No Place Like Home: Co-curated with Civil Art

LATITUDE Gallery is pleased to present No Place Like Home, an end-of-the-year collaborative group show co-curated with Civil Art. Co-founded and led by artist Ho Jae Kim, Civil Art is a nonprofit organization dismantling barriers to professional success for API (Asian Pacific Islander) artists, art writers, and cultural professionals. Civil Art functions as connective tissue in the arts ecosystem, building the networks, providing the milestones, and creating the foundations that turn creative potential into lasting cultural leadership. In this sense, Latitude Galley has long held a vision that Civil Art echoes, supporting Asian diasporic artists and fostering their visibility across New York and the wider global landscape.

In this show, Civil Art presents the 2025–2026 cohort of its emerging artist leadership program, Art House — Andrius Alvarez-Backus, Claire Chey, Herok Kim, Hyun Sun Ohm, In June Park, Joanne Ji Young Kim, Rayer Ma, Sharon Cheuk Wun Lee, and Wenhui Quan. Meanwhile, Latitude Gallery brings together a notable group of emerging artists in resonance — Grace Chang, Cherina Cheng, Claudia Kohn, Ailyn Lee, Shivani Mithbaokar, Grace Qian, Jiayu Wei, Wendy Wei, Cass Yao, and Theresia Zhang. Together, No Place Like Home gathers artists who use the familiar as a gateway to the unknown, thus reconfiguring the latent affect of everydayness.  

Recognizing what we have right in front of us—what is closest, most familiar—can be surprisingly difficult. Often it takes distance, a journey away from the everyday, to perceive the textures of our lives with clarity. What we recognize becomes uncanny; what feels intimate becomes dislocated. In this space of shifting meaning, viewers are invited to embark on their own journey—one that is philosophical, cultural, psychological, or somewhere in between.

Through textiles, patterns, objects, and materials drawn from domestic or cultural vernaculars, each artist constructs a passage outward. In Just Between Us, Anrius Alvarez-Backus “reclaims” found objects and expands their material identity beyond their original context, transforming them into an abstracted sense of reality: their faded washes and worn tones evoke something of humanity, suggesting a terrain shaped not by nature but by lived experience. In Threshold #1, Herok layers hanji—a traditional Korean paper—with toilet paper to create a dense, relief-like surface that represents the humble and easily overlooked materials of everyday life. As the layers thicken, Herok carves into the paper with chiseling tools, cutting grooves across the surface like tire tracks pressed into fresh snow, through which the artist transforms these ordinary materials into a passage into a phantasmagoric thicket of trees, a bridge to the otherworldly. 

In Welcome In [Huan Ying Guang Lin], Claudia Koh explores the space in suspension between the city’s nocturnal glow and the quiet intimacy of the domestic. The pensive face foregrounding the painting, and her hair glinting with the city’s distant, wavering lights, together gesture toward the estranged inner state of an urban resident seen as a mirrored apparition. In Blue Ribbon, Grace Qian refashions a corner of the bedroom into a vertically stratified territory. Under this subtle yet ingenious shift of vantage, the striking blue of the suitcase under the bed becomes the furtive gaze of a parallel interior, lending the still-life of the room an almost theatrical charge.

Here, the familiar is both medium and point of departure. These works chart routes across internal and external terrains, guiding us through landscapes shaped by memory, identity, and lived experience. The path ultimately circles back, returning us to where we began: home. But the return is not a simple restoration. Instead, we come back changed—transformed not physically but perceptually, newly attuned to what has always accompanied us.

In revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary, the artists in No Place Like Home remind us that distance can illuminate, and that home itself is an ever-shifting horizon, understood anew each time we cross it again.