invocations, exorcizing and producing ghosts, and surpassing the limits of linear time through the creative process. These artists bring together family narratives severed by war, migration, and generational trauma, creating new realms and realities. In doing so, they confront the essentially inescapable: life, death, and all that lies between and beyond.
Additional AAAI exhibitions on view now
Livien Yin: Thirsty is the first museum solo exhibition of the work of Brooklyn-based artist Livien Yin, MFA ’19. This single-gallery exhibition in the Ruth Levison Halperin Gallery showcases new and recent paintings by Yin and their sensitive, researched-based approach to creating scenes of contemporary subjects alongside historical Asian Americans and their environments. In their paintings, Yin often casts their friends as models, collapsing the distance between the past and present to create new connective threads between Asian Americans across generations. On view through Feb. 2, 2025.
TT Takemoto: Remembering in the Absence of Memory in the Madeleine H. Russell Gallery features two video works and two complementary series of small handmade objects and works on paper by San Francisco Bay Area-based artist TT Takemoto. Takemoto’s videos Looking for Jiro (2011) and On the Line (2018) uniquely center queer experiences of intimacy in prewar and WWII contexts. The Gentleman’s Gaman series (2009-23) and an installation of handcrafted kokeshi dolls (2023) offer sculptural, expanded modes of engagement with challenging and overlooked narratives in Asian American history, as reimagined by Takemoto. On view through Dec. 1, 2024.
“We are thrilled to share that works by 12 of the 33 artists featured in this exhibition – including Kelly Akashi, Binh Danh, Dominique Fung, Hesoo Kwon, Timothy Lai, Jarod Lew, An-My Lê, Kang Seung Lee, Reagan Louie, Nina Molloy, Masami Teraoka, and Lien Truong – have recently joined our collection and will debut alongside generous loans in Spirit House,” said Veronica Roberts, the John and Jill Freidenrich Director at the Cantor. “This exhibition is the culmination of years of research and is an incredible milestone in the AAAI’s development. I am confident that the exhibition, its accompanying catalog, and the substantial acquisitions we have made will help redraw the lines of art history for years to come.”
Spirit House is the largest of three major exhibitions in 2024 of the AAAI, an interdisciplinary hub dedicated to acquiring, preserving, displaying, and researching art related to Asian American and Asian diaspora artists and their practices. Curated by Alexander with Kathryn Cua, AAAI’s curatorial assistant, the exhibition is accompanied by the AAAI’s first publication, an extensive exhibition catalog.
The Cantor is now open an additional six hours per week. New extended hours are Wednesday and Friday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m., Thursday 11 a.m. to 8 p.m., and Saturday and Sunday 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.