What makes you, you? The answer is surely complicated, with memories of great-aunt Wangs and uncle Zhangs and too many stories that no one wants to hear. What is more interesting is asking 'what makes the artist the artist?' This question is one of inheritance and influence, but also of what artworks grabbed and didn’t let go and made their way into the artist’s work. What makes us who we are also has to do with our general spiritual and social orientation.

This exhibition will consider how we contemplate our inheritances—social, cultural, and spiritual—as well as how artists of different stripes might try to exercise their will over their own legacy and the legacies of the movements of which they are a part. When an artwork is completed, who does it belong to once it has left the artist’s hands? Let’s enter the realities of physical and spiritual immortality for as long as we are able, and steep in our thoughts about what impact that might have on the artist. Gain, loss, and progeny.