Godzilla: Echoes from the 1990s Asian American Arts Network

Emily Cheng is a painter born in NYC where she works and lives. Her large scale symmetrical abstractions draw on reference imagery from throughout history, such as 15th century European ornament, Chinese landscapes, or Zhou Dynasty Goddesses, and are imbued with an overwhelming hypnotic quality. She has had six solo shows in Asia, currently in the Shanghai Biennale and upcoming shows at Hanart TZ Gallery in HK, Art Basel and Taipei Dangdai spring/2024. Her awards include the National Endowment for the Arts, NYSCA grant and a Pollock Krasner Foundation Fellowship. She taught Asian Art History for 23 years at the School of Visual Arts, NY.

Mel Chin is an artist known for the broad range of approaches in his art, including works that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork, and works that enlist science as an aesthetic component to developing complex ideas. His practice calls attention to complex social and environmental issues through an expansive body of work ranging from collages, sculptural objects, animated films, and video games, to large-scale, collaboratively produced public installations. He is the recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees and his work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; The Menil Collection, Houston, TX; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others.

Bing Lee is an artist and founding member of Godzilla Asian American Arts Network, Epoxy Art Group and Tomato Grey. He initiated the ongoing project Pictodiary in 1983, and has committed to making iconographic journals daily as his significant portrayal of work. The artist’s comprehensive visual vocabulary developed in the Pictodiary appears in large scale murals and in works on paper. Lee’s work has also been the subject of site-specific public art projects, including the Canal Street Subway Station in New York City and Kowloon Tong Station in Hong Kong, among others.

Jennifer Samet is a Director of Eric Firestone Gallery, and an art historian and curator who specializes in contemporary and Post-War painting. She is a member of the faculty at the New York Studio School, and author of the column “Beer with a Painter,” in Hyperallergic.

Eugenie Tsai is a curator and writer based in New York. After sixteen years, she recently stepped down from her position as the John and Barbara Vogelstein Senior Curator, Contemporary Art, at the Brooklyn Museum. During those years, she shaped the Contemporary collection and organized around forty loan and collection exhibitions. These include Oscar yi Hou: East of Sun, West of Moon (2022-23) and Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic (2015). Prior to joining the Brooklyn Museum, she organized Robert Smithson (2004) for MOCA LA. The exhibition, which traveled to the Dallas Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art, received the International Art Critics first place award for best monographic show of 2005.