Chiao-Han Chueh: On Shifting Ground

On Shifting Ground August 12–23, 2026 Atrium Gallery -18th Street Arts Center Closing Reception: Sunday, August 23rd from 3:00–6:00 PM On Shifting Ground brings together paintings by Chiao-Han Chueh, created during her three-month residency in Los Angeles, alongside works from Luciana Abait’s Iceberg Series. When the two artists met, their works appeared far apart in medium, process, and visual language. Yet through ongoing conversations, they began to recognize an unexpected affinity in the way both transform space through color. Through layers of paint, pigment, drawing, and repeated interventions, each artist reshapes the spaces embedded within existing images. As colors accumulate and spatial relationships continually shift, the works reflect on how creating across places reshapes perception and transforms artistic practice. Chueh’s paintings slowly took shape during her residency. They reflect on relocation, time, and the traces left by lived experience, exploring how memory and trauma become inscribed in the body. Brushstrokes and layers accumulated, following the rhythm of daily life in the studio. Abait’s Iceberg Series combines photography, archival imagery, and digital collage to construct imagined landscapes. Working directly over the photographic surface with pencil and pastel, she softens the documentary quality of the image while reflecting on migration, displacement, isolation, and the search for home. Artist Bio Chiao-Han Chueh is a Taiwanese contemporary painter based in Germany whose practice explores trauma and survival, where the body becomes a site shaped by illness, instinct, and desires suppressed within patriarchal structures. Following her experience of thyroid cancer and surgery, she draws from medical imagery and anatomical references, approaching painting as a form of embodied research that reconfigures the boundaries and perception of the body. Her current project investigates the interaction between medical imaging systems—such as X-rays, anatomical diagrams, and spectral visualization—and color as a visual language, developing a painterly grammar that reflects on the mediated perception of the body. Situated within the context of Los Angeles, she extends this research into its intersecting medical, technological, and cultural infrastructures. Chiao-Han Chueh’s residency is generously made possible through a partnership between the 18th Street Arts Center and Taiwan Academy. Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Luciana Abait is currently based in Los Angeles, where she is a resident artist of 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica. Her multimedia works deal with climate change and environmental fragility, and their impacts on immigration. Abait uses images of nature, such as mountains, icebergs and oceans, along with flight plans, maps and human-made structures, to act as metaphors for her personal experience in her photo-based works.