This Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) Heritage Month, we’ve selected 6 shows to see by AAPI artists. There are also other art initiatives to pay attention to, such as Art for Change’s monthlong spotlight of prints by Asian American artists. From fashion-inspired, hyperreal paintings to small ceramic sculptures, these shows reveal the breadth of AAPI art across the U.S. today.

Alisan Fine Arts

Through June 21

The trio of Asian American painters featured in Alisan Fine Arts’s new show spans generations and engages with a range of art historical traditions, such as Surrealism, hard-edge abstraction, and Chinese album painting. The eldest of the group, the late Mimi Chen Ting, distilled the organic shapes of the landscape of New Mexico—where she lived part-time in the latter half of her life—into colorful, minimalist contours. The Chinese Canadian artist Yifan Jiang’s more conceptual practice encompasses animation, sculpture, and performance, but it is her paintings of mystical, dreamlike landscapes that take the spotlight here. Kelly Wang’s practice, meanwhile, is grounded in materiality; she uses Chinese ink painting and layers of minerals and ground metals to create diaphanous, monochrome abstractions. Despite their varied approaches, all three artists bring lyricism and fluidity to their work.

—Olivia Horn

Latitude Gallery New York

May 7–June 7

Inspired by a personal encounter with an infinity mirror in a dressing room, Ellie Kayu Ng’s latest works render the city and herself with hyperreal precision. These scenes, on second look, dissolve into dreamlike spaces. Fitting Room Visions (2025), for instance, features a woman wearing a purple dress who is multiplied in mirrors. Hands on hips, she appears like a ballerina on stage—but hidden away in a curtained, behind-the-scenes spot. Elsewhere, city streets and nighttime interiors become settings to explore shifting identity through fashion-inflected imagery. A gauzy patterned scarf encircles a subject’s face in Nighthawk (2024), and chic pointed red shoes strut the street in My Fair Lady (2025). On view now at Latitude Gallery New York, Ng’s “Bloom!” features 11 new paintings that explore identity as something fluid, continually refracted through the act of performance.

Ng, who was born in Hong Kong and now lives in Brooklyn, earned her MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art in 2021. She presented a solo exhibition with VillageOneArt in New York in 2022.

—Maxwell Rabb

Jonathan Carver Moore

Through May 31

In tender, blooming paintings, emerging Chinese artist Yunfei Ren explores global migration and its impact on people over time. The New York–based artist presents billowing color field paintings, reminiscent of tie-dye blotches. He adds fluid ink marks to his canvases in a process intended to capture the natural phenomena seen by migrants on their journeys. In Scorched Into Memory (2025), for instance, moody purples and yellows create an emotional backdrop for flame shapes that echo across the canvas. The work gestures, perhaps, to the warmth of a burning hearth or the danger of a raging wildfire.

“Latitude Unknown” is Ren’s first solo show with San Francisco tastemaking gallery Jonathan Carver Moore. He has previously exhibited at the de Young Museum and Stanford Art Gallery and received his MFA from Stanford University in 2024.

—Josie Thaddeus-Johns

Harper’s

Through June 14

Calvin Kim’s paintings gesture toward thresholds—horizons, sightlines, and moments before a climax. In “Departure Before Arrival” at Harper’s, his luminous paintings pair a hazy style with surreal, symbolic imagery, rendered in soft gradients and glowing colors. In Keeping (2025), a yellow flower is held between two colossal thumbs under a scarlet, cloud-ridden sky—its delicate stem precariously held in place. In The urgency of feeling (in the morning there is meaning) (2025), a translucent paper airplane is caught mid-air, an ephemeral moment turned into an emotional metaphor by the painting’s evocative title. Across his paintings, Kim evokes the ache of departure and the weight of arrival, often folded into one moment.

Born in Los Angeles in 1992, Kim holds an MFA from Columbia University, where he graduated in 2023. This marks his first solo exhibition with Harper’s. His first solo exhibition in New York was mounted by Situations in 2024.

—MR

PLATO Gallery

Through May 11

Anyone who’s spent time in New York will be able to tell that Shuto Okayasu’s paintings draw from real life in the city. His meticulous, realist works feature typical neighborhood sights: bodegas with aisles full of soft drinks (New Dream Land, 2025) and chess games in the park with rapt audiences (Chess at Union Square, 2025). And yet, there is a slightly warped edge to the artist’s works, a sprinkle of magic that reveals the artist’s optimism. Of his works on view now at PLATO Gallery, this is most visible in Love is Okku (2025). The piece references the titular Japanese word “Okku”: originally a Buddhist term, meaning hundreds of eons, it has now come to mean “tedium.” In this painting, the artist portrays himself and his wife amid a bountiful landscape, surrounded by a laptop, speaker stack, and other modern day trappings. Love, he suggests, is both eternal and everyday.

Okayasu apprenticed with two of the best known Japanese contemporary artists: Takashi Murakami and Tomokazu Matsuyama. His works have been exhibited in New York and internationally, including in a group show of Japanese artists at Tang Contemporary Art’s Hong Kong space in 2024.

—J T-J

Rajiv Menon Contemporary

Through May 11