In her paintings, one finds both geomancy and geometry, DNA spirals and Daoist talisman, electromagnetic grids and qi-energy network. For Cheng, knowledge ancient and modern are equivalent tools for creating a grammar and an artistic language showing how humans may speak to the cosmos and communicate with the world at large.

Liu researches immigration case files from the Port of San Francisco, each containing the same fabricated story—women coached with scripted accounts of being born in San Francisco, visiting China, and now coming home. Their ability to enter and stay in the country depended on their invisibility. Here, Liu paints portraits that refuse us the face. Instead, we encounter the backs of women’s heads.

Being raised in the mountains means always seeing the world at an altitude. The expansive becomes intuitive, and the interconnected is reliable. This is examined in John Frank Sabado’s portraits of people who have shaped his sense of communality from childhood. In Leonard Aguinaldo’s works, the figures see themselves as seeing the world change and how they wish to be seen in it.

Lying + Flying is anchored by a group of 1980s-era body prints on large, unstretched canvases, paintings that make the artist’s body both subject and instrument. Villa inked his naked form and pressed it onto fabric: face, hands, limbs, torsos. The gesture is direct, even blunt. A brown body marks space, refusing erasure. Years after his death, Villa still stands in the room.