Alisan Fine Arts x Re:Riddle
Now On 2025-04-19 - 2025-05-31
A memory is not just a then, recalled in the present moment. Rather, it is a "then" that is endlessly reshaped in its recalling—a continuous becoming of other "thens"—which, in turn, unfolds as unstable, ever-shifting "nows." Still Streaming brings together six Asian American artists: Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Isadora Isadora Gullov-Singh, Ren Light Pan, Summer Mei Ling Lee, Charlene Tan, and Kelly Wang, whose work contemplates the multilayered inheritance of their identities, where past histories live and breathe in parallels. These artists view memory not as nostalgia, but as an active force that not only structures identity but also propels it forward, dynamic and volatile. Through a diasporic lens, the artists play with the ongoing push and pull of ancestral memory and self-invention, reflecting on the legacies of migration, displacement, and hybridity — complexities that refuse to be resolved into a singular narrative.
The works in the exhibition — paintings, photography, cyanotypes, textiles, and multimedia artworks — underscore how the ‘now’ is a tangled, contested site inhabited by memories that are continually reactivated and reconfigured. To inhabit the now is to live in tension: between inherited pasts and emergent selves, between cultural expectation and personal reinvention. This is also the space of reverie and creativity.
Mark Baugh-Sasaki, Ren Light Pan and Summer Mei Ling Lee acknowledge that to remember is to confront the past’s ongoing interference in the present, to wrestle with the ways identity emerges from that interference — not neatly, but as something blissfully unruly and unfinished. Their works explore memory as turbulent, unpredictable, and at times joyfully ungovernable.
Isadora Gullov-Singh, Charlene Tan, and Kelly Wang understand that destabilization is also a form of continuity: a radical persistence of presence. The physicality of their works, the labor they embody, insists that memory isn’t just an abstract force. It’s lived, breathed, and sustained through form, gesture, and material.
Together, the works in the exhibition hold us in that unsettling, reminding us that memory doesn’t merely haunt the present; it animates it, agitates it. Still Streaming embodies the tension of holding together fragmented pieces of history that wonderfully refuse to cohere — mirroring the immigrant experience, the diasporic condition, and the plurality within American identity itself.
