“Threads of Belonging: Ten Emerging Asian Women Artists” at Hollis Taggart Downtown

Installation view of Threads of Belonging: Ten Emerging Asian Women Artists at Hollis Taggart Downtown (on view through November 26, 2025). Image courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown.

By LIAM OTERO November 7, 2025

Exhibition Link

The Asian Century is a term used in the sphere of History, Political Science, and Economics to describe the surging influence of Asia as a major player in the global scene. However, this term can just as well be applied to the Art World at large as there has been an unceasing shift in interest towards Asian artists, particularly those of a younger generation. Hollis Taggart’s Downtown location is currently featuring works by 10 Asian women artists who are laying the groundwork for a new chapter in Contemporary Asian Art. 

This painting-centric exhibition deftly highlights a multiplicity of perspectives by women artists whose origins span all over the continent. Dalya Moumina (b. 1997, Washington D.C.), an artist of Saudi Filipina ancestry, conjures otherworldly landscapes abounding in lush, tropical flora. Dense swooshes of brushstrokes create an evocation of a windswept plane unperturbed by the encroachment of any semblance of human activity - nature at its most pure state. Tiantian Ma (Chinese, b. 1997) also vies for the paradisiacal portrayal of nature, albeit through a combined panoramic / bird’s eye view.

Dalya Moumina, Whispers of Sunlit Waves, 2025, oil on canvas. 60 x 72 in. / 152.4 x 182.9 cm. Image courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown.

Winny Huang (b. 1980) also deals with the landscape as her subject, but for her, she follows a rigorous stippling effect with strokes of colored pencil on watercolor paper. Resultantly, the finalized images become a pictorial marriage of Pointilism-meets-literati landscape painting. 

The Japanese-born, New York-based artist Natsumi Goldfish (b. Fuchu-City, Tokyo) created a series of outside-looking-in window paintings. As sort of a reverse Rear Window perspective, a painting like After Hours (2025) is a domestic interior bathed in a softly warm light where a woman is seated before her laptop (her face is blocked by part of a window frame); off on the far left, a cat dozily stares back at us. The scale and height at which these paintings are hung achieves a trompe l’oeil effect, albeit not through the flashy showmanship of an Alexander Pope or John Peto, but through the power of subtlety. Side note: Natsumi Goldfish is currently in another excellent group exhibition, Thresholds, at GoCA (Gallery of Contemporary Art, Chelsea).

Natsumi Goldfish, After Hours, 2025, oil on canvas. 36 x 72 in. / 91.4 x 182.9 cm. Image courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown.

Shuling Guo (b. 1986, Chao’An, Guangdong Province, China) produces electrifying and dreamy scenes of blooming flora that emanate in glorious illuminations, all of which in perfect symmetry. These particular images feel like an elevated form of botanical illustrations.

Gabrielle Yi-Wen Mar's (Taiwanese-American, b. 1997) works have a dual figurative and abstract connection to their appearance. On the one hand, it seems as though a cornucopia of flowers layered over one another are greeting us, and at the same time, the most breathtaking symphony of brushy colors cascade and swoon over one another. Regardless of how you interpret the works, Mar’s fan-shaped brushstrokes are a great stylistic choice in attaining these visual patterns.

Jennifer Jean Okumura, Art with Intention, change and difference, 2025, oil on canvas. 48 x 36 in. / 121.9. x 91.4 cm. Image courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown.
 

Jennifer Jean Okumura (Japanese-American, b. 1980), Ivy Wu (Chinese-American), and Rosie Kim (South Korean, b. 1993) each experiment with spatiality and veiling through their hodgepodge of colors, shapes, and textures overlaid in such a way to encourage prolonged looking. With each passing moment spent with their respective paintings, figures or elements begin to emerge from the shadows or crevices as a kind of reward from this concentrated viewing. 

Chandra Fang, The Last of Spring, 2025, oil on canvas. 40 x 30 in. / 101.6 x 76.2 cm. Image courtesy of Hollis Taggart Downtown.

Chandra Fang’s (b. 1999) paintings embody a certain ethereality to them with their isolated figures, either vibrantly tinged or illuminated, that take center stage in the composition. A work like Consciousness #5 (2025) is a mysterious image in which four differently shaped orbs that are each ensconced by a radiating blue and white surface float in a blackened space. 

Hollis Taggart’s astute choice in young Asian women artists - all of whom hailing from either the Millennial or Z Generations - speaks to the rising interest that has been oriented towards new Contemporary Asian painting. Furthermore, the breadth of cultural backgrounds for each artist demonstrates that those interests truly are continent-wide and not just merely reduced to a particular country or region within Asia. WM