The Essence of Nostalgia in “The Eternal Living Room” Exhibition
In the ever-evolving world of hustle culture and leveling up, remember to pause and feel the warmth from tender moments of the past. Last year, Yao Xiao met with EnVi in her studio space where her art and past memories come to life, and shared her deepest thoughts and writing pieces about nostalgia. This year, Xiao is back to present “The Eternal Living Room”, a group art exhibition she curated in honor of capturing and preserving the artists’ memories tied to their home country as Chinese immigrants. From classic childhood snacks to a curated playlist of nostalgic Chinese songs, Xiao prepared an evening that felt like a trip down memory lane.
“The Eternal Living Room” includes four other Chinese artists — Huilin Gui, Xinmei Liu, Jinghong Chen, and Lu Zhang — and is currently installed at Land to Sea, a charming cafe in Brooklyn. On March 1, the night of the opening reception, the quaint space instantly filled and bustled with laughter, conversation, and connection. EnVi visited the opening and spoke with the artists on what it means to capture nostalgia and the sense of “home.”
Yiao Xiao
In the summer of 2023, Xiao visited her family home after some time away due to the pandemic. She wanted to experiment with cyanotypes and how the medium can capture stills of objects that hold ephemeral memories. Xiao first started with plants, from a handful her mother had surprisingly collected for her. “I think there was one of the few times that my mom and I [communicated] about art, but it was not through words,” Xiao said and emphasized how special the moment was. She moved on to other items like her mother’s pearl necklace and a big spoon her grandfather shaped himself (not pictured).
Xiao knew she wanted to showcase her cyanotype works but realized curating it into a group show would balance out her work with other perspectives. “It was totally new to me,” Xiao said with a grin as she recounted the curation process. Everything started to fall into place — all the artists were on board and Xiao found Land to Sea to be the perfect space for the exhibition.
“I think there’s definitely a place in our memory that is a kind of living room that we remember and these artworks have little bits and pieces of it,” Xiao said. “Land to Sea is also creating a kind of nostalgic Asian American living room,” Xiao continued as she described the room. “There’s like a mahjong table and then there’s also vintage furniture, or in general just kind of like home living room life.” The concepts of both her exhibition and the cafe mesh well together bringing together the shared nostalgia of the artists and visitors of the night.
Through “The Eternal Living Room”, Xiao aims to recreate the sense of safety and belonging that comes from finding community away from home. She hopes for this exhibition to be a healing moment for the artists and for people to feel their emotions and tap into the “living rooms” in their own minds.
Follow Xiao’s Instagram to see her comics and artworks!
Huilin Gui
In the middle of 2022, Huilin Giu’s memories were fleeting before her. The culmination of being far from family during the pandemic made her feel disconnected from everything. In fear of forgetting small yet significant memories, Giu created the Home series, consisting of art pieces made with gouache, colored pencils, and collage material. Through this series, she was able to capture the moments of her childhood. “I just felt this urge to document every memory that surfaced — those small, beautiful, irreplaceable moments that shaped me,” Gui said over a voice message as she was unable to attend the opening.
Giu is an illustrator from Beijing, China and is currently based in New York City. As seen in her three pieces on display for “The Eternal Living Room” exhibition, much of her work reflects her personal memories and experiences which tap into emotion and cultural Chinese traditions.
Each piece is filled with small fragmented details of Gui’s memories — from the walnuts on the coffee table in “Grandma’s House” to the goldfish in a small bowl in “Living Room.” The small details of each scene are intentional with affection for Gui. “My childhood was filled with their love and care, but by the time I truly realized the depth of those relationships, I either didn’t have the courage or no longer had the chance to give that love back,” she said. Her art had become a means of expressing her love for her grandparents. “In the process of creating and revisiting memories, I also feel like I’m forming new ones with them,” she continued.
“I do hope my work creates a spark. A moment that inspires them to start sharing their own stories because every person’s story is unique and valuable,” Gui expressed. Throughout the opening, people fluttering by had commented on the simplistic style yet still found connections to the subtle details. Some related to the exact moments and layouts of the rooms while others connected with the nostalgic feelings of spending time with their grandparents.
For more of Gui’s work, follow her Instagram!
Xinmei Liu
In the small nook of the back room next to the green fluorescent light of Land to Sea’s logo, Xinmei Liu’s two wood-carved block prints are displayed. Liu is a Shanghai native who moved to New York City for art school and the early stages of her career. In 2023 she moved to Indiana, where the slower tempo of life made her feel lonely and homesick.
“There wasn’t a lot of artist community,” Liu said. Resources were also limited in Indiana. Liu used to make Risograph prints, but had a hard time finding a studio to make her prints. She resulted in making wood-carved block prints, a medium where a piece of wood is carved with a design, inked, and pressed onto paper or other materials.
Liu’s prints “Jiaozhou Road” (2023) and “Huangpu River” (2025), included in this exhibition, are part of her series Shanghai Memories which depicts two tragic events. “Jiaozhou Road” portrays an apartment fire that killed at least 58 people in November 2010 while “Huangpu River” captures the discovery of thousands of dead pigs floating in Huangpu River in the spring of 2013.
“In the series, I visualize faint memories of myself in a small corner of the metropolis, witnessing changes in the city through the passage of time,” she wrote in her artist statement. Liu later told EnVi she wanted to create pieces about events she remembers from her hometown, which include major events that people might have forgotten about. Since Liu has moved around often, the meaning of “home” has become complicated for her. Through her art, she feels she is able to return to where she is from.
For more of Liu’s work, follow her Instagram!
Jinghong Chen
An accidental school project turned into Jinghong Chen’s main passion — paper cutting. Chen is a visual artist born in Fuzhou, China who moved to New York City in 2015 for college, and is now based in Rhode Island. Her work mirrors her personal history and cultural motifs that stem from finding remnants of familiarity after assimilation and displacement. Chen first did a paper cutting workshop in second grade and “never touched scissors again,” she joked. Years later in art school, she gravitated towards the medium again and ran with it.
The pieces from her Cut Paper Series started as a daily practice where Chen cuts designs in traditional Chinese lunar calendars, a token of her childhood. The calendar has symbolized a piece of China away from home for Chen. “It’s just like such a meditative practice for me to meditate and kind of just get my head into a peace space but also just a reminder for being Chinese,” Chen said. “This continuous practice is kind of a way for me to find my voice and find my place here in the US as a Chinese person,” she continued.
Chen explores these two worlds — China and the US — through these pieces as she navigates her sense of belonging and “how to situate herself in a shifting landscape of memory, tradition, and place,” she mentioned in her artist statement. Chen hopes through her work, people of not only the Asian diaspora but other immigrants, can relate to the challenge of going to a new environment and the process of getting used to it.
Follow Chen’s Instagram for more of her work!
Lu Zhang
Lu Zhang is a visual artist from Xi’an, China currently based in New York. She works with a variety of mediums, which include ceramics, video, and painting, and blends them together in order to reenact memories and tell stories. Hanging tall and bright in the back room of Land to Sea is Zhang’s oil painting “Who Left the Light on For Me” (2021). It depicts her deceased grandparents’ living room, a place she spent a lot of her childhood in. In 2018, three of Zhang’s grandparents passed away around the same time within the year. Three years after their deaths, Zhang visited her grandparents’ apartment and noticed her parents had maintained the space by cleaning the floors, organizing things, and watering the plants.
“In most Taoism and Buddhism traditions, people [pass] away, but then their spirit will still occasionally come back and visit their old homes. They [my parents] wanted to maintain the room as it used to be, so when they come back, they still think that’s where their home is,” Zhang explained. This place also became complex for Zhang — not only did it transition to somewhere her grandparents’ spirits can come back to, but it also lives in her childhood memories. It’s not a place she can return to as it once was.
Zhang happily recounted her grandparents’ untouched living room — the mahjong table her grandma loved playing on, the plants she loved to grow, childhood tissue paper, and their old leather couch. All remained the same. Zhang noticed something particularly special about the light that came through the window. Along with capturing the space once filled with life, the light became the main mood point she tried to capture in the painting.
“It feels like outside the window, it’s like this vest of unknown spaces and separates the real world and the spiritual world,” Zhang fondly recalled. “Like in some way it was not real light. It was almost like a holy light in my memory when I was seeing that. I really wanted to capture that moment of light.”
Zhang hopes for people to tap into the warm nostalgic feeling of “grandma’s home” when looking at her painting. For more of Zhang’s work, check out her Instagram!
In her artist statement, Xiao sparked the questions: “Is memory eternal? Or is it temporary, like the 15 minutes it took when the object sat on top of the paper?” Which alludes back to her cyanotype process. “The Eternal Living Room” invites you to step into the zone of nostalgia and reflect on what home may look like for you. It elicits thought provoking conversations that make you reminisce on fond times with your childhood memories or families. If you’re in the area, make sure to stop by Land to Sea as the exhibition is up until May 3rd!
Interested in capturing travel memories through zines? Check out our Creative Spotlight with Gabrielle Stephany Tamburian here!
