Arlan Huang + Alex Paik
Date of Conversation
08.13.2025
Bios
Arlan Huang Arlan Huang (b. 1948, Bangor, Maine) is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City and an active member of Godzilla: Asian American Arts Network. As an artist he has traveled two paths, a community art path and a mainstream path. The fundamental philosophy of community can be traced back to his involvement with Basement Workshop (1971) and his position as co-coordinator of Yellow Pearl, a collection of art, music, and writing of young Asian Americans across America.Through painting and other media, Huang’s artistic practice merges his political activism with personal memory and archival history, often weaving together themes of race and representation with the mystique of abstraction. He most recently joined abolitionists and the Chinatown community in condemning the construction of new jails in the four boroughs of New York.
His most recent exhibition, Just Between Us, was in partnership with Pearl River Mart SoHo and Think!Chinatown along with Corridor Glance, in partnership with Pearl River Chelsea and Asian American Alliance.
Huang has exhibited at Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Drawing Center, Artists Space, Sculpture Center, Taft Museum and is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation’s Creating a Living Legacy award.
In 2021, he and 18 members of Godzilla withdrew from a planned historical show, Godzilla vs. the Art World: 1990-2010 at the Muesuem of Chinese in America. The stand off centered on the alleged complicit involvement in the exchange of $35 million as a community giveback for their silence in the building of another jail in Chinatown as approved through the Borough-Based Jail Plan put forth by the mayor’s office of NYC. Godzilla advocated for a public forum in solidarity with groups from Chinatown. MOCA declined.
Alex Paik is an artist, community builder, writer, and curator based in Los Angeles. He is Founder and Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, a non-profit network of artist-run spaces and serves on the Steering Committee at GYOPO, a collective of diasporic Korean cultural producers and arts professionals.