February, 2025 Fanyu Lin for Financial Times (Chinese)

In a world often marked by divisions—cultural, geographic, and institutional—three women are gently reshaping the conversation. At Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2024, Executive Director Clara Andrade Pereira and guest curators Kathy Huang and Jungmin Cho have crafted something with heart: a vision that dissolves boundaries and invites us to see the world anew. With its roots in Miami, Untitled Art is poised to expand its horizons further, with a new edition set to debut in Houston in September 2025.

For the 2024 edition in Miami Beach, through the theme “East Meets West,” they wove together voices from the Asia-Pacific, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Asian diaspora, creating not binaries but a mosaic of interconnected stories. This is a fair that feels like a gesture of care—soft yet powerful.

As they lead me through the fair for this installment of the Global Leadership Conversation series, the theme reveals itself, not as a collection of individual galleries or artists but as a harmonious whole, where the collective spirit gives rise to the unique beauty of this gathering.

Photo of Jungmin Cho, Kathy Huang, and Clara Andrade Pereira at Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2024. Image credit: World Red Eye, courtesy of Untitled Art.

Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2024. Image credit: World Red Eye, courtesy of Untitled Art

Art Fair as Cultural Cartography

“This is about building networks and creating dialogues that resonate at all levels—among collectors, institutions, and galleries,” Clara explains. Untitled Art serves as a form of cultural cartography, mapping connections across regions, histories, and artistic expressions to reveal a larger, multi-dimensional vision.

This vision takes shape in thoughtfully curated corners of the fair, where galleries representing emerging talent are carefully positioned in relation to those showcasing more established voices. The Nest sector, a key initiative by Untitled Art, provides a nurturing home for emerging galleries, artist-run spaces, and non-profits, offering subsidized booths to help overcome traditional barriers to art fair participation.

In one such encounter, Cub_ism_ Artspace, a Nest gallery from Shanghai, anchors one side of the grouping, presenting the Works and Days series by Lilyjon—an alter ego of the artist who builds a world where painting and literature, myth and reality intertwine. In this syncretic universe, past and afterlife, innocence and darkness, life and death are collapsed into a single moment, as if reconstructed from the forgotten dreams and lingering memories of all living things. Through his poetic vocabulary, Lilyjon creates a labyrinth permeated with sadness and power, where ancient hymns echo alongside elegies for the future, flowing across time and space in contemplative stillness.

Lilyjon, Works and Days: Themis Keeping Balance, 2023-2024 © the artist and Cub_ism_ Artspace

Adjacent to Cub_ism_ Artspace is another Nest gallery, Project K from Seoul, whose works carry forward the contemporary spirit of Korea while holding onto the echoes of its traditions. Across from them is NOPLACE (Nueveochenta – Arróniz – NF Galería), an established presence and multi-gallery collective spanning Bogotá, Mexico City, Madrid, and beyond. Inspired by Thomas More’s utopian vision of “no place,” it embraces a shared system of production that reimagines the traditional gallery model, creating a dynamic platform where collaboration and the exchange of ideas take precedence over convention.

Completing this constellation, CARVALHO PARK from Brooklyn introduces a perspective that bridges the local and the universal. Drawing on its multidisciplinary foundation, the gallery fosters dialogue across disciplines, anchoring this convergence of expressions with a spirit of exploration and connection that is both dynamic and uniquely resonant.

Here, time and space dissolve: the voices of emerging and established artists, the weight of histories, and the urgency of the present coalesce into a moment of poetic clarity. It is as though these galleries, placed with intention, have created a map where the familiar meets the unknown, and new possibilities are quietly drawn.

East Meets West: Challenging Preconceptions

Untitled Art, Miami Beach 2024, breathes new life into the concept of “East Meets West.” This isn’t a simplistic focus on geographic or cultural binaries but a thoughtful exploration of how traditions, ideas, and histories intersect and evolve. The theme challenges preconceived notions and broadens the lens through which we view global art.

Of course, this vision is not new. Some galleries have long committed themselves to the mission of East-West exchange. Sundaram Tagore Gallery, for instance, has been challenging prevailing narratives since its founding in 2000 in New York. At a time when the art world often favored Western male artists, Sundaram Tagore set out to highlight deeply cross-cultural explorations, championing artists—particularly women and those from underrepresented cultures—whose work embodies our interconnectedness. The gallery’s global roster of artists synthesizes Western visual languages with forms, techniques, and philosophies drawn from Asia, the Subcontinent, and the Middle East.

Challenging preconceptions feels increasingly relevant in today’s art world. Kathy shared, “The idea of an ‘Asian experience’ isn’t something you can define in one or two words,” she reflects. “For a long time, Asian art was categorized by specific materials or traditions, but that framework doesn’t reflect the diversity of contemporary practices.” Untitled Art echoes this approach, creating a space where artists, galleries, and audiences are invited to think beyond labels and celebrate the complexity of global narratives.

This perspective is central to Kathy’s work as a curator. Her first major project, Wonder Women, debuted at Jeffrey Deitch in 2022, featuring the works of 40 Asian American and diasporic women artists. “That was my first big project,” she recalls, “and I still very much have a commitment to showcasing Asian and Asian American artists and expanding those conversations.” Her forthcoming Wonder Women book, published by Rizzoli, builds on this work, exploring the artists’ practices through the lens of identity, resilience, and creativity. The project resists reducing these artists to a single narrative, instead embracing the diversity of their experiences across cultures, generations, and mediums. It is deeply human and emotional, asking us to consider how shared histories and individual journeys shape the way we see and create.

Bridging the Spaces Between

Jungmin’s transition into curatorial practice reflects her vision for bridging gaps within the art world. After running an independent art space in Korea for six years, she moved to New York to pursue a graduate program in curatorial studies, driven by a desire to expand her understanding of art systems beyond her home country. “In Korea, there’s always either really small independent spaces or big institutions,” she explains. “I wanted to know more about mid-sized institutions because they play a specific role—bringing up emerging artists and connecting them to larger institutions or international contexts.”

Her experiences have shaped a vision for creating sustainable communities and platforms that bridge the traditional divide between for-profit and nonprofit models. “I’ve always thought about how to make spaces and relationships with artists sustainable, how to fill the gap between nonprofit and profit, and how to grow together,” she reflects. For Jungmin, Untitled Art offers an opportunity to explore these questions further. Her quest is a collective one. It is one of inclusivity and sustainability, seeking to redefine how art spaces operate and how artists find their place in the world.

At Untitled Art, three women, alongside their dedicated team, have created an experience where boundaries soften and connections are nurtured. We are invited to think more expansively and reminded that art is not merely a reflection of the world—it is a way to imagine it anew.

Kathy walked us to her favorite works at Pablo’s Birthday, a series of small, quiet paintings rendered in oil on wood by Tony Huynh. “They’re so sweet,” she smiled. “There’s a lot of art fairs where you feel like you have to show really poppy, bold works, but these are a little quieter, and I think they make a big impact.” These little paintings invite a closer look without shouting for attention but instead offer tenderness, weaving together fragments of memory, imagination, and a touch of fairy tales. We sometimes forget that art doesn’t have to be groundbreaking to be meaningful; it can simply be sincere. In Huynh’s Blue Diver, a swan gracefully glides across waters. I feel how art ripples through the world, creating nests of connection and making it gentler, stronger, and more harmonious—one thoughtful gesture at a time.

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