ASIANS BELONG HERE is a public art exhibition organized by roosi and KiSmithGallery in collaboration with SaveArtSpace. The exhibition, taking place on billboards in New York City, is to help raise awareness on the ongoing string of hate-fueled attacks on Asian Americans nationwide. The multimedia project brings emerging and established artists together who created one-of-a-kind pieces that shed light on anti-Asian violence.

Racially motivated harassment on Asian Americans have increased across major U.S. cities last year. According to the NYPD,  hate-fueled attacks on Asian Americans rose 1,900% in New York City in 2020. Stop AAPI Hate, a reporting database created at the beginning of the pandemic as a response to the increase in racial violence, received 2,808 reports of anti-Asian discrimination between March 19 and December 31, 2020. The violence continues throughout 2021 with President Joe Biden having signed an executive order denouncing anti-Asian discrimination shortly after taking office in January. 

The ASIANS BELONG HERE selected artists are Yikui (Coy) Gu, Yen Ha, Sam Sundos, Meguru Yamaguchi, Stickymonger, Kanha Hul, Ryan Bock, Angelica Yudasto, Kiyomi Quinn Taylor, & Sono Kuwayama.

Curated by Keith Estiler & Ki Smith.

During the week of July 12, 2021, SaveArtSpace will launch public art installations for each work on billboard ad spaces in Manhattan & Brooklyn. The public art will be on view for at least one month.

Curators

Keith Estiler is a Filipino-American writer, curator and art editor at HYPEBEAST. Born and raised in Queens, New York, Keith works closely with his friends and fellow Queens natives from the art collective, @studioroosi, to uplift PoC voices through diverse projects such as planning contemporary art exhibitions for emerging artists of color with galleries across New York City and activism-focused initiatives such as raising thousands of dollars for the NAACP amid the Black Lives Matter protests. Throughout his varying creative efforts, Keith champions the underrepresented and those in the art industry who don’t fit the conventional mold. 

Connect with Keith on Instagram at @keithestiler.

Ki Smith is an American art dealer and owner of Ki Smith Gallery, Harlem and East Village. In 2012 he and his brother, artist Sei Smith, co-founded Apostrophe NYC, a gallery/nightclub hybrid known for their guerrilla pop-up exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, MoMA PS1, and NYC subway stations. Born and raised in Manhattan, “Smith is drawing inspiration from dealers of the 1970s—like Richard Bellamy or Paula Cooper—who were often the same age or not much older than the artists they represented,” (Abby Schultz for Barron’s, 2019). Smith opened Ki Smith Gallery in 2018, to focus on building a community that prioritizes close, enduring relationships with rising artists.

Connect with Ki on Instagram @kismithgallery.

Selected Artists

Location: Bushwick Ave & Jefferson St, Brooklyn

Yikui (Coy) Gu was born in 1983 in Nantong, China and emigrated to the United States at the age of seven, growing up in Albany, NY. He has a BFA from Long Island University and an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

He has exhibited his work nationally in New York, Miami, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Boston, and St. Louis; and internationally in London, Berlin, and Siena, Italy. He has been an artist in residence at the School of Visual Arts in New York, and has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, the Washington Post, KunstForum International, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Yale Daily News. His work has appeared on the cover of the Lower East Side Review, and in Fresh Paint and Art Maze. His work is held in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Art Library (NYC), the Siena Art Institute (Siena, Italy), Camden County College (Blackwood, NJ), and numerous private collections.

He resides in Philadelphia and teaches as Associate Professor of Studio Art at the College of Southern Maryland. In his time off he enjoys traveling, good Belgian beers, and keeping up to date as a sneaker-head. The bulk of his time, however, is spent in the studio where he is currently plotting his takeover of the international art world, while remaining mostly harmless.

Collect with Yikui (Coy) Gu on Instagram at @yikuigu.

Location: Pulaski Bridge & 53rd Ave, Queens

Yen Ha is an architect, artist and writer. Born in Saigon, she lives in New York City, where she co-founded Front Studio, an architecture firm. Her short stories were finalists in Glimmertrain’s New Writers Contests and the New Rivers Press American Prize, and appear in Waxwing, Crack the Spine and Hypertext. Ha has been awarded residencies by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MASS MoCA, Saltonstall and Trestle Art Space. Her work has been exhibited nationally and a selection of drawings are available at 20x200.

Ha’s work uses repetitive, small scale gestures to build landscapes based on the memory of time and place. The drawings are assembled together from individual sheets, amalgamated into abstracted scenes of mountains, seascapes and natural forms. Ha’s abstract and delicate lines imbue her work with a longing for places once traveled while conveying dreams of vistas yet undiscovered.

Her current work, the Family Chronicles, a series of illustrations, constructs a story of immigration based on actual photographs and events. The compiled images speak to a longing to belong to America, and yet a need to remain true to a country and culture of origin, in this case, Vietnam.

Connect with Yen Ha on Instagram at @yhaduong.

Location: McGuinness Blvd & Calyer St, Brooklyn

Sam Sundos is a self taught, American-born artist of Palestinian decent living and working in New York City. The use of recurring characters helps to define a common narrative throughout his drawings, paintings and embroidery work. These elements often tell autobiographical stories that help to address the artist’s ultimate belief that no one’s humanity should be held more precious than others.

Along with citing the works of Alice Neel, Margaret Kilgallen & Etel Adnan as inspirations, Sundos often finds himself relying on his humor and performative arts background to channel his unique voice in his most current work.

In this piece, “All together now/movement as one”, Sundos taps back to a time in his youth as a member of a hip hop dance collective. A process exemplary of unity- a unity expressed through movement and movement only achieved through one cohesive, collaborative voice- this reflection further aligns the importance of community.

Connect with Sam on Instagram at @sabri.

Location: 11th Ave & W 45th St, Manhattan

Born in 1984. From Shibuya, Tokyo. Meguru Yamaguchi is a contemporary artist based in Brooklyn, New York who moved to the U.S. in 2007.

He consistently pursues the possibilities of the "brush stroke", one of the basic elements of painting. In his representative series of works "OUT OF BOUNDS", under the concept of "Transcending stereotypes, rules, borders and boundaries, Expansion of painting", he stopped using canvases that restrained the physical area for his strokes, and created an original method for materializing the unrestrained shapes of the brush strokes themselves, with which he keeps making three-dimensional and more dynamic artworks.

Born and raised in Shibuya, he experienced the pivotal transition of Tokyo street culture from the 90's to early 2000's. After he moved to the U.S., he has collaborated with major brands representing American street culture, such as ALIFE, BILLIONAIRE BOYS CLUB, FTC, HUF, NIKE, etc. He has also collaborated with other international brands such as ISSEI MIYAKE MEN, LEVI’S, OAKLEY, UNIQLO, and so on.

You can connect with Meguru Yamaguchi on Instagram at @meguruyamaguchi.

Location: Morgan Ave & Harrison Ave, Brooklyn

Stickymonger is a New York-based artist whose giant murals transform ordinary spaces into eerie, dreamlike, parallel universes. Looking into the large eyes of her animation-inspired subjects, the viewer is invited to explore the interplay of darkness and light, as well as the tension between innocence and fear, femininity and anxiety.

The artist’s early murals were created using hundreds of vinyl stickers, meticulously put together, piece by piece. The method served to create a sense that each image was melting and flowing together, like a river of ink down a gallery’s walls. This dark fluidity at the center of Stickymonger’s work was inspired by her youth in South Korea, where — growing up in a home next to her family’s gas station — the artist’s imaginative universe was formed while playing in the shadow of oil drums and staring into the reflections of dense black petroleum puddles.

Currently, Stickymonger has expanded her work beyond vinyl to include other mediums such as spray paint and acrylic. As her methods evolve and change, she continues to offer the viewer a portal into a surreal shadow-world of contradictions: as inviting as it is ominous, both delightful and disconcerting.

Connect with Stickymonger on Instagram at @stickymonger.

Location: Flushing Ave & Bushwick Ave, Brooklyn

I was born in a rural area in Siem Reap Province. I had work with Open Studio Cambodia in Siem Reap city. I feel art is essential to my soul as a mode of self-expression and is deeply connected to my daily artistic practice. My multidisciplinary artwork mainly incorporates photography and performance art with painting, paper cutting, and stencil techniques. Thematically, I work often highlights the role of women in society, questions society's deeply held beliefs, and celebrates the women in my life. I am the recipient of the Treeline Urban Resort Artist Grant (2020), and has been an invited speaker and art instructor by the United Nations Women i4i Conference (2020) and NOMADIX Arts Festival (2020).

Connect with Kanha on Instagram at @kanha_hul.

Location: Pulaski Bridge & Jackson Ave, Queens

Ryan Bock specializes in painting, drawing, puppetry, animation and experimental film methods. Bock’s practice is rooted in a need for narrative structure. Residing somewhere between mythology and nightmare, Bock depicts mise-en-scène riddled with symbology and allusions both cinematic and painterly. Maintaining a fascination for shape, shade, shadow, structure and optical illusion, Bock deconstructs his subject matter into often barely-recognizable delineations and structurally unsound repetitive patterns. In an attempt to confront the contemporary individual’s relationship to mortality, fear and superstition, Bock depicts correlations between the human figure and its innovations: technology, architecture and religion—both historically and fictitiously. By consistently contrasting historical subjects with those of the present, and using the recurring patterns found to generate predictions about our future—a process he refers to as ‘dusty futurism’—Bock propels his audience to reconsider the routine human experience and discloses the illusions implemented to keep them from questioning.

This work is based off of a book by Gavin Menzies entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered America, which claims that the Chinese landed in the Americas 71 years preceding Christopher Columbus. While the theory is heavily disputed among historians and scholars, it begs the question of whose history we accept as truth and whose history is buried. History is not fixed, and is often used to push agendas and manipulate societies. The design of the Chinese ship with its iconic horizontal slats is almost lost to the eye as it transforms into the stripes of the American flag, behind the square of stars—the tools used to navigate the high seas. Trailing behind, the Portuguese ship is marked with the cross, poised to take credit. The overall image is a representation of a map. Hands from outside the picture plane grasp at its corners, and scrawl across its surface, actively editing. What if the Chinese had been accredited with "discovering" America? What and who would our society uplift and celebrate?

Connect with Ryan on Instagram at @bockhaus.

Location: Bushwick Ave & Flushing Ave, Brooklyn

Angelica Yudasto is an Indonesian-Peruvian artist who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Yudasto composes site-sensitive arrangements of ethereal tapestries and sculpted glass that act as a physical representation of her past traumas and inner anxieties. Collected photographs and forms float on the near-transparent surface of her digitally-printed silk works like a fading recollection of a bygone moment. Yudasto’s pieces are momentary and transient, responding to the vulnerability of the body and the fragility of memory, while collapsing the dimensionality of the spaces they inhabit.

Statement: I create works that are visual reminders of the inner workings of my relationship with my surroundings. I use flame-worked glass and digitally printed fibers to expand on my internal meditations in reaction to physical space. The work is naturally autobiographical in how they behave as mappings and tracings of my memories, attraction to soft objects, to drawing, to translucency, and to mirroring. I pair marks and collect images that suggest a memory of familiar gestures and movements to create an atmospheric space of residual traces. The young boy is my father pictured sitting with my aunts and grandparents in Indonesia. Vignettes of batik and abstracted glass forms are present, framing my Javanese late grandfather. This is a portrait of my family, the people I hold very dear to my heart and a snapshot of a memory that serves to remind myself the importance of where I came from.

Connect with Angelica on Instagram at @ayudasto.

Location: W 46st St & 12th Ave, Manhattan

Kiyomi Quinn Taylor (b.1995) is a multimedia artist born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey. Taylor received her BFA from New York University in 2017 and her MFA from Columbia University in 2020. She makes work that examines iconographies of her mixed-race heritage (Black and Japanese) as well as, her family’s narrative history. Taylor uses collage and mixed media (painting, drawing, sewing, stop-motion animation and performance) to examine ancestral memory and her own inner, emotional life in the language of allegory. She has shown work in and around New York City. She currently lives and works in New York City.

Connect with Kiyomi on Instagram at @kiyomitay.

Location: 11th Ave & W 45th St, Manhattan

Sono Kuwayama is an artist who works and lives in New York City. Kuwayama's work centers around concepts of space and relationships in space. For Asians Belong Here she created a digital image to speak to the colour yellow, language and objectification.

...a billboard…

to gaze

who’s gaze?

sees

a yellow bird up there

a dead bird - tagged, categorized and given

a name

not its song

or it’s flight

the bright underbelly

in rigor mortis, we see the delicate beauty 

alive it flies free

past our gaze and consciousness

With hate crimes, there is an objectification that removes our common humanity.  We use our language to name apparent differences, qualities we want to tag on to a specimen.  People are rendered objects, identified by colours: black, brown, yellow, red, white, blue, purple, pink, green.  Colours become a shorthand to encompass whole histories and depending on whose eyes you are viewing it through, the stories could seem unrelated. Racism is an objectification. It is using language to name qualities that make for separation. It is creating a one dimensional picture - the sound bite. It dismisses.

Yellow was the starting point.  

What is yellow? Yellow is the sun, is radiance, is buttercups, is the colour for the solar plexus chakra.  Yellow is the derogatory term for people of asian descent.  Yellow is cowardice. Yellow is Amanda Gorman’s outfit at the inauguration. Yellow is strength.  Yellow is the colour of intellect (high intellect and strong intellect)*. 

We objectify things in nature.  We name things.  We group things and categorize and create systems to map differences. We create containers to hold these things in what we hope enlightens understanding.  Or, are  we putting  them in non threatening boxes - coffins we can nail shut?

Birds, which normally fly free in the sky are killed, stuffed, identified and tagged.  An artist collects the objects and places them in “rainbow order”.**  The colours are dazzling.  They are no longer birds but objects to create a spectrum of colour.  

I want to take back yellow - to contemplate yellow - to be in relationship with all these layers of yellow - of a bird killed and stuffed - of a people objectified and stripped of their humanity.

How are we able to see these beautiful creatures, these stunning colours?  Are we complicit in the killing?

What if we looked up and saw this beautiful bird, the beautiful yellow of its underbelly?  What would we think?  What is our relationship to yellow, to the vulnerability of the underbelly? How do we relate to this colour?  What do we associate with yellow?  Is it puss? Is it gold?  Is it radiance?  Is it cowardice? Is it Asian? A bird flying free?  Is it something to revile or a quality we want to strengthen in our solar plexus?

How do we think about colour?   

• , according to Annie Bessant and C.W. Leadbeater 

** James Prosek (Yale Art Museum in conjunction with birds from the Peabody Collection)

Connect with Sono on Instagram at @sonokuwayama.

Participating Organizations

Founded in 2015, SaveArtSpace is a non-profit organization that works to create an urban gallery experience, launching exhibitions that address intersectional themes and foster a progressive message of social change. By placing culture over commercialism, SaveArtSpace aims to empower artists from all walks of life and inspire a new generation of young creatives and activists.

Connect with SaveArtSpace on Instagram at @saveartspace.

roosi was formed in 2019 with the intention to connect fine art to everyone. The art industry is often perceived as “exclusive” or “unreachable” by many people, roosi aims to shift traditional views of fine art and dismantle its longstanding ideals by providing a platform for underrepresented artists and injecting local communities into wide-ranging projects.

Connect with roosi on Instagram at @studioroosi.

Ki Smith Gallery operates beyond the realm of standard industry practice. The young artists we represent are a small, carefully-selected group, all of whom have distinct methods of expression and thought.

Connect with Ki Smith Gallery on Instagram @kismithgallery.