Cecile Chong: Blue and White Tides

Cecile Chong, Call of the Sea, 2025.

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Cecile Chong: Blue and White Tides

Exhibition Dates: October 4-November 2, 2025

Open Studios and Artist Walkthrough: Saturday, October 18, 2025 at 2:30pm

Exhibition Closing and Artist Walkthrough: Saturday, November 1, 3pm

Exhibition on view: Saturdays and Sundays at 11am-5pm

 

KODA in New York proudly presents a solo exhibition featuring multimedia artist Cecile Chong. The exhibition, titled Blue and White Tides, will be part of Chong's three-month residency at KODA House centered around the theme of Peace-Building. The exhibition, displaying a variety of different works using different media, focuses on layers. The layers within Chong’s artwork, its culturally and symbolically significant materials, proximity to water, and overlapping histories provide inspiration for these pieces. 

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Working across painting, sculpture, fiber works,  installation, and video, Chong weaves together personal and global histories through the recurring motif of blue-and-white ceramics. Chong's insightful and refreshing perspectives on the spread of Chinese-originating blue and white ware explore how blue-and-white ware ceramics have accompanied humanity for centuries and reflect a global and enduring aesthetic obsession. She considers their universal resonance: blue and white glazes bonding to clay as a metaphor for ocean and sky meeting the land, tied together with the architectural and symbolic history of the KODA House, will provide a transformational experience for its viewers. Immersed in the rhythms of tide and storm, she revisits the emotional force of J.M.W. Turner’s seascapes, imagining the various hidden histories and cultural fragments that lie beneath the surface. Through this lens, Chong's exhibition becomes a quiet act of peace-building, inviting reflection on shared cultural symbols, ecological interconnectedness, and highlighting the lasting effects of cultural diffusion, cultural exclusion, the acquisition and implementation of cultural items into other cultures, and the possibility of healing across time and place. On the second-floor gallery is Chong’s collaborative project Broken China, created with interdisciplinary artist and writer Tao Leigh Goffe. The duo explores fragmentation, resilience, and shattering myths of purity, while disrupting orientalist narratives and stereotypes.

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Within the parameters of this exhibition, the KODA House and its architecture contribute pivotal historical layers: a military outpost during rising anti-immigrant sentiment, tainted by the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) as well as the Immigration Act of 1917. Simultaneously, Americans were bewitched by Chinese blue-and-white ceramics, popularizing “China hunting” and the American antique craze, conveniently fetishizing objects while excluding their creators.

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Blue-and-white ware originated in China starting in the 9th century, when ceramicists combined their skillful technical mastery with imported cobalt originating from Persia. The tradition of this new technique spread widely and rapidly across Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, inspiring Iznik ceramics in Turkey, Delftware in the Netherlands, Meissen porcelain in Germany, Wedgwood in England, Talavera Poblana in Mexico, and many more adoptions and variations. By layering volcanic ash from Ecuador with Chinese ceramic traditions, the project sheds light on the heavily impactful transoceanic connections that were cast by the Silk Road and Manila Galleon.

Blue and White Tides will transform a former military home into a site of reconciliation, where fragments of history become vessels for resilience and connection; healing the dark historical and culturally exploitative past that still affects many today. Taking the paradox of peace-building to acknowledge countless histories of exclusion while reimagining material culture as a site of belonging.

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Artist Bio

Cecile Chong is a New York–based multidisciplinary artist whose research-informed practice investigates how materials, objects, languages, and living forms carry histories of movement, ecological knowledge, and cultural exchange across generations and geographies. Born in Ecuador to Chinese parents and raised in Quito and Macau, her work draws on lived experiences across the Americas and Asia.

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Her public art installations include Held & Holding for Queens Botanical Garden (2026), Chicken Little: Líneas de Falla / Fault Lines for WhiteBox at 42nd Street/MTA (2026), Chicken Little: Lost in Transmission for Art in Buildings, 125 Maiden Lane (2024), Prickly Issues at MakerPark (2024), and EL DORADO – The New Forty Niners, presented across the five boroughs of New York City (2017–2022). Chong is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant and has received fellowships, residencies, and grants from organizations including the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA), the Puffin Foundation, Art Omi, Marble House Project, Surf Point Foundation, Dieu Donné Workspace, the Joan Mitchell Center, and KODA.

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Her solo exhibitions include Q Galería at Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Kates-Ferri Projects, Smack Mellon, Sugar Hill Children's Museum, and Kenise Barnes Fine Art. She has also exhibited at El Museo del Barrio, the Nevada Museum of Art, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, CUE Art Foundation, and Wave Hill. Her work is held in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, El Museo del Barrio, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Chinese in America, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Long Island Museum, and other public and private collections in the United States, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. Reviews of her work have appeared in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Whitehot Magazine, Artnet, and The New York Times. Chong received an MFA from Parsons School of Design, an MA in Education from Hunter College, and a BA in Studio Art from Queens College. She is a member of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts Studio Program in New York.