Asian cultures have rich spiritual traditions in which ancestors are a vivid presence in the day-to-day lives of their descendants. Knowledge and beliefs are learned through experience, but also inherited through storytelling, intuition, and even the subconscious or psychic. Unlike the Western concept of history as fixed in time, in Eastern cultures, the past inhabits the present.
Spirit House, currently on view at the Henry Art Gallery is a sprawling exhibition of nearly 50 works by 34 artists who trace their roots to 13 Asian countries. Over half the artists were born in Asia, but only three still live there full time. Most were educated in the West and live in North America. Their work is contemporary in style and covers a wide range of media: painting, sculpture, ceramics, glass, textiles, photography, video and installation.
Most of the artworks are representational rather than abstract: images of people, places, and objects. But the artists maintain strong psychological ties to the places that they and their families came from. They cannot or will not leave the past behind. Their work embodies that sense of connection, spanning time and distance and connecting generations.
The show is organized around five themes, conceptual portals through which these connections are made. “Spirit Houses” can be as tangible as the dollhouse made by Korakrit Arunanondchai’s mother, which the artist has scorched and reinhabited with spirit figures. Or as conceptual as the shadow of a doorknob reconstructed in translucent fabric, from a house where Do Ho Suh once lived. Greg Ito’s The Weight of Your Shadow (2023) recreates the barracks where his Japanese American grandparents were incarcerated during World War II, in shiny brightly-colored metal and plastic. Filled with lush plant life and family heirlooms, it embodies both memories and hopes for healing.
Shrines or altars are fixtures in many Asian homes; sites of rituals such as offerings, prayers, and incense-burning. They embody family relationships and diasporic culture with their daily presence. They can be as simple as the window of photographer Reagan Louie’s aunt’s single-room apartment, its sill crowded with fruit offerings, surrounded by paper banners wishing for prosperity, long life, and compassion. In her large-scale oil painting, Shrine (2021-22) Nina Molloy depicts her mother, grandfather and great-grandfather together in a room. Unlike the formal portraits found in household shrines, they are blurred, their limbs truncated, like ghosts materializing in the present. Ceramicists Stephanie Shih and Cathy Lu create reliquaries or votives riffing on the fruits found as offerings and symbols in household shrines.
The curators of Spirit House define “Hauntings” as historical forces and events whose effects are still felt in the present. History is not frozen in the past but continues to influence the lives of generations that did not experience it directly. This is particularly true of traumatic events such as war and mass oppression. Binh Danh and Dinh Q. Le reproduce photographs of prisoners executed during the Cambodian Genocide. Danh frames their faces with leaves, using a plant-based printing process to metaphorically bring them to life in the present. Le interweaves a victim’s face with a mural from the Reamker, a Cambodian allegorical poem about the battle between good and evil. Sculptor Tuan Andrew Nguyen crafts the brass from artillery shells and unexploded bombs recovered from Vietnam into instruments of peace: a singing bowl whose musical tone possesses healing qualities, and the arms of a bodhisattva posed in a gesture of protection and reassurance.
“Ghosts” are not just specters of the dead, returned to haunt the living. They can be family secrets or people known to their descendants only through photographs and stories. Kelly Akashi’s family members were incarcerated at the camp in Poston, Arizona during World II. Eighty years later, she went to Poston to search for evidence of their ordeal. Bronze and glass casts of Akashi’s own hands hold the stones and branches she found, and jewelry inherited from her grandmother. Lien Truong’s grandmother died before she was born. She pictures her as The Crone (2022), both old and young, able to defy time and space.
“Dimensions” are the alternate realities imagined by artists, where contradictions between the past and the present may be reconciled. Pao Houa Her uses the simple device of studio portrait photography to place her Lao elders in the idealized landscape of the Laos they longingly recall. Heesoo Kwon uses digital technology and artificial intelligence to superimpose her imagined feminist utopia, Leymusoom and her avatar, Yellow Heesoo on photographs and videos from her childhood.
Promotional materials about this show describe “work that challenges the boundary between life and death” but it is more about memory, both personal and collective: how stories, values and beliefs are passed down through families and shared across diasporas.
Spirit House is at the Henry Art Gallery at the University of Washington through January 11, 2026. The exhibition and accompanying catalog originated at the Cantor Arts Center, Stanford University. An opening celebration of the Henry’s fall exhibitions will be held on Friday October 3 from 6 – 9 p.m.
