Ghost Stories: Afterlives in Asian American Art
Date & Time:
Sunday, April 19, 2026
2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location:
San Francisco Art Fair Theater
Ghost Stories: Afterlives in Asian American Art brings together artists Cathy Lu, Binh Danh, and Jenifer K Wofford for a discussion exploring how memory, migration, and history haunt us—and how they are reanimated through contemporary artistic practice. Across sculpture, photography, painting, and performance, these artists engage the “afterlives” of images and narratives: colonial histories embedded in unexpected forms, war memorialized in living landscapes, and everyday people and pop-cultural figures recast through humor and critical play. Cathy Lu reclaims and reconfigures ceramic traditions to confront the complexities and distortions of Asian and Asian American identity. Binh Danh’s chlorophyll prints embed photographic portraits within leaves, allowing histories of war and diaspora to literally take root and decay in nature. Jenifer K Wofford animates cultural figures and mythic archetypes through performance, painting, and video, using humor and embodiment to unfix the past.
Together, their practices ask: How does art transmit memory and experience across time? And how can it make visible the spectral forces — of empire, displacement, ancestry, and imagination — that continue to shape our collective experience? Join us for an event that reframes haunting not as something to fear but as a generative space where the past insists on being seen and where new futures begin to take shape. This event features a moderated conversation with the artists, followed by audience Q&A.
About the Moderator
Dr. Aleesa Pitchamarn Alexander is a curator and writer based in San Francisco. She is currently the Robert M. and Ruth L. Halperin Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art and Co-Director of the Asian American Art Initiative (AAAI) at the Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University. Co-founded with Stanford art history professor Marci Kwon, the AAAI is an ongoing, research-driven project that expands scholarship, public awareness, and institutional support for Asian American art. The initiative highlights the work of artists and makers of Asian descent through exhibitions, publications, public programs, and collection-building, focusing on those whose contributions have often been marginalized or overlooked in art history and museums. She is the curator of Spirit House (2024) and East of the Pacific: Making Histories of Asian American Art (2022), both landmark exhibitions of the Initiative, currently traveling to their third venues. She received her PhD in the History of Art and Architecture from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Aleesa is currently working on a major survey book on Asian American artists with Phaidon, due in 2027, the first comprehensive resource on over 250 artists from the 19th century to today.
About the Panelists
Cathy Lu (b. Miami, FL) creates ceramic based sculptures and installations that reference Chinese diasporic images, mythology, and experiences as a way to point out fallacies about race and gender in American culture. She draws attention to unacknowledged histories of immigration, hybridity, and assimilation in order to reimagine our past and present to create a more equitable future.
Lu received a BA and BFA from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University and an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is currently Assistant Professor of Ceramics at UC Berkeley.
Lu’s work has recently been included in the collection of the Asian Art Museum San Francisco, Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Kadist, Museum of Fine Arts Boston, San Francisco Arts Commission Portsmouth Square public sculpture, SFMOMA, and private collections.
Binh Danh reimagines traditional photographic techniques to explore history, identity, and place. Known for his contemporary daguerreotypes of national parks, he creates reflective images that invite viewers to see themselves within the American landscape. His work is held in major collections, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the National Gallery of Art, SFMOMA, the de Young, and the Asian Art Museum. In 2023, his book Binh Danh: The Enigma of Belonging became the first recipient of the Minami Book Grant for Asian American Visual Artists from Radius Books. He is also an associate professor of art at San José State University.
Jenifer K Wofford is a San Francisco artist and educator whose work is informed by hybridity, history and calamity. She has presented her projects at venues including SFMOMA, the Asian Art Museum, YBCA, Southern Exposure, BAMPFA, Oakland Museum of California, and SJICA (Bay Area). She has also shown at Asia Society (Houston), Wing Luke Museum (Seattle), DePaul Museum (Chicago), Frieze (Los Angeles), Osage (Hong Kong) and Silverlens Galleries (Manila + NY).
Wofford is a 2025 San Francisco Bay Area Artadia Awardee and a 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant. Her awards include the YBCA 100 list, the Eureka Fellowship, grants from Art Matters, SFAC, and CCI and artist residencies at Montalvo/Lucas Artist Residency (Saratoga) and Liguria Study Center (Italy).
Wofford teaches in the Fine Arts and Philippine Studies programs of the University of San Francisco, and holds degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (BFA) and UC Berkeley (MFA). She was born in San Francisco and raised in Hong Kong, Dubai, Malaysia and the Bay Area.