Housekeeping
Cheng-Lan Foundation is pleased to announce Housekeeping, the second in a two-part collection show. Following Home, A Fire—which explored how the featured practices are intertwined with domestic environments and the architecture of the home—Housekeeping expands the inquiry by bringing together loaned works alongside pieces from the Foundation’s collection. This broader constellation extends the investigation of art-making as rooted in notions of home and belonging for artists across diverse backgrounds and generations.
Running through 28 November at the Foundation’s public exhibition space, Cheng-Lan’s Corner, the exhibition brings together five female-identifying artists who work across multiple mediums, including installation, photography, and sculpture.
The title of the exhibition is suggestive of the intimate, daily work of maintaining, organising, and anchoring a family within societal rules and a physical structure. Similarly, Housekeeping uplifts works by artists whose practices are indelibly inseparable from family and community life.
It opens with works by Ruth Asawa and Olga de Amaral—both pioneering female artists working during the 1960s-80s— whose respective works with looped wire sculpture and woven textile were the result of integrating family life, community engagement, and education into non-hierarchical creative practices. Both artists upended conventional narratives of artmaking by advocating for everyday, craft materials as ‘fine art’, whilst persistently working against gender and hierarchical biases outside the dominant gallery system.
Both artists also made maternal work an indelible part of their practices: Amaral, for example, often cited her love for textile art as stemming from watching her mother weave, whilst Asawa cared for her children alongside developing her distinct visual practice. Amaral and Asawa would also make education a part of their lives, with Amaral founding a university textile program, and Asawa playing an instrumental role in establishing San Francisco’s first public arts high school.
These works are brought into conversation with contemporary practitioners whose works provoke thought into the relationship surrounding the home, inheritance, memory, and art-making—centering these themes as a generative, powerful force for creation. Newly constructed for the occasion of the exhibition is an installation by Shanghai-based artist Xue Ying (b. 1993, Shandong), who draws from her personal contemplations of family dynamics in her practice. The work, entitled The Room is Empty, But Pregnant (2026) integrates unorthodox materials—including found objects, detritus, and natural elements— framing them into oblique references to situations that happen outside the space of the gallery.
Opening hours: Wednesday–Sunday, 12:00–19:00.
Photo: Untitled (S.166, Hanging Two Interlocking Cones with a Center Disc), c. 1952, brass wire.
Artwork © 2026 Ruth Asawa Lanier, Inc., Courtesy David Zwirner