Cross Crossings to Cross

About the Curatorial Fellow:

Jungmin Cho, based in Seoul and New York, is the founder and director of WHITE NOISE—an art space and platform in Seoul dedicated to fostering artistic experimentation and building global art communities since its establishment in 2018. Also, as an independent curator, writer, and art advisor, she tries to pose accessible yet critical questions to the world through art. Her current interest explores East Asian modernity and its ongoing transformation of emotional and material residues, focusing on how these elements are symbolized and commodified in art and pop culture from a microscopic lens.

Through WHITE NOISE and her independent practice, Cho has collaborated with a wide range of international organizations, including Brief Histories, Canal Projects, Frieze Seoul, GYOPO, Hessel Museum, Montez Press Radio, NOISE Istanbul, Space NN in Munich, and Tiger Strikes Asteroid, among others. Their work has been featured in publications such as The Art Newspaper, Artsy, Hyundai Art Lab, The New York Times, and Spike Art Magazine. Recently, Cho served as a guest curator for Untitled Miami 2024, exploring the theme "East Meets West." She got the 2025 AHL-Chun Family Foundation Curatorial Open Call Grant and graduated from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

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About the artists:

Anahita Akhavan is an Iranian-Canadian artist whose practice examines Islamic art, architecture, and the politics of cultural translation. Working primarily in painting and expanded through textiles, sculpture, and printmaking, she explores how ornamentation, archives, and displaced objects embody spiritual, social, and aesthetic meaning. Born in Iran, she earned a BFA from the University of Tehran and an MFA from the University of Saskatchewan. Her work has been presented in Canada, the United States, and Iran, with residencies at the Banff Centre, AKA artist-run, and Joya: arte + ecología in Spain. Akhavan’s works are held in the collections of Global Affairs Canada, the Cleveland Clinic, Google, and other public and corporate collections.

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Ji Eun Cheon (b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of perception and understanding. Through installations that synthesize various media, she examines the coexistence of paradoxes—order and chaos, reason and uncertainty. Her fictional universe, Uncanished Workld, reflects the limits of knowledge and the perpetual tension between structure and instability. She holds BFA and MFA degrees in sculpture from Seoul National University and MFA in fine arts from School of Visual Arts.

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Hannes Egger (born 1981 in Bolzano, Italy) is a conceptual artist whose work explores participation, interaction, and the transformation of everyday situations into artistic experiences. With a background in philosophy from the University of Vienna, Egger approaches art as a process of shared perception — inviting audiences to take part, question, and co-create meaning. His performances, installations, and participatory projects often unfold in public or domestic spaces, shifting the role of the spectator into that of an active participant.

Egger has presented solo exhibitions at institutions including Lottozero (Prato, 2024), Kulturbahnhof (Kassel, 2022 – with Thomas Sterna), Via Farini (Milan, 2021), Mewo Kunsthalle (Memmingen, 2018), and Museion (Bolzano, 2014). His works have also been featured internationally in group exhibitions such as the 11th Cheongju International Contemporary Art Exhibition (2024), Belvedere 21 (Vienna, 2023), Fundació Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 2020), ZKM (Karlsruhe, 2019), and the 14th Curitiba Biennial (2019).

He currently teaches at the Faculty of Art and Design at the Free University of Bolzano, where he continues to investigate the intersections between art, philosophy, and collective experience.

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Niv Gafni is a sound artist, sculptor, composer, and lecturer. His body of work consists of large-scale installations as well as abstract sound works. At the core of his practice, Gafni is engaged with the invisible, the enigmatic force that drives life, and the spiritual field between humans and everything that is non-human. Using sound as a form of existence, as a way of thinking, as a behavior, and as pure energy, he creates situations that encourage listening and observation, opening a gateway to a very primal and ancient encounter with the environment and the world. Gafni harnesses the abstract qualities of sound into a system of movement, form, and space—a whole that constantly oscillates between matter and spirit, between the conscious and the unconscious, between the human and the post-human, seeking a different understanding of art and existence. His work constantly examines how to transcend cultural, aesthetic, intellectual, and existential patterns through the thought of sound and by manifesting complex environments that emphasize objects as a whole, the air between things, and the course of time and transformation. Gafni has presented solo and group exhibitions, and his work has been featured in international festivals.

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Ruoxi (Jarvis) Hua (b. 1999, Suzhou, China) is a painter, who currently works and lives in New York. Hua’s works have been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Breaking Dawn: A Quiet Revolution at the Blanc in New York, NY (2025), Exit: Escape and Rebirth at A Space Gallery inBrooklyn NY (2025), and THIRD PLACES at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH(2024).
Born and raised in Suzhou, China, Hua traveled to the US in 2017 to attend The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg VA, where he double majored in studio art and biology, while minoring in philosophy, and received a Bachelor of Science degree. Recently, He acquired his Master of Fine Arts degree from School of Visual Arts in New York.

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Chenta Laury is a Maui-based artist and educator whose practice explores the expressive potential and living intelligence of natural materials, honoring the cultural traditions that inform them and the transformations they inspire. Merging heritage, process, and concept, her practice fosters dialogue between past and present, material and meaning, tradition and innovation.

Originally from O‘ahu, Laury spent 15 years in New York working in art and education, including at the Guggenheim Museum and as Head of Education at The Noguchi Museum. She holds a BA in art history and studio art from Oberlin College, a master’s from Harvard University, and a Certificate in Applied Arts from the Fiber Crafts Studio.

Her work has been exhibited in the Hawai‘i Triennial (HB2019), the Honolulu Museum of Art, and the Schaefer International Gallery, and is held in collections including Capital Modern (Hawai‘i State Art Museum), and the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Featured in Fiber Art Now (Summer 2024) and a 2024 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship finalist, Laury’s practice—rooted in slow, transformative processes—intertwines African-American, Finnish, and Hawaiian traditions to explore belonging, resilience, and transformation.

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Shivani Mithbaokar (b. Mumbai, India) is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Through painting, printmaking, ceramics, and found materials, she reimagines decorative motifs as abstract anatomies, exploring the body as a landscape of healing and transformation.

Mithbaokar has been an artist-in-residence at NARS Foundation and has exhibited at Field of Play Gallery(Brooklyn, New York), Yui Gallery (New York, NY), 440 Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Greenpoint Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), and Arsenal Gallery (New York, NY), among others. She has participated in U.S. and India-based zine festivals including MoCCA Arts Fest (New York, NY) and Bombay Underground Festival (Mumbai, India). Her work has been featured in New American Paintings, Hyperallergic, Friend of an Artist, and her self-published artist book is available at Printed Matter. She received her BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design (2018) and completed her MFA in Painting and Drawing from Pratt Institute in 2025.

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Ayelet Amrani Navon explores themes of transience and intimacy. Contemplating what it means to be human, in a human body, and what it means to encounter another. By means of painting, sculpture, and installation, Amrani Navon constructs environments that contain “a place to meet” where human connection can be amplified. This meeting place is the site of her one-to-one performances through which she attempts to achieve a meaningful encounter with a participant, an “accelerated friendship”. The performance consists of rituals based on sensory stimulation, talk, and principles of psychoanalytic theory. Growing up questioning the idea of attachment to land, alongside a perpetual search for a “place”, she explores forms of belonging and intimacy in circumstances of transition, perpetual migration, flight and change. Amrani Navon attended Basis School of Art, Israel (Top Honors Graduate) and the Tel-Aviv Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis’ Interdisciplinary Program. She holds an LLB from Tel-Aviv University Law School and was a Bar member in NY, California and Israel.

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Hyunjin Park is a Korean interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in Brooklyn and Seoul. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and video, she explores how technology-driven capitalism reshapes traditions and reinforces boundaries between the old and the new, the human and the non-human, and life and death—through the representation and cultural significance of living creatures, a recurring motif in her practice.

Her work focuses on themes of non-human beings, including plants, animals, monsters, and artificial intelligence, exploring the intimate relationships nurtured through care and the myths surrounding these entities. Recently, she has integrated the robotic dog AIBO into her practice, exploring the intersections of animals, machines, and technology, all through the familiar yet uncanny face of a dog.

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Xinan Helen Ran is a multidisciplinary artist who creates installations and public art encounters, using collapsible materials such as fabric, text, natural elements and found objects. Her work explores the intersections of trade, waste disposal, labor, leisure, and homemaking in the new world. Xinan is drawn to the point where trauma, nihilism, and humor converge.

Based in Brooklyn, Xinan creates portable installations and public art encounters. Ranked “Highbrow and Brilliant” by New York Magazine’s Matrix (2023), she is a 2025 MacDowell Fellow, a 2025 NARS Foundation Fellow, a 2024 More Art Commission Artist, and a 2024 NYSCA grant recipient. She was a resident at the LMCC Arts Center (2022), and an Ox-BowFellow (2016). Exhibiting nationally and internationally, Xinan has collaborated on public projects with the Harvard Peabody Museum of Archaeology(Cambridge, MA), Stone Quarry Art Park (Syracuse, NY), and Beam Center(Governors Island, NY). Xinan is an art educator, an art administrator, and as et designer for new theaters.   

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Based in the New York Metropolitan area, Josué Morales Urbina is an award-winning installation and sculpture artist whose work delves into themes of transcultural displacement and dépaysement. His contemplative abstract installations evoke feelings of foreignness and the impermanence of memory through the use of everyday perishable materials such as drinking straws, coffee beans, toasted bread, rubber bands, and edible objects.

Born in Guatemala City and nurtured across the United States as a third culture kid, Morales Urbina explores identity and belonging through his art. For him, creation is both inquiry and refuge, as he explains, “I create art to build a home for myself; my art practice is my home.”

He has exhibited widely and is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His residencies include the Vermont Studio Center, La Napoule Art Foundation, Centrum, GoggleWorks, Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, NARS International AIR, SVA Artist Residency, ChaNorth, and the Textile Arts Center’s TAC AIR 16. Recognized as a Sculpture Finalist by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts in 2023, he received the 2024 Jersey City Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship.

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Brazilian-Canadian artist Giorgia Volpe explores interconnectivity and transformation through a multidisciplinary practice encompassing public art, photography, performance, and object-making. With degrees from the University of São Paulo and Laval University, she has exhibited worldwide, including at the Biennale de Lyon, MAC São Paulo, and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. A recipient of the Videre Prize (2012) and Québec City career award (2023), Volpe’s work engages memory, space, and participatory experiences, redefining our relationship to the environment through poetic and critical interventions. Across Canada, Brazil, Cuba, Mexico, Colombia, China, Thailand, France, Portugal, and beyond, her creations invite dialogue, exploration, and reappropriation of everyday materials, emphasizing the dynamic interplay between the individual and collective experience.

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Cass Yao is a gender-fluid artist based working with sculpture and performance. They received a BFA in Interactive Media Arts from New York University (2023). Their works have been exhibited in Latitude Gallery (NY), and non-profit spaces like LIC-Arts (NY), New Uncanny Gallery (NY), BRIC House Gallery (NY), theBlanc Art Space (NY), etc... They have had a solo exhibition at Baba Yaga Gallery (Hudson NY) and will have an upcoming two-person exhibition at Frisson Gallery (NY). Currently they are artist-in-residents at NARS Foundation season III & IV.

Additionally, Yao’s performance practice is grounded in theatricality and ritualism. They have directed five sculpture-based, multi-sensory performances rooted in theatricality and ritualism at various queer venues in New York and have participated in many durational performances at public spaces.

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Tony Zhao is a Brooklyn-based painter and designer whose work centers on texture as an emotional language. Operating between painting and printmaking, he is drawn to the industrious methods of image-making. Zhao’s process-driven practice revolves around sensitivity, transparency, and movement. Through layered, tactile compositions, Zhao distills the mundane—transforming surface into a site of resonance, where narrative emerges through material gestures and touch.

Born and raised in Beijing, China, Tony Zhao received his BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2024. While in China, he worked as an independent curator and educator at UCCA Center for Contemporary Art. Zhao has exhibited internationally, including at Union Street Gallery (Chicago), Gelman Gallery (Providence), and UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing). His recent solo exhibition Lake House at A/W Space in Nanjing, China explores interior spaces and personal objects encountered in his travels, reflecting on the melancholy of the vanishing American middle class from a traveler’s perspective, offering a meditation on space and memory.

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