Chinese American Arts Council/Gallery 456 is pleased to present Wherever You Go Becomes a Part of You, on view from April 28, 2023 through May 26, 2023.

As a four person group show, Wherever You Go Becomes a Part of You focuses on the engagement of different communities and the stories they tell. Through modes of storytelling like juxtaposition and comparison, the works maintain strength in relaying narratives about ownership, gender and authenticity.

The exhibition includes 4 rotating shows, each featuring a pair of artists.

第 2 章：時尚故事，Annysa Ng 和 Giancarlo Cipri 的二人展。服飾可以是反映文化價值觀、歷史背景和社會身份的媒介。 借用服裝和配飾的輪廓，Giancarlo Cipri 和 Annysa Ng 的作品通過象徵主義、物質性和設計元素展現了時代、志向和創作者的視角。

Part 3: By Ann Other Name featuring Annysa Ng + Shanzhai Lyric. Shakespeare, canonical keeper of the English language, is said by some to be a fictitious character to whom many works have been attributed. Hamlet, for instance, is composed of stolen bits from earlier plays, collaged together with unreliable transcriptions by anonymous scribes and disgruntled actors. With a single image of a found poem, Shanzhai Lyric invokes Shakespeare as a shanzhai author who unravels the binary between East and West, challenging and complicating staid notions of collectivism versus individualism. Meanwhile, Annysa Ng's painted silhouettes of Chinese figures donning Elizabethan collars imagine a speculative realm of hybridity and permutation.

Part 4: Point A to Point B and Beyond featuring Shanzhai Lyric and Bing Lee. Shanzhai, the Chinese word for counterfeit, translates literally to “mountain hamlet” in reference to an area on the outskirts of town where bandits stockpile goods to redistribute among the people. According to philosopher Byung Chul-Han, shanzhai also has ties to the tradition of Chinese landscape painting where the emptiness of a mountain landscape invites collective inscription and the addition of red seals directly onto the work. The value of the work is not tied to a single individual artists but rather, the value increases with the accumulating and shifting marks of additional authors. This notion of collective authorship is evidenced in “Point A to Point B and Beyond,” featuring works by Shanzhai Lyric and Bing Lee— who share an ongoing conversation around questions of landscape and ownership. In the fall of 2020, Shanzhai Lyric founded the fictional office entity Canal Street Research Association, devoted to studying the ebbs and flows of NYC’s counterfeit epicenter, and for which Bing Lee created a special seal. At 456 Gallery, Shanzhai Lyric inscribes this seal onto a wall built by artist Tehching Hsieh who retroactively signed it in 2023. Bing Lee’s bottles are fixed with excerpt from Pictodiary, a daily practice of drawing pictograms.