Jeannie Hua: Transgressions

Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456 is pleased to present Jeannie Hua: Transgressions, curated by Nancy Good and Mylene Lachance-Paquin. on view from February 21, 2025, through March 7, 2025.

History omitted and erased are as significant and integral as recorded history. What you experience within and without exists regardless of texts on a page, a line in a ledger, in a book, in a banker’s box, in an archive, in a library, enclosure within enclosure within enclosure. The cracks, smears, and tears in art of the past become an integral part of the art itself. History lost its colonial legitimacy when deconstructed by the recognition that history doesn’t belong to the victors. Instead of being “gaslit”, Nancy Good and Mylene Lachance-Paquin uses gaslight to illuminate the unrecorded, the blanks, the erased, the forgotten. Art to re-enact; art to fill in the blanks; art to mirror our revisionist memories; pin the medals on the chests, give the names to the nameless, plant the tombstone for the buried. Legitimacy is what you say it is.

This art series was spurred by a discovery of anecdotal history in a small mining town in Nevada. When you drive on highway 95, through the desert, into Tonopah, you’ll see the Clown Motel, then its neighbor, the Old Tonopah Cemetery. Beyond the fenced enclosure of Tonopah’s luminaries past, is a mound of mining waste. Underneath the mound are the bodies of Chinese American immigrants who once were fellow denizens of Nevada, of America, of Earth.

However, their lineage didn’t end there. Beyond the diaspora that is part of the immigrant experience, is the knowledge that you are all rooted from loved ones and lives branch beyond ourselves. In the specificity of circumstance is the shared universality of experience.

This work is a visual dirge not just for the men buried beneath the waste. It’s for all bodies, disregarded once their utilitarian purposes have expired.

There is universality in specificity. Unmarked graves of BIPOC, LGBTQ+, and women dot our country’s landscape, land space. The following series is called “Transgressions,” a recordation of the psyche processing private and personal crimes committed within the context of political, ecological, and socio-economic systems.

This series would not be possible without the discovery of Jamie Ford, who in search for his great grandfather’s resting place ended up by the side of Highway 95 at the foot of a pile of mining waste. His generosity and kindness sustained the creation of the series. This show would not have existed without the curation of Nancy Good and Mylene Lachance-Paquin, the firsts to give room and space for the narration for the forgotten. I appreciate the assistance from Jessie Sun, for translating all the materials for Transgression. And I have nothing but gratitude for all the wonderful people who make CAAC, Gallery 456 the important center for discourse and the exchange of ideas.

Programs

Opening Reception: February 21, 2025, 6-8pm
Protest Banner Making Workshop with Aram Han Sifuentes: February 22, 2025, 1-4PM
Artist Talk with Jeannie Hua: February 24, 2025, 6PM
Excerpts of Plays Curated by Laura Mankowski Deveaux: March 1, 2025, 1-2PM
Collage Workshop with Jeannie Hua: March 2, 2025, 2-4PM

Please contact info@caacarts.org for more information.

Artist Bio

Since graduating from the MFA program in 2022 at School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Jeannie Hua participated in the Longform residency at the Ox-Box School of Art and Artists’ Residency. She had a solo show at Core Contemporary as part of the Post-Invisibles 2024 Biennale with 15 simultaneous shows in Montreal, Toronto, Lyon, Paris, Mexico City, Bahamas, and Las Vegas. Jeannie taught various collage workshops including at the Ox-Bow School of Art. Her work has been shown at BWAC and First Street in NYC, as well as Agitator and Woman Made in Chicago. She had a solo show at College of Southern Nevada’s ArtSpace Gallery and became adjunct faculty in art and art history at the school.

She has participated in group exhibitions in galleries and museums in New York, Illinois, California, Nevada, Michigan, Virginia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Utah, Tennessee, Oregon, and Orquevaux, France. She was the recipient of the Denis Didero Grant, Nevada Council of Arts Grant, as well as merit scholarship to Ox-Bow School of Art as well as Ox-Bow residency.

Gallery 456
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Chinese American Arts Council’s Gallery 456 Visual Arts Exhibition Series is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.