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Julie Xiao: A Journey
2024-11-01 18:00 - 2025-02-23 15:00 (America/Indiana/Indianapolis) | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Thirty-foot-long scrolls telling a story of self acceptance and belonging will fill the Main Gallery of Tube Factory artspace starting November 1. The “Jellyfish Person” is the central character in Indianapolis-based artist Julie Xiao’s large-scale ink and gouache works. In Xiao’s immersive exhibit, the audience will follow — and may identify with — Jellyfish’s pursuit of finding a place to feel welcomed at, to fit in, and to feel at home.
“I have always been interested in jellyfish because they are mesmerizing creatures,” Xiao said. “They adapt very easily to different environments in the water. They have their own defense mechanisms and are just really beautiful creatures. I was thinking about how many individuals have to adapt to their environments in order to fit in, through that idea the Jellyfish became this anthropomorphic traveler wandering through this natural —yet dystopic and dark — landscape.”
Jellyfish first emerged as a painting when Xiao was working on her BFA in Animation at Ball State University. It hung in her house for a while. Then, while applying to the MFA program at Herron School of Art and Design, Jellyfish reappeared. Xiao was thinking a lot about environmental issues and spiritual symbols in relation to her own journey moving from China to the United States as a child.
By making the character anthropomorphic, it allows for a wider range of interpretations and personal connections. When a character has human-like traits but also embodies other forms, it becomes a versatile symbol that can represent various experiences and identities.
“I was thinking, maybe, in this way, audiences can always interpret and have their own meanings. Or they can relate with the character more. It can embody everyone in a sense,” Xiao said. “Then all these other images emerged, like the orbs in the background. They’re similar to spiritual guides. Drawing from my roots, I think back on how ancestors are there to protect and guide you in life. I also think a lot about roots and trees. That’s why you see a lot of them in the works. Trees tell a lot of history. They are like living time capsules, holding a wealth of historical information within their rings and roots.”
The first large-scale scroll, The Keeper, was inspired by an apple tree from her childhood. And, it led Xiao to create scrolls ranging between 30 and 40 feet long by 4 feet wide. “I would wait for the bus every day under the tree,” says Xiao. “But then, one day, it was suddenly chopped down. I still pass by it sometimes because it’s near where my parents’ restaurant is. You can see it regrowing again. So, I was just thinking about that when I created this tree, it was a landmark in a sense. Trees are like little landmarks of places.”
Xiao creates the pieces on the scrolls by rolling them out a section at a time. And with the work being very detailed, it requires her to use her full body to paint back and forth on the 4-foot wide scroll. The newer pieces in the exhibit are the gouache paintings and the large scale tapestry. These continue her use of auspicious Chinese symbols such as gourds, chrysanthemums, beans, and lanterns.
“Much of my work is inspired by Japanese print and traditional Chinese painting and landscape work. Some works from China and Japan are very similar because they have inspired each other throughout history. A lot of the superstitions, mythologies, and symbolism in the work are from Chinese beliefs and symbols I’ve grown up with,” Xiao said.
Overall, Xiao hopes the audience will find hope, guidance, and optimism in her work — while also acknowledging the difficulty of moving through life and change.
“Everyone’s on this journey to find a place of acceptance. I think a lot of people can relate and identify with that,” Xiao said.“But this work is also a reflection of my life and experience as a multicultural person. I am tethered between two different worlds and identities but not fully embraced by either.”
Xiao’s body of work is meant to challenge and question our perceptions of identity and to consider how our experiences and environment influence who we are. With its unique imagery and symbolism, A Journey invites viewers to engage with the profound and often unconscious forces that shape understanding of ourselves and our place in the world.

About the artist: Julie Xiao received her Bachelor of Fine Art degree in Animation in 2019 from Ball State University (Muncie, Indiana) and a Master of Fine Art in Visual Art in 2023 from the Herron School of Art and Design (Indianapolis). As a multicultural artist, she has felt caught in a constant state of displacement and suspension. This has led her to ask several questions through her work like: How is our identity shaped? How do we embrace and accept the different fragments that contribute to our sense of “home” as it relates to our identity? Much of her research centers around how art can be a vehicle to explore our fragmented histories and contemplate where we come from, as well as where we are heading in an ever-changing and uncertain world. Through various visual elements, she explores the ways in which our sense of self is shaped by factors such as society, culture, and history. She works in multiple mediums: digital, oil, acrylic, watercolor, and gouache, but is best known for her use of ink on expansive paper scrolls that pay homage to the rich tradition of Chinese ink painting. Her work is in the Eskenazi Health Public Art Collection and various murals she has painted — such as Chilled Water Cycle, City of Carmel, and Scottsburg —can be found throughout Indiana.

The exhibition is made possible by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Efroymson Family Fund, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Wong Kit Yi: Inner Voice Transplant
2024-11-01 18:00 - 2025-02-23 15:00 | Contemporary Art Museum of Indianapolis (CAMi), 1125 Cruft St., Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Inner Voice Transplant explores the links between subjects as disparate as ancient Egyptian practices of dream interpretation; jiāngshī (Chinese hopping vampires); and the first voice-box transplant, which took place at the Cleveland Clinic in 1998. These inquiries are connected through her signature video essay mode, which incorporates newly composed songs with karaoke-style running subtitles into associative, essayistic narratives. This novel format opens up the videos to viewers’ embodied interactions, something expanded further by her live presentation of a karaoke performance-lecture during FRONT 2022’s opening days, and then at Tate Modern in London as well as M+ Museum in Hong Kong.
The artist has also made a traveling kit that allows other art venues around the world to present a version of the project.
As the artist states, “Ancient temples were the precursors of hospitals, places where body and spirit were meant to be treated together. Modern medicine, however, appears to divorce the concept of treatment from care of the soul.” In her thoroughly interdisciplinary approach, the perceived separation between bodies of knowledge and types of experience are broken down and imagined anew. In the spaces between established genres, Wong considers the question of illness and the need for some to simply live with it rather than heal in the way we are often commanded to do.
About the Artist
Wong Kit Yi lives and works between New York and Hong Kong. Her works have been included in recent projects organized by M+ (Hong Kong, 2023); Tate Modern (London, 2023); FRONT Triennial (Cleveland, 2022); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong, 2021); Public Art Fund (New York, 2020); Para Site (Hong Kong, 2019). She was a resident in the Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence program (Marfa, 2021) and received an MFA from Yale University. She has taught university courses about performance, video art, and new media and currently teaches at the School of Visual Arts (New York) in the MFA Fine Arts program. Even when not teaching, she can’t quit lecturing people and continues to do so in her signature karaoke-inspired lecture format. Wong is currently preparing for a new commission by the Lahore Biennial 03, as well as a co-commission by LIAF 2024 (which is the longest-running art biennial in Scandinavia) and The Kitchen (New York).
This exhibition is made possible by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Allen Whitehill Clowes Charitable Foundation, Efroymson Family Fund, Institute of Museum and Library Services, and The Arts Council of Indianapolis and City of Indianapolis.

Benjamin Berg: ░▓ I Can See the Pixels ▓░
2025-01-03 09:00 - 2025-02-23 15:00 | Efroymson Gallery, 1125 Cruft Street, Indianapolis, IN, 46203, United States
Computers do whatever you tell them to, even if you tell them to make a mistake.

There are some seemingly bad ideas behind Benjamin Berg’s exhibition I Can See the Pixels. For starters, everything is created using the 1980s-era GIF image format, which is hated by today’s computer programmers for its limited color palette and inefficient storage. Also, the source images are small and low-resolution. Worst of all, he forces his computer to use colors that are totally wrong, nowhere close to the ones it needs. What’s wrong with this picture?

Berg isn’t interested in doing things the “correct” way. He’s more curious about what happens when you do them incorrectly. He tries to misuse technology just enough to make it misbehave,
but not so much that it breaks down entirely. Finding the right amount of wrong is a delicate balance.

This GIF-based work requires countless screenshots and hours of sifting through those screenshots, cropping and resizing them, looking for the best mistakes, the most interesting failures.

Sometimes they don’t fail hard enough the first time and so he sends them back through for a second pass. Often only a small area is good enough and he crops everything else away. Finally, he takes his favorite failures and blows them up big. The pixels, once tiny and hard to spot, are now on display for all to see.

I Can See the Pixels features prints and large-scale projections of animated GIFs, accompanied by ambient plunderphonic music playing from two sets of speakers.

For more information, to stream/download music, or purchase art prints, visit animalswithinanimals.com/bent

About the artist: Benjamin Berg is a multidisciplinary artist from Indianapolis. After making glitch music for several years, he started applying similar techniques to the visual arts in 2005, documenting his experiments on his blog. His writings from this period culminated in a series of highly influential and widely cited glitch art tutorials.

By making technologies misbehave, his work challenges the assumptions built into those technologies, assumptions which are often unstated and sometimes even unconscious.

He also releases music with his band Animals Within Animals, and solo under various names including stAllio! and Old Man Glitch.
