Panel: AAPI Voices in Contemporary Art

Abby Chen

Abby Chen is Head of Contemporary at the Asian Art Museum. She recently curated Into View: Bernice Bing and Kongkee: Warring States Cyberpunk. She is the curator for the Taiwan Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale entitled Everyday War, featuring works by artist Yuan Goang-Ming, now on view at the Asian Art Museum. She is the recipient of the 2024 National Art Education Association Asian Art and Culture Interest Group Distinguished Art Educator Award. Abby’s experimental approach often explores the intersectionalities of race, sexuality, gender, nation, migration, and technology in both the United States and Asia. 

Julia Li

Julia Li is the co-owner of COL Gallery in San Francisco's Ghirardelli Square. She’s also co-producer of Karl with Callie Jones. Prior to this, she served as the inaugural Director of Inclusion and Belonging at the Asian Art Museum, where she developed and implemented the museum's first diversity, equity, access, and inclusion strategy. Julia is also the founder of Create Space Generator, a nonprofit creative entrepreneurship incubator. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley and BFA from Washington University in St Louis. 

Kristie Song

Kristie Song is a Berkeley-based multimedia journalist who is passionate about covering local contemporary arts spaces and scenes. Her writing and photography has been featured in KQED, where she has reported in-depth features on zine communities, as well as diverse musicmakers, artists, and other creatives. 

Masako Miki

Masako Miki  is a creator of enchanted characters in wool and watercolor who live in the gap between the sacred and the secular. Masako Miki’s paintings, sculptures, and installations manifest ancient folklore in ways relevant to our contemporary lives. Using a variety of materials, including wool, wood, bronze, ink, and watercolor, Miki creates characterful artworks rooted in Shintoism, the Indigenous culture of her Japanese birthplace, but informed by the freedom and ambition fostered by living in California for three decades.

Yowshien Kuo

Yowshien Kuo is a multidisciplinary artist residing in St. Louis. Quoting the thinker and writer W.E.B. DuBois, “One ever feels his two-ness, – an American…”. Yowshien blends his personal  experiences as a Taiwanese American with historical references and criticism to comment on social and racial inequality, cultural constructs, sexuality, and the human condition. Kuo received his MFA from Fontbonne University and has exhibited at The Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis. His work belongs to collections at the Cantor Arts Museum at Stanford University and the Dallas Museum of Art. 

Grace Jin

Grace Jin comes from four generations of village healers in Zhejiang, China, a lineage she carries today as a multidisciplinary artist and medical student. Her practice metabolizes studies in Western and traditional Chinese medicine, Buddhist and Taoist cosmology, decolonial history and feminist literature to create matrilineal heirlooms for restorative futures. Grace is pursuing a MFA from California College of the Arts and studying at Stanford School of Medicine.

Namita Paul

Namita Paul is a San Francisco-based artist whose interdisciplinary practice explores memory, care, and transformation. Shaped by years of intimate, often invisible labor as a mother, migrant, and maker, her work reflects on the emotional imprints of architecture—the way built environments hold our stories, shape our identities, and become part of who we are. Rooted in thresholds—between home and displacement, containment and unraveling—her materially rich and concept-driven works search for forms of grace, resilience, and belonging. Paul holds a BA in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts and an MA in Cultural Studies from the University of Washington, as well as an MFA from California College of the Arts.