Hallucinating Hieroglyphs: The Visual Languages of Martin Wong

Vivian Li is the Lupe Murchison Curator of Contemporary Art at the Dallas Museum of Art.  Her research focuses on postwar and contemporary Asian and Asian diasporic artists, often looking at their practices through a global lens.  Her recently curated exhibitions include Matthew Wong: The Realm of Appearances and Slip Zone: Abstraction in the Americas and East Asia.  She has also contributed to a variety of publications, including the Oxford Art Journal, The Brooklyn Rail, and the anthology Postwar Revisited—A Global Art History, 1945–1965.

Lisa Hsiao Chen is the author of a book of poems, Mouth (Kaya Press, 2007), and Activities of Daily Living (W.W. Norton, 2022) a novel partly inspired by the life and work of the durational artist Tehching Hsieh. It was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a New Yorker Best Book of 2022. She received a 2025 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant and wrote most recently about the artist Martin Wong for The Paris Review. Born in Taipei, she now lives in Brooklyn.

Larry Lee is a multimedia artist, independent curator, and writer who earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Chicago and his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where he teaches in the Art History, Theory and Criticism; Contemporary Practices, and Academic Spine departments. He is also adjunct faculty at Columbia College Chicago and DePaul University.

His practice includes sculpture, video, installation and painting that “remakes” his personal history in specific and the Asian American experience in general into stylized multimedia objects and images he facetiously terms “orientalia”. His work has been exhibited in Chicago at the Chicago Cultural Center, Gallery 400 and Evanston Arts Center as well as New York City, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Dallas, Houston, Cleveland, New Haven and Glasgow, Scotland. In addition to his curatorial project, Molar Productions, Lee collaborates with the painter Jason Dunda to perform as “The International Chefs of Mystery!” in a long-running video series available on Vimeo. Pre-COVID, the artist along with Susannah Papish co-founded boundary, an alternative project space in Beverly on the outskirts of southwest Chicago.

In the spring of 2022, he launched the Spotlight Series at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago to showcase work by local, emerging, and mid-career artists of Chinese descent and celebrate the divergent artistic visions and experiences of being Chinese in America that reflects upon our relationship to contemporary visual culture to a wider audience within the community.