Xingze Li and Yen Yen’s online curatorial project Backyard Dream Keeps Me Awake, an exhibition featuring paintings, prints, photographs, and videos from thirteen Asian and Asian American artists. 

Backyard Dream Keeps Me Awake takes a close look at the mundane life and its little moments by sharing visions of the artists to their surroundings that are transformed by every day. While some of the selected works speak directly to the most important issues for the artists in the current pandemic, other pieces make metaphorical references to the search of being as an individual in this society and attempting to find what is more or less than the frame of their identity and role. Each artist in this exhibition could be considered as an observer: The observer tries to understand how human lives are affected by the society in different aspects and simultaneously reflects on their worldly experiences through visualizations of feelings morphed with their surroundings.

As we’ve been thinking about the purposes and functions of an online exhibition, this show is an exploration of a different way of viewing. The entry page with floating elements from each artist’s work serves as entryways to individual artwork and the full curated section. Viewers are free to gravitate towards details that lead to discoveries before seeing the exhibition as a whole. We hope this exhibition provides a comfortable visual space and an online breathing room, perhaps even evoking a sense of shared humanity for those of you who are facing severe changes and uncertainties.

Web pages designed and edited by Xingze Li.