Smart Salon: Contemporary Chinese Artists in Chicago

Event Date: May 19, 2026 (5PM)

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Ellen Larson moderates a conversation with artists magicfeifei, Miao Wang, Linye Jiang, gallerist Qiuchen Wu.

Chicago-based artists and cultural producers Magicfeifei, Linye Jiang, Miao Wang, and Qiuchen Wu join Center for the Arts of East Asia Associate Director Ellen Larson in conversation. Anchored in UChicago's long-standing role in shaping the study and exhibition of Chinese art, the discussion considers how artistic practices circulate between China and global institutions. Participants explore how artists and curators mobilize China not as a fixed geography, but as a critical lens that generates new ways of thinking across media, histories, and transnational networks.

This program is presented in conjunction with Beyond Boundaries: Three Decades of Contemporary Chinese Art at the Smart, and in collaboration with the Center for the Art of East Asia.

Free; RSVP encouraged.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Magicfeifei is a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago. Her practice spans between photography, sculpture and performance. Her practice weaponizes cuteness through magic to challenge and subvert conventional social norms. Employing humor, irony, and deliberate embarrassment, she creates seductive yet discomforting narratives that twist the ordinary into the uncanny, confronting indifference and revealing uncomfortable truths.. Her work has been shown at SkyART, Smart Museum of Art, Sawhorse, Shanghai Seminary, Cochrane-Woods Art Center, Logan Center for the Arts, Lightwork, and CICA Museum. Feifei received her BFA from School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2021, and her MFA from the University of Chicago in 2025, where she currently teaches as a Teaching Fellow.

江麟冶 Linye Jiang (b. 1988, Sichuan, China) is an artist living and working in Chicago whose practice evolves from the lens-based medium into sculptural and site-specific installation. Approaching photography as both image and physical object, her work interrogates the aesthetic and ideological conventions that have long defined the medium. Working across image-making, archival reprints, and performative methods, she examines gender, intimacy, and the tension between social norms and private life.

Jiang has exhibited at Charlotte Street Foundation; Heaven Gallery; Dittmar Memorial Gallery, Northwestern University; the Chinese American Museum of Chicago; the Gene Siskel Film Center; Zhou B Art Center; and A4 Contemporary Arts Center, China. She holds an MFA in Photography from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has participated in the Wassaic Project residency with support from the Mary Ann Unger Fellowship. Jiang is a recipient of the Emergency Grant, Foundation for Contemporary Arts (2025); the Ignite Fund, 3Arts Chicago (2024); the Angela and George Paterakis Scholarship (2023); and the Vivian Maier Scholarship (2022).

MIAO WANG (b. 1988, Jilin, China) lives and works in Chicago, IL. She received her MFA from the University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, and her BA in Art History from the University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL. Wang is a recent recipient of The Arts Club Fellowship from the Arts Club of Chicago (2026) and was a recipient of the Spark Grant from the Chicago Artists’ Coalition (2020-2021). She was an artist-in-residence at the Monira Foundation in Chicago, IL (2024-2025) and a Teaching Fellow in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago (2024-2025). She is currently teaching at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Qiuchen Wu (he/they) works at SHANGHAI SEMINARY, a not-for-profit gallery located in the Bridgeport neighborhood, Chicago, Illinois—the occupied lands of the Council of Three Fires: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi Nations. Its most recent exhibition was Ecce Homo, featuring a video installation—“L’ABECEDAIRE DE DELEUZE”—by the late American artist Sturtevant (1924-2014). Its current exhibition is Pochtecayotl, featuring the eponymous
sound installation by Dylan Clark & Ángel Xicohtencatl Espinoza.

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