Expanded Horizons: The Asian Cultural Council Announces 2025 Grant Recipients

ACC 2025 grant recipients from left to right: Xiao-Xiong Zhang, Joyce Sahagun Garcia, Tsai Yi-Wei, Caro Chan, Donn Holohan, and Serene Hu.

In a cultural moment marked by dissonance and displacement, the Asian Cultural Council (ACC) has chosen a different register: one of attunement, listening, and the long arc of exchange. This month, the New York-based nonprofit announced its 2025 Asia Grant Cycle recipients: 37 artists, curators, architects, scholars, and choreographers whose practices reimagine movement, language, and the soft power of presence across geographic and disciplinary lines. The total disbursement, $920,371, signals financial support and a deliberate investment in the promise of cultural reciprocity.

Since its founding in 1963, ACC has offered more than funding; it has offered time, space, and context. It has supported over 6,000 exchanges in 26 countries, with the idiosyncratic understanding that a meaningful artistic inquiry often requires stepping into the unknown. What distinguishes the ACC model is its refusal to instrumentalize culture as output. Here, culture is not produced but lived.

This year’s cohort comprises 16 New York Fellows, 18 Individual Fellows, and three Graduate Fellows, all selected for projects that span street photography, speculative puppetry, vernacular architecture, and cross border dramaturgy. If the geography is transnational, the methodology is equally expansive: immersive residencies, field research, artistic collaborations, and independent inquiry that push against the limits of form and habit.

The New York Fellowship, ACC’s flagship immersion program, invites artists from Asia to live and work in New York for six months, offering not just proximity to the city’s cultural institutions but, more crucially, to its frictions and flux. For visual artist I Hsuen Chen (Taiwan ROC), whose practice pivots between performance, installation, and photography, the city becomes both subject and foil, a space to interrogate … Click here to read more

Art Review City

Club Cementerio

Julia San Martín solo show: Proyectos Proyectos Raúl Zamudio / Empty Circle NYC

Proyectos Proyectos Raúl Zamudio / Empty Circle NYC presents the solo exhibition Club Cementerio by Julia San Martin, curated by Raúl Zamudio, director of said space. It is a multimedia show that includes painting, drawing, video, sculpture, and textile interventions.

The artist began to develop the concept of “Club Cementerio” in 2020 amid COVID-19, riots, and social demonstrations in different parts of the world, especially in her native Chile, where she was at that time. Around the world, in an act of weariness, hundreds, perhaps thousands of monuments have been torn down; the hero, the explorer, the conqueror, the white and masculine victor, who swarms in history, in particular of Art (with capital A) suddenly lost its pedestal, and its head. It is almost unbelievable that it took hundreds of years to take a pair of ropes and throw them to the ground. That Club Cementerio of San Martín is made up of a whole context of daily and historical violence. In this way, the works that are part of the exhibition are scathing laughter from those who have experienced, in their own flesh, the systematic voracity of colonial and capitalist thought.

Julia San Martin has extensive knowledge of the history of Western art, the periods, the systems of representation, and the characters. She also has academic training in various traditional drawing and painting techniques; those skills “can make her as uncomfortable” as an acquired vice that is difficult to break. Like the majority of her work, the Empty Circle show is self-referential and consists mainly of self-portraits, heroines who make fun of themselves, of their social status, gender, or race. Structural violence on the body of non-white women is present in … Click here to read more

Nigerian-American Artist Victor Ekpuk at Princeton University Art Museum

Nigerian-American Artist Victor Ekpuk at Princeton University Art Museum: Transforming an Ancient Graphic System for an Art for Today

Nigerian-American artist Victor Ekpuk sees himself as an indigene of the West African culture, which engendered Nsibidi, an ancient ideographic communication system that is both textual and performative. Native to the Ejagham peoples of the Cross River region shared by Nigeria and Cameroon, Nsibidi likely originated around 400 C.E., spreading to the neighboring Ibibo, Efik, and Igbo peoples. During the Age of Slavery, it also crossed the Atlantic, taking root in Cuba and Haiti. Ekpuk draws inspiration from Nsibidi to create dense sign-and-symbol networks that dominate his art, giving it evocative, expressive power. These networks also include signs and symbols arising from his own memory and imagination, as well as ideas from other cultures. Utilizing all these resources, Ekpuk has developed a unique, personal vocabulary that embeds in his art a symbiotic, rhythmic interplay between art and writing. He has gone far beyond the Nigerian artists who preceded him in utilizing Nsibidi as part of a merging of Western modernism with Nigerian and African ways of art-making.

*Mask*, handpainted steel, 2022 Photo by Joseph HuImage. Courtesy of Princeton University Art Museum.

Love of drawing has also pervaded Ekpuk’s journey as an artist. “I am almost always painting on my drawings or drawing on my paintings,” he says, revealing that, at core, it is drawing that drives the force of his art. This fuse manifests itself even in his sculpture, which he sees as his passion for line finding three-dimensional incarnation. When Ekpuk creates his enormous site-specific ephemeral murals for which he is well-known, his command of line is such his creation virtually flows out of him as a stream of consciousness.

His drawing fluency made Ekpuk a successful illustrator and … Click here to read more

Grimanesa Amorós

Exploring Light and Essence: The Luminescence of Grimanesa Amorós

Grimanesa Amorós, a luminary within the artistic realm, has enraptured audiences with her profound and contemplative light installations. Drawing upon her formidable background in painting and her unyielding passion for materials, she has transcended the boundaries of her medium, fashioning immersive experiences that provoke introspection and challenge the perceptual confines of our world. This evocative exposition embarks on a profound odyssey into the labyrinthine recesses of the artist’s inspiration, techniques, career highlights, and forthcoming projects, illuminating the extraordinary artistic ethos that defines her.

Grimanesa Amorós, portrait by Chiara Cussatti.

Born in Lima, Peru, in 1962 and living in New York City since 1984, Amorós is known for her large-scale light sculpture installations. She began her artistic career as a painter and studied at the Miguel Gayo Art Atelier in Lima and the Art Students League of New York. In the early 2000s, she began to incorporate light into her work. She was greatly inspired by the northern lights she saw during a trip to Iceland. Fully understanding the potential of light to create immersive and transformative experiences, the artist set on a newfound path.

She has exhibited her work in major cities worldwide, including New York, London, Paris, and Beijing. Amorós’ work has been praised for its beauty, thoughtfulness, and ability to create a sense of wonder. She has been awarded numerous prizes, including the National Endowment for the Arts Visual Artist Fellowship and the Art in Embassies Program of the U.S. Amorós’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums around the world, and her work is a testament to the power of art to transform our lives. Her light sculptures are more than just beautiful objects; they are also invitations to introspection and reflection. They challenge us to see the world … Click here to read more

Lemon Sky

Lichtundfire’s “Lemon Sky” show

Lemon, or gold–in essence, yellow–brings forth connotations of brilliance, wealth, and youth. Gallery director Priska Juschka at Lichtundfire conceptualizes this powerful color, yellow, as an extreme statement in chroma–and it dominates unyieldingly. Yellow is aflame as it pierces through our surroundings and remains an unforgettable hue in our recollection of imagery. On an existentially (subconscious)unconscious level, I believe, we all revere, and yet fear, yellow, as it is the color associated with the sun. Our very existence was borne of the yellow star we know as the sun. A sun that keeps us alive but also could do grave damage to our world–and ultimately–will consume our planet: as a whole.

Yellow, in my estimation, is the primary of primaries.

The impression of the memory of a chromatic scale arranged as an emotional abstraction is what Vian Borchert’s four paintings “Lemon Zest,” “Limoncello,” “Transcendent,” and “Lemon Sky” convey. We might experience an ongoing biography in quarters, as each painting could represent a decade or so of the artist’s life–as we might see this life in its development, in the compositional shape of colors. The yellow in each picture is strategically placed, indicating the level of awareness and wisdom the artist had at that point in life. The yellow, representing the actual true self’s identity, could indicate the location of that true self within the boundaries of the artist’s perception, as manifested within the boundaries of the painting itself.

Joyce Pommer’s “Paper & Fabric,” a mixed media work with acrylic and collage, presents what could be imagined as a distorted family genealogy. The yellow circles, inhabiting what appears to be a free-hand graph, surround the subtle indications of what could resemble people’s silhouettes. The white patches within the graph make the viewer feel as if there was a deterioration of events, of memory partially lost. The yellow is a source of a resonant reference of time and familial stability (or instability)for us as well.

When juxtaposed with Philip Gerstein’s painting “Master Stroke” and Joyce Pommer’s “Paper & Fabric,” Sandra Gottlieb’s photograph “Vertical #20”, from her Seascape Series, and one of three seascapes in the exhibition, resonates of yellow at the horizon; this becomes alchemically realized when, within our outer periphery, we obliquely … Click here to read more

Roland Gebhardt

Roland Gebhardt: The Incisionary Construction of Space and the Void as Imaginary

When someone trains to become an artist, s/he or they are given a set of biases. S/he or they are told that light carries information and must come forward in space, while darkness lacks such information and must recede back into space. The person is also made to believe that the positive space positions the subject and the foreground, while the negative space carries the background. At a certain point, however, a reversal of relationships occurs in what s/he or they observe and conceive. It is a reversal of highlight to shadow, foreground to background, and positive to negative space, which breaks the rigid associations and hierarchies in how one perceives and understands the visual world around oneself. Roland Gebhardt (Born 1939, Suriname) has dedicated a lifetime honing a practice wrought from this paradigm shift, and the presence of the void is the basis of Gebhardt’s solo exhibition at David Richard Gallery, titled “Framing Perceptual Illusions: A series of wall sculptures examines presence, absence, and voids.” The viewer is presented with white, minimalistic geometric constructions that play with the concept of information in terms of presence versus absence and the real versus the imaginary.

*Untitled LV0110*, painted poplar wood, 42 x 42 x 12 in | 107 x 107 x 30 cm, 2021. Photograph by Yao Zu Lu.

Gebhardt pioneered minimal sculptural works in the early 1960s when he initially played with the concept of in-between spaces that result from the interaction of shapes. Subsequently, the artist began to make precise surgical incisions in the form of a long line or edge of a plane into objects to create “linear voids” that he equates to drawings. Gebhardt continued this trajectory by … Click here to read more

Steve Shane

Collector Q&A with Steve Shane

My passion for art began in my senior year of high school in a Detroit suburb. I decided to take a humanities class, and there I met a teacher, Nancy Updegraff, who would be one of the most influential in my life. She introduced me to the world of art. She challenged me to examine art to look beyond what I saw, discover what the artist was trying to say, and how the art spoke to my heart.

My “claim to fame” is that I worked at Annina Nosei Gallery in 1982 when Jean-Michel Basquiat was using the basement of the gallery as his studio, so I knew him very, very well. I do regret that I didn’t buy a painting by him then.

I dislike the word “collector” as it applies to me. I see myself as an art historian and an art lover. Most of my leisure time is spent immersed in the world of contemporary art. I visit galleries and museums. I attend conferences and art fairs. As a way of expanding my art perceptions, I present lectures on art to many diverse audiences. My greatest joy comes from hosting groups in my home in “salon style” visits. During these visits, which are designed to be interactive, I share anecdotes and special insights into my curated selection of artwork.

Even though my career as an anesthesiologist was not in the art world, art has been part of my life that has sustained me and helped me grow as an individual.

What is your absolute favorite thing you do within the art world?

My absolute favorite thing to do in the art world is to host the Steve Shane art salons (a la Gertrude Stein). This is my way of … Click here to read more

Sam Jackson

Artist Q&A with Sam Jackson

Sam Jackson’s approach to painting, digital media, and print combines subject matter that defies straightforward interpretation. The process of exploring how originality is captured and the aesthetics of its significance is a central theme of his practice. The do-it-yourself attitudes, homemade and amateur painting techniques, fantasy, excess, youth culture, violence, Baroque and Renaissance painting are all part of Jackson’s oeuvre. These urgencies are embedded in the painting’s application, growing into portraits or figures hewn with textual recalls. Medium and message are both extrapolated as a ground for further discoveries in painting, whereby paint is applied, translated, and governed by an intensity of appearance and reference. Mainstream culture, encouraged by evermore open media coverage, its absorption into high street fashion, investigations into compositional harmony, atmosphere, and the handling of paint, the ancient and the modern are strategized hybridity that are collective meditations on how contemporary painting is an oscillation between the textual and the symbolically real.

*One Of Us Must Know*, oil, ink, and spray paint on board, 8 x 7 in | 20 x 17 cm, 2022

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

Caravaggio, I have always been fascinated by the use of the spiritual, religious, and subversion coming together in an emotional drama on the canvass.

How did you become a professional artist?

I was fascinated by art and painting from a young age. I was taken to a Lucien Freud exhibition aged nine and found the images fascinating and odd. Somehow, I could see that in painting, you could express something beyond words that were emotional in some way and really made me want to be an artist. So, after graduating from the Royal Academy for my postgraduate studies in 2003, I was picked up and started my ongoing relationship and representation … Click here to read more

Shinji Murakami

Artist Q&A with Shinji Murakami

Shinji Murakami’s work springboards from the philosophy of Gunpei Yokoi, the famous inventor of Nintendo’s Game Boy, Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology. Withered technology in this context refers to a mature technology that is cheap and well-understood. In contrast, lateral thinking refers to finding radical new ways of using such technology. Yokoi held that toys and games do not necessarily require cutting-edge technology; novel and fun gameplay are more important. Murakami does not believe that profound human understanding has necessarily caught up to the explosive evolution of modern computer technology. Still, the pixelated expressions of 8-bit video games at the root of his work are one withered part of this evolutionary process. Murakami interrogates lateral thinking of this pixel. Working in wood, alkyd paint, and LED light, Murakami focuses on communicating his ideas to a broad audience. With the precision of a master craftsman, he renders universal motifs – flowers, puppies, hearts – in minimalism and pop, re-interpreting the aesthetics and context of each genre and reassessing their role within contemporary art. His practice is an ongoing search for simplification, removing more and more unnecessary elements and moving works into more ephemeral formats.

*Color Puppy* (Generation 5, iPhone 5c colors), wood, glue, alkyd paint, and collar 11 x 5 x 11 in | 27 x 11 x 27 cm (each), 2013

Who is your favorite artist of all time?

I love two great pop artists, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and they are two of the biggest influences on my work. I am a self-taught artist who never attended art school or took any special classes. In my early twenties, I found a series of TASCHEN books in a bookstore for about $10 and bought books by those two, Mondrian, Picasso, and Basquiat. In those … Click here to read more