Lily Honglei – Chinese American/Immigrant Artist

Open Call: Portals, The Shed, NY

Provincetown Art Association and Museum Grant Recipients Exhibition, MA

Panorama of Roots: Showcasing Asian Heritage, Steinberg Museum of Art, NY

The Unseen, Chinese American Arts Council, NYC

Up Close from Afar, Westbeth Gallery, NYC

Remember, Flushing Town Hall, Queens, NY

EXHIBITIONS

Lily Honglei presents KITES: A Poem by an Immigrant at Open Call: Portals, The Shed, NY

Lily Honglei, Open Call Portals The Shed, The Shed Open Call, Asian American artist, — Installation at Open Call: Portals, The Shed, New York, NY, 2025

Photograph by Adam Reich, Lily Honglei Art Studio

Opening Portals, Bridging Worlds

Posted Jun 23, 2025

Dejá Belardo, associate curator at The Shed

Physical, remembered, or imagined, portals allow us to revisit the connections that tether us to each other. The door to the Level 2 Gallery at The Shed marks the first portal of this exhibition, welcoming visitors to the multidimensional world created by 12 artists’ projects selected as part of Open Call’s fourth edition. Poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant’s concept of mondialité, or “worldmentality,” guides the connections between artists in this exhibition by introducing a vision of global belonging rooted in relation, difference, and poetic entanglement—a vision of a world shaped not by sameness but by the unpredictable interplay of differences, instead of the national boundaries and fixed identities that typically divide us.¹

The works in the exhibition inhabit thresholds where histories of migration, colonialism, and spirituality converge. Across installation, film, sculpture, painting, sound, and performance, the artists offer layered meditations on displacement, memory, and belonging. They reveal portals not merely as physical passages but as sites of transformation, imagination, and return. While confronting the lasting impacts of colonial extraction, migration, and environmental instability, this exhibition gathers artists who engage with histories and rhythms of cultural inheritance, including beliefs, traditions, knowledge, skills, and material objects. The portals and realms created in the exhibition open passageways between past and present, memory and material, displacement and belonging, representing a constellation of interrelated yet irreducibly distinct identities, each contributing to a dynamic, shared humanity. (continue reading the essay or watch the exhibition walkthrough)