The Brooklyn Rail

Tucked into the rear corner of Stanford University’s Cantor Arts Center, Livien Yin’s Thirsty might be easy to miss. Made up of just thirteen works, the exhibition presents the Brooklyn-based artist’s ongoing series “Paper Suns,” alongside new works that investigate intergenerational connections within the Asian diaspora. Altogether, Thirsty seems modest in size compared to the much larger neighboring exhibitions also curated by Stanford’s Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI). Down the hall, for example, Dwelling: New Acquisitions presents a hodgepodge of recent additions to the Cantor’s collection, while Spirit House showcases thirty-three contemporary artists of Asian descent, the scale of both shows easily overshadowing Yin’s first solo museum exhibition. And yet, during the afternoon I spent at the Cantor, I found myself trapped in that little corner gallery, hypnotized by Yin’s work.

Sometimes, art tells you what it means to say plainly—in our world of small screens and short attention spans, that kind of art certainly has its place. Yin’s dynamic and individual use of oil on linen, however, resists the temptation to gloss over fine distinctions and instead insists on particularity. Throughout Thirsty, Yin’s paintings show themselves to be as detailed and dimensional as they are symbolically and historically rich. The exhibition all but begs viewers to stay a while and soak it all in.

In terms of her methodology alone, Yin’s work is extremely immersive. Up close, her careful attention to the colors and contours of her models’ skin creates entire topographies of texture and movement. In Thirsty No. 1 (2022), for example, in which a figure wearing a tangzhuang or Tang suit—complete with frog buttons and a Mandarin collar—chugs water from a jug, Yin paints the hands, arms, and face of her model using shades of orange, green, pink, yellow, blue, beige, and auburn. At a glance, the work is vivid, even mesmerizing. Upon reflection, Yin’s layered approach to painting also resists broad categorizations like “Black,” “white,” “brown,” and so on. For this artist, every square inch of her subject is a labyrinthine territory that is, crucially, difficult to anonymize.

Especially in her crowded paintings, such as Manang (2024), which gathers several historical Bay Area activists into a single frame, each of Yin’s figures is strikingly individual. In the foreground of the former Lucky ‘M’ Pool Hall, Yin herself chalks up a pool cue while her community organizer friend, Alisa, leans over the table and prepares to take a shot. Behind them, Chinese American artist and arts advocate Bernice Bing, who died in 1998, smokes a cigarette and watches. With these details in focus, the work’s title, “manang,” which is a term of respect meaning “older sister” in Ilocano, makes the connections between these three figures shimmer. In the spirit of Raphael’s School of Athens (1509–11), Yin blends together the past and present to visualize the importance of solidarity between activists and reify the links between resistance efforts across time.

Using this approach, Thirsty covers a lot of thematic ground. In Kin Gee Zapatería (2021), for example, Yin takes inspiration from Arnold Genthe’s famous photographs of San Francisco’s nineteenth and early-twentieth–century Chinatown to place her female model in men’s attire, which would have given her more freedom of movement at that time. By using the term “zapatería” in the title, Yin also refers to the shift in Chinese immigration from the US to Mexico during the period of the Chinese Exclusion Act , constructing a speculative history of Chinese immigration and bringing the individual lives of the immigrants of that time to life. By placing portraits of her friends into historical contexts, Yin deepens the connection between past and present, reviving realities that have been forcibly erased and exposing the interplay between historical traumas and ongoing forms of discrimination and exclusion.

With this in mind, it’s clear that the decision to include Yin in the AAAI’s barrage of exhibitions this season was intentional. As Yin earned a Master of Fine Arts from Stanford in 2019, her work to expand the representation of Asian American activists in the Bay Area art scene is rightly situated. When associate curator and AAAI co-director Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander was first hired in 2018, she learned that of the forty thousand items in the Cantor’s permanent collection, only about forty were works by Asian Americans. The exhibition of Yin’s Thirsty, then, is one of many efforts to inject works by Asian American artists into the Cantor’s collection and widen Stanford’s ability to represent diverse artists.

From my perspective, Thirsty pays a powerful tribute to the radical resilience of Asian American networks. While much of the AAAI’s work has focused on acquiring, preserving, and displaying art by historical Asian American artists since its launch in 2021, Yin’s exhibition points toward a bright future, opening the door for many more exhibitions of its caliber and kind.