Installation view, Light and Grain 秋麦

Light and Grain 秋麦
Closing Saturday, August 23, 2025
65 East 80th Street, NYC

These are the final days to experience Light & Grain 秋麦, a solo exhibition by American photographer Michael Cherney at Fu Qiumeng Fine Art.  The exhibition offers a focused exploration of Cherney’s distinctive photographic practice—at once a contemporary response to classical landscape aesthetics and a visual meditation on the nature of time. Over more than thirty years of living and working in China, Cherney has utilized the camera as a vessel for temporal reflection, guiding the viewer through nuanced encounters with landscape and cultural memory. This exhibition is shaped by a classical Chinese understanding of time—the past lies ahead, visible and examinable, while the future gathers behind, obscured from sight. For Cherney, photography becomes a quiet act of preservation, capturing transient moments within a fixed, visible frame.

In Light & Grain, Michael Cherney traces the flow of time through three movements: Tracing Downstream, where myth and terrain converge; Reflections in Midstream, transforming fleeting instants into scroll- and fan-inspired forms; and The Unseen Upstream, a cross-cultural dialogue of calligraphy and brushwork that gestures toward unseen futures. Enlarging the textures of his negatives, Cherney distills each frame to its essence—“seeing the grand within the small”—merging photographic precision with the spirit of ink painting. These works bring past, present, and future into quiet convergence, holding time momentarily still.

Spanning two decades of work, the exhibition unfolds as a visual journey shaped by place, memory, and the enduring passage of time. Be sure to catch Michael Cherney’s captivating works before it closes!

To learn more, click here.

A Pair of Eight-Panel Folding Screens, Edo period, 19th c., color on gold-leafed paper,

h: 84.8cm x w: 272.8cm (each)

Summer Online Exhibition
August 2025

Hiroshi Yanagi Oriental Art is pleased to present a special online exhibition, Coolness. This curated selection brings together artworks that evoke a refreshing sense of clarity and calm—inviting viewers to experience a moment of cool respite, even through the act of looking. In a season often marked by heat and intensity, these works offer a visual breeze, reminding us of art’s power to soothe, refresh, and renew.

To view these stunning works, click here.

Installation view, Post-Natural Oasis

Post-Natural Oasis
Closing Friday, August 22, 2025
120 East 65th Street, NYC

Don’t miss Post-Natural Oasis, before it closes August 22 at Alisan Fine Arts! This summer group exhibition brings together Shuyi Cao, Fu Xiaotong, KKD, Leah Ying Lin, Andrew Luk, Man Fung-yi, Anna Danyang Song, and Yi Xin Tong in a striking collection of sculpture, wall reliefs, and object-based works exploring humanity’s evolving relationship with nature. What might a post-natural world look like—whether in the future or along an alternate geological timeline?

Though many pieces incorporate elements from nature, none are truly “natural.” Instead, they probe our instinct to assign cultural meaning to the natural environment. Poetic yet critical, these works balance fragility with absurdity, sincerity with satire. Crafted to appear humble—even charming—they quietly interrogate the violent legacies of exploration, reflecting the layered ambiguities and shifting meanings found in diasporic experience.

Be sure to immerse yourself in these captivating works before they’re gone!

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Wang Mengsha: Borrowed Shadows

Wang Mengsha: Borrowed Shadows
Closing Friday, August 22, 2025

Also be sure to view the first U.S. solo exhibition of Beijing-based artist Wang Mengsha before it closes August 22! Known for her ability to blend traditional Chinese painting with a contemporary sensibility, Wang reinterprets the classic ‘xieyi’ style with bold colors, playful imagery, and a touch of humor. Her work often draws on everyday objects, elegant figures, historical Chinese garden settings and scenes from nature, echoing the landscapes and culture of southeastern China.

Wang describes her paintings as dreamlike and fluctuating—like shadows that flicker in and out of view. Rather than aiming for realism, she creates imagined spaces where objects and figures change in scale and perspective. Her concept of “Borrowing Shadow” reflects this approach: using recognizable forms to build a personal, poetic world inspired by Eastern philosophy.

Using a technique from traditional Chinese painting known as scatter-point perspective, Wang builds her compositions in a flowing, intuitive way. This approach allows her to move freely through memories, emotions, and ideas—rather than following a strict or linear story. Hibiscus Garden is a tondo filled with symbols of good fortune – birds, flowers, deer, scholar rocks and other dreamlike objects to invite viewers into a playful world full of curiosity and wonder. Enchanted Purple Gourd is similar, although in this piece there is a pair of bathing maidens as its central subject, surrounded by recurring characters and objects: a cartoon-like tiger, giant birds, roses, and as the title suggests, a vibrant purple gourd. Her art gently questions how we hold on to imagination in a world that often asks us to let it go.

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Heated Colors, Hammered Forms: Female Metal Artists of Japan

Heated Colors, Hammered Forms: Female Metal Artists of Japan
Closing Friday, August 22, 2025
16 East 79th Street, NYC

Don’t miss your chance to experience Heated Colors, Hammered Forms: Female Metal Artists of Japan before it closes next week at Onishi Gallery!

This captivating exhibition shines a spotlight on the groundbreaking women who have transformed kogei—an art form traditionally dominated by men and historically linked to the samurai—into a vibrant contemporary practice. Featuring the exceptional work of Osumi Yukie, Oshiyama Motoko, Hagino Noriko, Okamoto Yoshiko, and Otsuki Masako, the show reveals how these artists have mastered the demanding medium of metal to create works as expressive and beautiful as those crafted from more forgiving materials like clay or textiles.

Working with gold, silver, platinum, copper, lead, and unique Japanese alloys, they expertly apply techniques such as casting, chiseling, hammering, and overlay. Though each artist brings her own unique vision, they are united by a profound respect for the rich traditions of Japanese metalcraft.

Discover their extraordinary contemporary masterpieces in person before the exhibition closes!

To learn more,  click here.

Installation view, Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie

Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie
Closing Sunday, August 17, 2025
Galleries 963–965

These are the last days to view Monstrous Beauty: A Feminist Revision of Chinoiserie, an exhibition that radically reimagines the story of European porcelain through a feminist lens. When porcelain arrived in early modern Europe from China, it led to the rise of chinoiserie, a decorative style that encompassed Europe’s fantasies of the East and fixations on the exotic, along with new ideas about women, sexuality, and race. This exhibition explores how this fragile material shaped both European women’s identities and racial and cultural stereotypes around Asian women. Shattering the illusion of chinoiserie as a neutral, harmless fantasy, Monstrous Beauty adopts a critical glance at the historical style and its afterlives, recasting negative terms through a lens of female empowerment.

Bringing together nearly 200 historical and contemporary works spanning from 16th-century Europe to contemporary installations by Asian and Asian American women artists, Monstrous Beauty illuminates chinoiserie through a conceptual framework that brings the past into active dialog with the present. In demand during the 1700s as the embodiment of Europe’s fantasy of the East, porcelain accumulated strong associations with female taste over its complex history. Fragile, delicate, and sharp when broken, it became a resonant metaphor for women, who became the protagonists of new narratives around cultural exchange, consumption, and desire.

Don’t miss this captivating presentation before it closes!

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Body Transformed: Contemporary South Asian Photographs and Prints

Body Transformed: Contemporary South Asian Photographs and Prints
Closing Sunday, August 17, 2025
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery | Gallery 28

Body Transformed: Contemporary South Asian Photographs and Prints presents a selection of works that center on the human figure. For the artists in this exhibition, the human form and the expressive power of photography and print media offer ways to examine the place of the individual in contemporary society.

Works by Pushpamala N. and Clare Arni, Vivek Vilasini, Ram Rahman, and Naveen Kishore focus on the performing body to confront notions of gender and cultural identity through photography, a medium that has played a complicated role in India since the nineteenth century. Jitish Kallat and Rashid Rana manipulate photographic images to simultaneously assert and dissolve the portrait in jarring compositions that hover between reflections on the public being and the disquiet of the inner self.

Master print artists Krishna Reddy, Chitra Ganesh, and Jyoti Bhatt experiment with provocatively carved lines and vivid colors unique to printmaking. Fragmenting, morphing, and multiplying the figure, these artists incorporate various processes to explore representations of power, place, and sexuality in today’s world.

Drawn from the generous gifts of Drs. Umesh and Sunanda Gaur, Body Transformed reveals the human form as a site of both artistic experimentation and cultural inquiry.

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Delighting Krishna: Paintings of the Child-God

Delighting Krishna: Paintings of the Child-God
Closing Sunday, August 24, 2025
Arthur M. Sackler Gallery | Gallery 24

Imagine a god who appears to you as a mischievous child—you dance together in meadows, play with him, and gift him fruits and flowers. This may give you an idea of how the Hindu Pushtimarg community engages with the divine. They seek to delight and care for the child-god Krishna, and in return, they receive joy and spiritual insight. Delighting Krishna delves into the emotions and philosophy of the Pushtimarg tradition and the ingenuity of its artists. Pushtimarg religious spaces feature monumental paintings of Krishna on cotton cloth known as pichwais. For the first time since the 1970s, these fourteen pichwais from the National Museum of Asian Art’s collections are on view for the public. These paintings are literally larger than life, averaging about eight by eight feet in size. Pichwais are made to serve as backdrops for three-dimensional displays, typically paired with icons of Krishna, music, and scents. This collection of pichwais dates from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, and most were painted in Nathdwara, Rajasthan, the global epicenter of the Pushtimarg community. Encounter these intriguing paintings from multiple angles through insights from Hindu community members, curators, conservators, and a conservation scientist. Alongside the pichwais, court paintings illuminate Krishna’s playful charm, and mixed-media works show how the Pushtimarg tradition engages the senses. Awash with color and brimming with joy, these artworks themselves invite delight.

To learn more, click here.

Installation view, Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities

Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities
Closing Sunday, August 17, 2025
Red No. 1-B1, Caochangdi, Chaoyang District, Beijing

There’s still time to experience Bian Kai: Conjuring Realities, the first solo exhibition of Liaoning-born visual artist Bian Kai (b. 1981), at INKstudio in Beijing. This captivating showcase runs through Sunday, August 17. In his contemporary painting practice, Bian Kai draws extensively upon China’s rich mythological, philosophical and religious narrative traditions referencing classical texts—such as the Warring States Era Classic of Mountains and Seas, the Six Dynasties Peach Blossom Spring and the Tang Dynasty Buddhist Canon A Biography of The Tripiṭaka Master of the Great Ci’en Monastery—to render modern parables for our contemporary times. Using the various historical, heavy-polychrome, visual-narrative languages employed in Buddhist and Taoist temple murals, Tibetan Buddhist thangkas and Chinese imperial court painting, Bian Kai visually reconstitutes the mythological, religious content of his source material but never in a direct retelling or portrayal of the canonical story or image. Rather, in what he describes as painting as “performance” yan 演 or art(ifice), he transforms the canonical telling to conjure a “truth” zhen 真 for his audience that is both transcendent and personal.

The exhibition features the artist’s representative masterworks from the last ten years including (on the first floor) Next Stop: Peach Blossom Spring 下一站桃花源 (2024) from his “City” series; the monumental screen The Unbound Journey 逍遥 (2022) from his “Wandering Far and Wide” series; and its companion work Cosmography of the Primordial 山 · 海 (2020) from his “Mountains and Seas” series; and (on the third floor) The Shore of Enlightenment 慧岸 (2018) from his “Religions” series; and the left-incomplete, six-panel work Peach Blossom Spring: Arcadia as Unfinishable 未完成的桃花源 (2016) from his “Peach Blossom Spring” series.

The exhibition also serves as an open research workshop, featuring collaborations with scholars from Stanford University, NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and the National Art Museum of China, delving into the layers of historical, philosophical, and mythological content in Bian Kai’s work.

Be sure to catch this enthralling presentation before it closes!

To learn more, click here.

Installation view with flower arrangements by Eriko Nagata Floral Studio, Notes on Blue: The Art of Blue in Japanese Ceramics

Notes on Blue: The Art of Blue in Japanese Ceramics
Closing Friday, August 15, 2025
Closing weekend hours: Saturday, August 9, 11am-5pm; closed on Sunday
18 East 64th St, Ste 1F, NYC

There’s still time to catch Notes on Blue, Dai Ichi Arts’ summer exhibition celebrating the serene and multifaceted beauty of blue in Japanese ceramics—on view through August 15!

In Japanese art history, the color blue (ao) has an enduring legacy in both cultural significance and visual expression. As an island nation, nearly every region of Japan is bordered by the sea, making blue a deep source of inspiration in the physical landscape and the collective imagination. In the world of ceramics, the color blue offers a vast oasis of potential in visual expression, achieved through innovative and technically demanding glazes: most notably celadon and sometsuke (blue-and-white ware). Beyond these glazes, blue also emerges through other techniques such as neriage (marbelized clay), or in sculptural forms where color becomes structural rather than surface.

This stunning exhibition explores the diverse ways in which contemporary and modern ceramic artists engage with the color blue in visually compelling and innovative ways, celebrating its beauty, material complexity, and legacy in Japanese contemporary art and art history.

The gallery is also excited to launch their new E-Shop on Monday, August 11! They hope to bring more beautiful experiences for collectors, connoisseurs, and curators of Japanese ceramics. Stay tuned for more exciting news!

To view exhibition works, click here.