Passing in the Night

Imagine long streets under the night sky teeming with people from all ages and walks of life on a shared mission. Around them, stalls glow as aromas diffuse into the cool air. Such a scene could be from any open air exchange across Asia Pacific, or conversely in any Chinatown across the globe.

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This week “Night Market,” a new exhibition at Christie's New York, presents works by 34 intergenerational artists of Asian and Pacific Islander descent that conjures the spirit of these moments where cultural history is intertwined with family and community. With proceeds benefiting Civil Art and Apex for Youth, the lots for auction put forth multifaceted and varied narratives around identity like so many stories exchanged within the murmurs of a determined crowd. 

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The event succeeds “At the Table,” a 2022 sale at the auction house that responded to the wave of AAPI racism that arose during the pandemic. “We thought about the significance of food, but more specifically, the coming together of community over a meal, within the API community,” says Rachel Ng, a specialist in post-war and contemporary art at Christie’s. For “Night Market,” which Ng spearheaded, she continued this notion while building off marketplaces as historical epicenters for cultural exchange. “Night markets have emerged in varied forms across the world according to the needs, history, politics, and culture of the local community,” says Ng. “Just as stories, histories, gossip, news can be shared over a dinner table, marketplaces can provide this cultural exchange on a grander scale.”

The artists included range in age from septuagenarian to their early 20s, with mediums spanning painting, drawing, and photography. Throughout the selections, a focus emerges on figuration in particular. See, Christine Tien Wang’s homage to Michelle Kwan in a 2023 photorealistic oil painting named after the figure-skating icon, or Mark Yang’s Bodhisattvas, 2022, which envisions a wild cluster of legs, arms, torsos, and buttocks rendered in purple and green pigments. The work’s title is the Buddhist term for persons who have reached enlightenment yet chosen to stay on earth to help others. A painting by Liang Fu, I am my own unseen body and face, 2024, depicts an expanse of pink silk seemingly stretched over someone’s face. Zhang Huan’s Untitled (Woman with Lantern), 2012, is a stark, entrancing photogravure that shows a woman climbing up a ladder leaning against a hillside at night, glowing lantern in hand. 

Architecture emerges as another prominent subject, particularly from the point of view of those living in New York City: from Kanghee Kim’s 5:67PM, 2022, a photograph looking between two buildings across the East River toward the Empire State Building; to Sun Hwa Kim’s painting The Empire of Light, Brooklyn, 2024, portraying the facade of a wide, short building, perhaps a factory or former miscellaneous place of manufacturing at dusk.

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The overall impression of “Night Market” is indeed one of people and places, their pasts and futures concealed. But captured in these works, singular, transitory moments are seen and known—as are the nature of encounters at the market.

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‍“Night Market” is on view until August 2, 2024 at Christie's New York at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, New York, NY 10020.