🐍♦️🐍 1/1 2025 New Year Reception and Concert

Accent sisters x Fou Gallery x The Weirdo Podcast 不合时宜

10 AM——2 PM

Accent Sisters and Fou Gallery, open house ( walk-in welcome)

2 PM——4 PM （registration needed，🎫 rsvp link in the bio )

New Year Panel and Reception with Wang Qing, Na Zhong, Echo He and Jiaoyang Li

4 PM——6 PM New Year Concert (Registration needed, 🎫 rsvp link in the bio)

Chamberlain @chamberlainz +  Gatsa @wearegatsa

In Berlin Childhood, Walter Benjamin writes about a kind of semi-indoor, semi-outdoor urban space named of “interior balcony”, that holds the most intimate and vibrant parts of private memory. Time spent there grows like climbing vines, connecting the private living room and the public squares.

At the close of this year, Accent and Fou Gallery are relocating from Jersey City and Brooklyn to a new spot between Union Square and Fifth Avenue, in the historic Ladies’ Mile district of Manhattan. This new secret gathering place is just like an the interior balcony, a refuge built out of the diverse, transient communities in New York, a space that defies convention. Located on the 7th floor, it welcomes guests who seek it out. Ladies’ Mile, named in the late 19th century for being a safe, welcoming space where women could shop leisurely without a husband’s company, has long been a neighborhood full of department stores, bookstores, fashion boutiques, restaurants, farmers’ markets, and craft fairs. The women in this area—artists, writers, filmmakers—have been creators of beauty and thought leaders. Today, Ladies’ Mile continues this legacy, and on the first day of the Year of the Snake in 2025, Accent, The Weirdo Podcast, and Fou Gallery invite you to join us in bidding farewell to the old year and welcoming the new one. Come read, explore exhibitions, chat, drink tea, and listen to music in this space of art and reflection, as we usher in the new year together.

poster illustration @raven_another

2024年快过去了，如何证明你没白过这一年：

1. 说出2024年你的生活中发生的3件大事

2. 说出你在2024年认识的3个新朋友

3. 说出你在2024年去过的3个新地方

4. 复述你在2024年听过的最好笑的笑话

5. 描述你在2024年印象最深的时刻

……

或者，你也可以在2025年的第一天，来联合广场和重音姐妹、不合时宜播客和否画廊一起辞旧迎新！活动分为上下两个半场，上半场为聊天沙龙，三位主办方将在重音姐妹进行小型对谈，并邀请你一起进行灵魂拷问；下半场是室内音乐会，在音乐人Chamberlain、Gatsa乐队的音乐和Teaesthetic的茶饮的陪伴下，开启新的一年。

时间：1月1日

地点：89 5th Avenue 7F，New York，10003

圆桌沙龙I 王磬x钟娜x何雨x李骄阳：2-4pm，重音姐妹702

室内音乐会I Chamberlain x Gatsa：4-6pm，否画廊701

Thor’s Night, Poetry/Sound/Film night. Featuring new works by Lilan Yang, Jinjin Xu, and Ayesha Raees, this event is a raw exploration of migration, memory, and identity through film, poetry, and sound. Lilan Yang, an experimental filmmaker known for their tactile, 16mm work, will take you through the decay of time and the complexities of migration. Jinjin Xu, poet and artist, brings her sharp, witness-driven poetry to the stage, navigating the space between the personal and the political. Ayesha Raees blends poetry with multimedia, creating hybrid forms that unravel the conventional and disrupt linear narratives. Expect intensity, complexity, and a whole lot of soul. Plus, we’re opening up the mic—so if you’ve got something to say, come through and sign up.

Artist bio:

Growing up in Chongqing, China, Lilan Yang is an artist and experimental filmmaker currently based in Boston. Their practice, rooted in the materiality of 16mm film, delves into the flux of migration, the decay of memory and the intricacies of perception. Their films and installations have been exhibited across the United States, including the RISD Museum, the Brattle Theater, Northwest Film Forum, Foxy Production, Ann Arbor Film Festival and MONO NO AWARE film festival. Yang’s work has been featured in Boston Art Review and Little White Lies, among others. Yang’s innovative approach to filmmaking has earned them the Award for Excellence at Japan's Image Forum Film Festival. They have been an artist-in-residence at Millay Arts, Gallery 263 and I-Park Foundation, and have received grants from Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Interbay Cinema Society, and Interlace Grant Fund. Yang holds an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and has taught at RISD and Parsons School of Design.

JinJin Xu is a poet and artist based in Shanghai and New York. Xu’s work is birthed from a poetics of witness. Xu's work has shown at the 14th Shanghai Biennial, the Harun Farocki Institute, the Immigrant Artist Biennial, and has been recognized by honors from the Poetry Society of American and the Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. Most recently, How Art Museum Shanghai presented her first solo exhibition. Xu's debut poetry collection, There Is Still Singing in the Afterlife, won the Own Voices Chapbook Prize. Xu received her MFA in Poetry from NYU, where she was a Lillian Vernon fellow. In 2023, she was named one of the “100 Most Influential Chinese” by Forbes China.

Ayesha Raees عائشہ رئیس is a poet and artist identifying as a hybrid creating hybrid poetry through hybrid forms. Her interdisciplinary work places poetry at its center and delves into paint, film, sound,  theater, performance, and collaboration with the intention of breaking conventional ideas of linear language, form, and genre to materialize a space of belonging for marginalia and their narratives.Her work strongly revolves around issues of belonging and dislocation, G/god and spirituality, and beauty::cruelty while possessing a strong agency for decolonial, anti-violence, and anti-erasure practices. She edits poetry at the Whiting Award Winning Magazine The Margins and has received endorsements from Asian American Writers Workshop, Kundiman, Brooklyn Poets, UNESCO, Millay Colony For The Arts and elsewhere. Her work has been published extensively, including Poetry Northwest, Pleiades, The Nation, Poets.org and others. Her first book of poems Coining A Wishing Tower won the Broken River Prize and was published by Radix in 2024. She is based in New York City and Lahore, Pakistan (and many other unsettled spaces).

Come get BUTIFL for The Festive Season with XRE and Accent Society!

In a world that challenges the value of each of us, and strips us from community, "You Are BUTIFL" reminds us that YOU MATTER, irrespective of how we all appear...

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THE VISION:
Raise a toast to the end of a year, be sure to drink responsibly and guests are welcome to BYO!

THE ART
“You Are BUTIFL” combines performance art with a state-of-the-art multimedia installation "directed" by OpenAI ChatGPT, representing our (biased, and heavily Western-Colonizer-influenced) collective consciousness. It invites the audience on a journey to explore questions about beauty and ugliness from an interactive and playful point of view.

The core that we want the audience to understand is that the AI is pulling from the collective hive mind from millions of pictures pulled from the internet, your pictures, your pictures. I’m not biased, you are, we are. 

What do we mean?

Well, when humans engage with visual AI, and type in the words "beautiful humans" racist, sexist, ageist, ableist images of young, asian-appearing, females show up. This is because the AI is pulling from the fetishizing wealthy technicians and others who originally input the pulled bias data.

When humans engage with visual AI, and type in the words "ugly humans", the system SHOULD CRASH but instead more biased images come up... of males, over 50, bald, from Arab and African demographics.

IT IS REALLY IMPORTANT THAT AUDIENCES UNDERSTAND that yes enjoy tech and AI but not to pretend that it is not also biased and at times very problematic!

So... Come mess with the AI and get BUTIFL for The Festive Season with XRE and Accent Sisters!