On Saturday, May 23, 2026 | 2PM – 5PM, we’re hosting a community pop-up and fundraising event you won’t want to miss.
Come spend the afternoon with:
Butter Bandit, Koko Kona Coffee, Tarrangart, Aunties Family Kitchen Food Truck
Plus Voi Cà Phê extending hours until 5:00 PM
Expect art, pop-ups, live performances, and a live mural painting bringing the neighborhood together.
One day only, so bring your friends and family and come hang with us. See you there!
June 28, 2026 | CALL FOR ARTISTS
Dystopia All the Way Down at the Georgetown Steam Plant
An Asiren Production
Making art helps, so tap into those feelings you don't want to feel right now and put them on the canvas, or in the clay, or in a poem, or in any medium you want. Put them over there into that work, and then bring that work to VENT!
Submission form:
/vent-artist-call
@gtown_arts_culture
Jill Kyong’s work has a quiet, grounding tenderness—an attention to the natural world that becomes, almost seamlessly, an attention to family. This piece began with a stick she found while camping in Stanley, Idaho, carrying three clusters of lichen—a small “family” that immediately made her think of herself and her two adult children. Lichen, after all, require two or more separate organisms to exist: intertwined, interdependent, and yet distinctly their own. The metaphor lands gently but powerfully—shared history, shared roots, separate lives.
There’s another story embedded here too: the branch itself, found after a long hike on an Oregon mountain. Jill carried what she thought was the perfect one down from the summit, only to realize the branch she truly needed was waiting at the trailhead, right by her car door. In the gallery, that detail feels like the heart of the piece—an offering of patience and return. Sometimes what we’re searching for isn’t at the peak; it’s been waiting for us to come back to ourselves.
Victoria is a Filipino American artist, painting primarily in oil on canvas in a style that combines representational and abstract elements. She believes art is an interactive, dynamic encounter between the artist and the community; thus, her work explores the interwoven roots of individual and collective consciousness through shared human experience. Believing in the power of art for social change, she strives to create meaningful, timeless art that resonates not only with personal but also community interests. An underlying theme of her work is the search for home in physical landscapes and in the landscapes of mind and memory from the perspective of my immigrant experience. Another unique feature of her paintings, regardless of their subject matter, is the cobweb she embeds in each of them as a symbol of the connectedness of everything. For inspiration, themes, and technique, she draws on a diversity of cultural and artistic heritages, including Asian and Western traditions, history, and literature.
This Hannya mask by Hanako O’Leary is all presence—earthy, tactile, and quietly confrontational. The horns and that central, blade-like opening feel less like “demon” imagery and more like a conduit: a way to let something raw and essential come forward.
In line with Hanako’s intent, it doesn’t hide or demonize—it reveals. There’s an ancient, archetypal calm to it, but the surface tells the truth; emotion as power, femininity as both armor and aperture. It’s a celebration of modern complexity—tragedy and triumph held in the same, unwavering form.
Eric Chan’s Gyopo Gwisin Gut reads like a ritual painted into being—part invocation, part lament. It’s a send-off for Koreans who perish abroad, a dirge for the forgotten fallen forever-foreigners—those whose lives end in diaspora, still held at a distance from home, history, and belonging.
Chan layers folk imagery and spectral presence with a clarity that’s almost disarming, letting the work carry both bite and grief. In the gallery, it doesn’t just depict mourning—it performs it, asking us to witness what gets erased, and to honor the spirits that refuse to be forgotten.
Suzanna Leung is a Chinese-American artist and digital illustrator from Seattle, WA. Her art is heavily inspired by East Asian imagery and provides a glimpse into the Western world’s objectification of Asian people. Many pieces incorporate elements of body horror and comment on the emptiness of being seen as an object by others and the emptiness that comes with it.
One Yung Kim’s portraits feel like they’re arriving in real time—hovering between visibility and withdrawal, never pinned down, never fully resolved. There’s a profound tenderness in that refusal. As Kim writes, they learned early that “a self can be whittled down to whatever will survive another judgment,” and painting becomes the place where that erasure pauses—where doubt turns into a line, a color, a fragile contour of presence.
Each canvas begins as a question—who materializes when everything solid wavers?—and what emerges are figures made of “luminous gaps,” bodies balanced on thresholds. Kim leaves surfaces unfinished and gestures exposed, not as an aesthetic trick, but as permission: for what usually retreats to breathe for a moment. The work doesn’t ask to be decoded; it asks to be stood beside—alive in the shimmering unrest between absence and arrival.
Nak Bou’s work nails a very specific kind of nostalgia—the early 2000s, pre-social-media boredom where time moved slowly and everything important happened in the in-between. Inspired by the mundane ritual of waiting for the school bus after a long day of classes, these paintings elevate a moment most of us would’ve called “nothing” into something tender, cinematic, and strangely iconic.
What I love as a gallerist is how Nak folds in the visual language that shaped that era: anime and Asian pop-culture not as decoration, but as a real part of youth identity. The result feels intimate and universal at once—quiet, familiar, and loaded with the small details that tell you exactly who this kid is, and what world they’re growing up in.
Melissa Llamas’ paintings—created in conversation with SAYÀW (Tagalog for “dance”)—move like memory; layered, intuitive, and charged with feeling. She lets color and pressure lead, so forms surface and slip away again, like a body caught mid-motion.
Up close, the work is all rhythm—scraped passages, dense brushwork, and sudden flashes of light that make the surface feel alive. It’s intimate, restless, and deeply human: a kind of dance between presence and disappearance.
Talon (she/her) is a queer Korean transracial, transnational adoption survivor who uses mixed media with found poetry and photography to create analog paper collages. She primarily works with cut-out words and phrases found in a multitude of printed materials. This deliberate visual style pays homage to the adoptees who were kidnapped, our birth families lied to, and then sold to predominantly white Christian countries in the West. Using collage as a form of resistance to disrupt the adoptee narrative, she does not make art only for commercial consumption. She makes art to be the change she wishes to see. At the intersection of identity, lack of ancestry, adoptee sovereignty and abolition, through her practice she invites critical inquiry of white saviorism’s role in transnational, transracial adoption. Therefore, her work is not just a collage; it is a catalyst, an attestation, and the belief in the power of transformation.
Hanako O’Leary’s Japanese-inspired masks carry a charged kind of presence—objects that feel ceremonial, psychological, and intensely alive. Rooted in Noh theater tradition, her work draws from the Hannya mask: the iconic face of a jealous female demon, marked by sharp bull-like horns, metallic eyes, and a leering mouth.
But what makes these pieces so compelling in the gallery is their emotional complexity. The Hannya isn’t just “demonic”—it’s also sorrowful and tormented, a portrait of obsession and jealousy that becomes a mirror for very human feelings. Hanako’s masks hold that tension beautifully: danger and grief, power and vulnerability, all suspended in a single downward gaze.
