Portals

A publication produced for the exhibition Portals (August 13–September 20, 2026) at Studio 105, co-curated by Connie Yu and Maya Yu Zhang. Includes a curatorial essay, written contributions by exhibiting artists, and a reading list in collaboration with Ulises.

“Portals features an intergenerational group of artists, connected by the material and metaphorical project of making a home in an unfamiliar place. Within Portals, reverberations of immigration, landing, and the ways it has made us behave: Formal drawing and painting grow looser, uncannier. Experimental poetics return to a material place. Mark-making techniques like debossing, scratching, and rubbing give these surfaces a sense of time. The picture plane is a window there, a wall here, a long slice of floor.


Yu Jiangang’s paintings on paper, carried with him during his 1989 immigration from Shanghai to San Francisco, waver between the draft and the abstract, gesturing toward yards, hills, walls in middle distance, and amalgamated spaces that seem familiar in their pastoral. His kin, Connie Yu, shares ink rubbings and prints on rice paper, using floorboards, windows, breeze blocks — skins of lived environments, surfaces both interior and exterior. Maya Yu Zhang’s works of paper comprise recycled and reformed immigration documents, trawled through natural processes on this side of the earth. Applying pressure to binaries of life/death, self/other, near/far, Portals engages with the additional valences of surface, with drawings by Mei Kazama, who investigates the spectral as a realm of simultaneous grief and possibility.” 


Designed and printed by Connie Yu
Published by Many Folds Press 
Late Summer 2026, Philadelphia

Risograph printed in Black and Blue inks. 
36 pages, staplebound
5 x 6 inches.
Edition of 50.