Friday, April 25, 2025 at 1:00 PM to Sunday, December 14, 2025 at 1:00 PM
Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena
my hands are monsters who believe in magic features works of Asian diasporic artists that explore the process of unmaking and remaking the self in their work. Focusing on the potential for art as a site of radical reimagination, the exhibition will include a group of artists having a [cross generational] conversation about the liberatory possibilities of the endless, messy, contradictory, and sometimes grotesque process of producing a social identity. At a time when visibility is widely touted as a goal for Asian Americans (and other people of color), it is also one that can prove dangerous. Our relationship to identity becomes especially loaded, lending a particular urgency to the work included in this exhibition. my hands are monsters who believe in magic highlights construction and reinvention – both in the literal, material sense and as an approach to personal, communal, and ancestral histories – to help us see our own potential and the potency inherent in the world around us. The title of the exhibition quotes a line from Ocean Vuong’s poem “Dear Sara” in Time Is a Mother.