We are pleased to announce “Ritual to the Sun: If the Body is a Map and Art is a Portal,” a group exhibition that examines the intersection of artistic practice, labor and ecological reverence.
Opening reception: Mar 8, 5–9 PM. Drinks and conversations served.
With title inspired by Martha Graham and Emily Dickinson’s works, “Ritual to the Sun” explores art as both devotion and navigation, revealing how creative practice bridges body and spirit, nature and creation. The exhibition reflects on the body as a vessel of lived experience—marked by history, labor, and transformation—while artists, like ancient civilizations aligning with celestial cycles, map their own relationship to time, place, and materiality through gestures of making and meaning. In this context, art becomes a portal—an entryway into deeper ecological consciousness and a call to attune ourselves to the urgent realities of environmental precarity.
Featured artists: Charles Arnoldi, Charles Liu, Jinseok Choi, Jian-Jun Zhang, KEF!, Kenneth Morehouse, Nancy Evans, Wang Yiming and Zhang Xiangxi.
About the Curator:
Ann Shi is an independent curator, art advisor, archivist, and USPAP-compliant art appraiser specializing in 20th-century Chinese paintings. Born into a family of artists and collectors in classical ink paintings, music and drama, Shi has a deep appreciation for multidisciplinary art forms that connect time, materials, and spaces. She holds a BA and MMath with Honours in Mathematics from Oxford University and an MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and was formerly a risk officer in the hedge funds over her six-year banking career. Her curatorial approach often explores the intersectionality on various accounts, from classical Chinese ink art, literati lineage, and contemporary expressions, shifting between indigenous and external perspectives within her cultural and gender identity, fostering fresh perspectives that contest the notion of Asian art with an aim to gradually dissolve physical and metaphorical borders of races, genders and geography. (Instagram: @annonymous_cynist)
About the Space:
a poco art archive is an independent creator’s space and curatorial incubator located in Culver City, dedicated to showcasing innovative and thought-provoking works and foster cultural dialogue. As an intimate space that defies conventionality, we aim to transform the act of archiving into a curatorial project and artistic labor—where ideas, processes, and dialogues are continuously cultivated, challenging static notions of “archive” while embracing the fluidity of creative evolution. (Instagram: @a.poco.art.collective)
