CAMOC has been preserving and promoting Chinese Americans’ history, culture, and contributions in the Midwest since 2005. We can’t wait to welcome new and familiar faces, so save the date for the following events!
21
June2026
Queerness in Chinese Erotic PaintingsExplore the rich, complex, and often hidden histories of sexuality in Chinese art through this engaging program led by expert and enthusiast Wendy Chuwen Xiao. Centered on the visual language of traditional Chinese erotic painting and its resonances today, the session invites participants to consider how desire, intimacy, and the body have been represented, imagined, and interpreted across time.
About the Lecturer
Wendy Chuwen Xiao is a researcher and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of art history, material culture, and the history of sexuality in early modern China. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in History and Art History in 2022, and her M.A. from Harvard University in Regional Studies—East Asia in 2024.
Her research focuses on how objects generate and mediate fantasies of desire, with particular attention to visual, textual, and sensorial forms that challenge normative understandings of gender performativity and sexual morality. In her M.A. thesis, she examined an eighteenth-century Qing dynasty erotic album, arguing that its idiosyncratic visual language suggests it may have been produced for a female audience, offering new perspectives on viewership and agency in historical erotic art.
Alongside her academic work, Xiao maintains an active artistic practice, creating illustrations and paintings that reflect her engagement with image-making, narrative, and the expressive possibilities of form.
Get Tickets Here
About the Lecturer
Wendy Chuwen Xiao is a researcher and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of art history, material culture, and the history of sexuality in early modern China. She received her B.A. from the University of Chicago in History and Art History in 2022, and her M.A. from Harvard University in Regional Studies—East Asia in 2024.
Her research focuses on how objects generate and mediate fantasies of desire, with particular attention to visual, textual, and sensorial forms that challenge normative understandings of gender performativity and sexual morality. In her M.A. thesis, she examined an eighteenth-century Qing dynasty erotic album, arguing that its idiosyncratic visual language suggests it may have been produced for a female audience, offering new perspectives on viewership and agency in historical erotic art.
Alongside her academic work, Xiao maintains an active artistic practice, creating illustrations and paintings that reflect her engagement with image-making, narrative, and the expressive possibilities of form.
Get Tickets Here
2:00 PM – 4:00 PMThe Heritage Museum of Asian Art
3500 S Morgan St.
Chicago, IL 60609
3500 S Morgan St.
Chicago, IL 60609
20
June2026
Englewood Summer Book FestFree community event hosted by Wood St. Collective. Local authors and book vendors, live performance and literacy showcase, free food & family activities, community resources and giveaways.
CAMOC will have a booth to showcase the CAMOC archives and sell museum merch.
RSVP Here
CAMOC will have a booth to showcase the CAMOC archives and sell museum merch.
RSVP Here
11AM – 4PMWood St Collective Urban Farm
6234 S Wolcott Ave, Chicago, IL 60636
6234 S Wolcott Ave, Chicago, IL 60636
27
June2026
Spotlight Series – Fengzee Yang: Cross Into LimboCAMOC welcomes you into our space to get a first look at our newest exhibition’s opening reception. Enjoy some light refreshments and snacks while you get to know others from your community! Engage in conversation with the artists and learn more about their approach to this newest addition to the museum. While you’re here, make sure to take a look at our other exhibitions currently on display on the other floors.
Fengzee Yang: Cross Into Limbo explores transfiguration as the fundamental condition of the body that hold a suspended identity. She aims to capture the moment when they are neither what they began as nor what they are turning into. All three works hang on the wall, and all three come out of wood carving done by her own hand, which is a long, bodily process. To Fengzee, carving is a nomadic process: subtractive and irreversible. Coming from a nomadic experience, the nomadic process works as a succession of translations, of adaptations to changing conditions. The form emerges from that negotiation, continually becoming something else.
Fengzee’s work explores transfiguration as the fundamental condition of the body. She pushes the body toward the edges of organ, mineral, and myth, suspending it between flesh and symbol, caught, unresolved, between the desire to become other and the cost of doing so.
Fengzee Yang engages with wood, clay, and metal as somatic extensions, interrogating the materiality of the physical form. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited at spaces including The Plan, Slow Dance Space, Tala, ARC Gallery, Artruss, and Cochrane Woods Art Center of the University of Chicago, among others. She has participated in artist residencies at Jingdezhen International Studio, Jingdezhen, China; Oxbow School of Art, MI; Vermont Studio Center, VT; and ACRE Residency, WI.
RSVP Here
Fengzee Yang: Cross Into Limbo explores transfiguration as the fundamental condition of the body that hold a suspended identity. She aims to capture the moment when they are neither what they began as nor what they are turning into. All three works hang on the wall, and all three come out of wood carving done by her own hand, which is a long, bodily process. To Fengzee, carving is a nomadic process: subtractive and irreversible. Coming from a nomadic experience, the nomadic process works as a succession of translations, of adaptations to changing conditions. The form emerges from that negotiation, continually becoming something else.
Fengzee’s work explores transfiguration as the fundamental condition of the body. She pushes the body toward the edges of organ, mineral, and myth, suspending it between flesh and symbol, caught, unresolved, between the desire to become other and the cost of doing so.
Fengzee Yang engages with wood, clay, and metal as somatic extensions, interrogating the materiality of the physical form. She earned her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works have been exhibited at spaces including The Plan, Slow Dance Space, Tala, ARC Gallery, Artruss, and Cochrane Woods Art Center of the University of Chicago, among others. She has participated in artist residencies at Jingdezhen International Studio, Jingdezhen, China; Oxbow School of Art, MI; Vermont Studio Center, VT; and ACRE Residency, WI.
RSVP Here
2:00 PM – 5:00 PMCAMOC FL4
238 W 23rd St
Chicago, Il 60616
238 W 23rd St
Chicago, Il 60616