The Faraway Nearby
March 5–23, 2025
Westbeth gallery
55 Bethune Street New York, NY 10014
Artists:
Kazumi Tanaka and Jayoung Yoon
sooim lee and Xinyi Liu
Jamie Ho and Junli Song
Lipika Bhargava and Naho Taruishi
Curator: Jiyeon Paik
Assistant curator: Jean Chung
Exhibition Designer: Archtechtonic
Westbeth Gallery is pleased to present The Faraway Nearby (TFN), a group exhibition featuring eight Asian women artists who engaged in a five-month-long dialogue project curated by Jiyeon Paik. Inspired by Rebecca Solnit’s book The Faraway Nearby, this project is indebted to Solnit’s reflections on reading, writing, solitude, and solidarity, which form the conceptual foundation of this curatorial initiative. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, photography, video, and installation—interwoven with excerpts from the artists’ conversations—the exhibition navigates themes of memory, inheritance, and identity, offering an intricate exploration of personal and collective narratives.
The exhibition opens with a performance by Kyoung eun Kang, a 2023 TFN artist, who reimagines Olga Cabral’s poem Woman Ironing—a former Westbeth resident—through movement and audience interaction. Revisiting Cabral’s portrayal of domestic labor, Kang’s performance bridges past and present, connecting historical perspectives on women’s work to contemporary struggles for recognition and solidarity.
Kazumi Tanakaand Jayoung Yoon engage with maternal relationships through sculptures and objects imbued with personal memories. Their works trace the passage of time, delving into how love, loss, and inheritance shape the bonds between mothers and daughters and how these enduring connections influence generational legacies.
sooim leeand Xinyi Liu reflect on diasporic identity through intergenerational lenses. lee’s prints, drawings, and paintings, recalling her experience as a Korean immigrant in 1980s New York—where the roles of wife, mother, and artist overlapped amid cultural expectations—resonate with Liu’s contemporary deconstruction of race and femininity. Through dyed and layered mulberry paper, Liu weaves fragile, translucent pink skins that resist fixed categorization, symbolizing the fluidity of belonging. Their works echo one another in contemplating multifaceted identity across time and place.
Jamie Hoand Junli Song collaborate across photography and video to explore memory, diaspora, and personal history. As second-generation immigrants, they construct layered narratives through modularity and animation, investigating how identity is inherited, reimagined, and transformed over time.
Lipika Bhargava and Naho Taruishi exchange an abstract dialogue on life and death. Bhargava’s paired images reflect cycles of mortality, while Taruishi documents family visits to ancestral gravestones from 1996 to 2024. Their collaborative video piece, Movement of Water (2025), intertwines intimate grief with broader themes of conflict and loss, engaging critically with the geopolitical tensions rooted in colonial legacies and contested power structures.
Alongside, TFN features archival materials from the artists' dialogues alongside contributions from 20 invited respondents participating in TFN’s In Response program. These letters, images, and video clips extend the discussion beyond the gallery walls, enriching the collective engagement and broadening the interpretive scope of the works.
Presented at Westbeth Gallery—a space shaped by the legacies of pioneering women artists such as Diane Arbus, Shigeko Kubota, Elizabeth Murray, Lorraine O’Grady, and Hannah Wilke–TFN unfolds as a dialogue bridging past and present. Weaving together diverse artistic practices, the exhibition considers how stories endure, shift, and take on new meanings over time. In this ongoing exchange, art becomes an act of remembrance and transformation—reclaiming histories, bridging distances, and offering a space where personal and collective narratives continue to evolve.
And They Make Us Poor,
For Our Only Wealth Is Seeing
October 12–December 27, 2024
episode gallery
213 Franklin Street Brooklyn, NY 11222
Jean Chung, Kyoung eun Kang, Kakyoung Lee, sooim lee, Jung Eun Song, Kazumi Tanaka, Naho Taruishi, Jayoung Yoon
And They Make Us Poor, For Our Only Wealth Is Seeing, a group exhibition that explores the evolving relationship between humans and their environments as natural landscapes transform under the pressures of climate change and urbanization. Borrowing its title from a line of poetry by Fernando Pessoa, the exhibition centers on solastalgia—the distress and sense of displacement experienced when one’s familiar environment is irrevocably altered. Through this lens, the exhibition delves into the emotional and psychological impacts of these changes, exploring how shifting perspectives toward the natural world evoke feelings of grief, dislocation, and adaptation.
Image courtesy of episode gallery, New York. Photography by Archtechtonic.
Image courtesy of episode gallery, New York. Photography by Archtechtonic.
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