Within Global Isolation, the online exhibition curated by Han Hongzheng and Chandler Allen, was covered by the Brooklyn Rail by Sahar Khraibani in Within Global Isolation: Asian Artists in America.

Within Global Isolation: Asian Artists in America is a virtual exhibition, organized by curators Han Hongzheng and Chandler Allen, and fueled by a spike in anti-Asian sentiments, xenophobia, and discrimination as a result of COVID-19. The exhibition brings together work by ten Asian artists living across the country: Hương Ngô, Ying Zhu, Guanyu Xu, Damien Ding, Tinwai Wong, Leonard Suryajaya, Zhen Guo, Toby Zeng, Weina Li, and Siyuan Tan. It contextualizes work within the current social, political, and physical circumstances while examining coexistence within stark global disparities. Within Global Isolation also features substantial conversations with the artists, who detail the discrimination they’ve faced since the pandemic started, as well as the hardships brought on by this massive economic halt.

For Chicago-based Asian American multidisciplinary artist and SAIC assistant professor Hương Ngô—who is particularly attuned to histories of colonialism and migration having lived in the US, Hong Kong, France, and Vietnam—ethnography is an important factor in understanding the long-term effects of colonialism, her personal experiences of migration, and how the two are deeply enmeshed. In an interview with Allen, she shares: “a critical gaze at ethnography might help us understand histories of thought and ideologies that have enabled colonialism and spurred migration.” On view here is Ngô’s film ESCAPE (2004–06), made during the Iraq war, but ringing eerily familiar today. The piece chronicles two protagonists as one puts on a white Hazmat suit, and the other spends an afternoon outdoors in an orange one. The 7-minute video is marked by two sections: “SUGGESTED USES FOR YOUR NEW ESCAPE POD,” and “PREPARING FOR THE NEAR NEAR DISASTER.” The screen itself functions as an isolation pod, with one person occupying it at a time. In one particularly arresting scene, the protagonist sits at the opposite end of a park bench from another person. Though the work was created in response to the claims of biological warfare, it takes on new meanings and valences with the COVID-19 pandemic, where distance is encouraged and at times imposed. The gestures in this project were meant to be speculative, but they’re now very real. Ngô shares: “The emotional landscape of increasing distance and distrust of one another is also real.”