Group Show: Reject Me Harder

2025/06/10- 2025/07/12

Artists:
Alternative Systems,
Anoushka Bhalla,
Anna Mikaela Ekstrand,
Jiaoyang Li,
Jie Shao,
Justin Sterling,
Sixing Xu,
Siyu Chen,
Sizhu Li,
Wei,
Wendi Men,
Yoshie Sakai,
Yuhan Pan,
Zhenzhen Qi

Curator: 
Chiarina Chen

︎︎︎Catalogue
︎︎︎Curator’s Note


Reject Me Harder is an exhibition on what lingers after rejection and what we make from it. It gathers works shaped by refusal—rejections not only from institutions, grants, and jobs, but also from relationships, families, or self-expectation. Emerging from personal conversations and artistic responses, this show reflects on what is left behind, overlooked, or withheld, and how we continue, anyway. What if rejection wasn’t the end, but a material? A method? A shared language? A kind of laughter? Hence it is not about bitterness
or proof, but about staying close to the unresolved. It’s about making from what hovers on the edge of visibility, and insisting that what’s been overlooked still holds power, meaning, and beauty. The following manifesto encapsulates both a personal declaration and the collective spirit of the show. It begins in “I,” expands into “we,” and returns, like most things, to the quiet persistence of
one.

---

Reject Me Harder: A Manifesto

I’ve felt the silence in the inbox.
The no without explanation.
The door that didn’t open.
The work that was never seen.
But I am not the sum of what didn’t happen.
I reject the rejection.
I trace what lingers—
the residue, the half-formed, the not-yet.
I gather it. I make with it.
Reject me harder.

It won’t define me.
I won’t disappear.
I validate my pace, my process, my instincts.
I don’t wait to be invited.
I begin anyway.
I am not alone.
We found each other in the lens off-frame.
We learned to speak through fragments.
We build from scraps, jokes, voice memos, drafts.
We don’t erase; we rewrite.
We don’t fix; we reframe.
We collect. We create.
This is not about overcoming.
This is about staying with.
We do not seek a tantrum.
We do not seek pity.
We do not seek applause.
We seek resonance.
We seek transformation.
We seek each other.
We are an archive of almosts.
A scatter of things that could have been.
We give form to what felt formless.
We find potential in the partial, the leak, the unresolved.
We’re not waiting to be chosen.
We’re already here.
I am here.
Even when the call never comes.
Even when no one is watching.
Even when I’m not understood.
I will still be here.
Making. Reframing. Laughing.
Living.
Reject me harder.
I already know how to transform.
                        — By Chiarina Chen

---