Ancestral Resonance: A Pop-up Exhibition on View at 445 S First Street, San José, CA
Ancestral Resonance
September 5 - October 11, 2025
A Pop-Up Exhibition on View at
445 S First Street
San José, CA
Morgann Trumbull Projects is proud to announce our newest exhibition, Ancestral Resonance, a pop-up presentation featuring work by Ahn Lee, Charlene Tan, Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩, and Nancy Nguyen. Ancestral Resonance examines ancestry as a site of creative inquiry, where artists trace history through unconventional methods and critical insight. The exhibition will be on view from September 5 to October 11, 2025. An opening reception will be held on Friday, September 5 from 5:00 to 8:00pm. An artist talk and exhibition walkthrough with the artist Ahn Lee will be held on Saturday, September 6 at 3:00pm.
Each of the artists foregrounds their ancestry, their past, and those that preceded them—whether by researched study or spiritual practice, repetition of tradition or reinterpretations—through individual and innovative means of artmaking. While utilizing different media to achieve their aims, they all place historical narratives, spirituality, and belief systems within a contemporary framework, and in so doing, reimagine history in order to create optimistic futures.
Ahn Lee’s ceramics practice combines autobiographical re-making with archival research on the Cantonese diaspora, historiography, and critical race and gender theory, to examine their ancestral connection to this contested site of capitalism and imperialism, focusing on the Bay Area. Though academically trained, the artist creates intuitively, combining critical history with personal narratives to envision a queer Cantonese future. In works such as Rabbit (Second Pillar), 2024 and 白虎 White Tiger, 2024, the artist uses Chinese Astrology, specifically the BaZi, to address their own biography and identity, keenly placing themselves within spiritual histories and lineages. The history of Chinese in America also takes center stage in the artist’s work. In Celestial Bodies, Celestial Beings, ceramic lanterns replace traditional paper or silk with a material that's simultaneously more permanent and fragile, reflecting the paradoxical nature of Cantonese immigrant experiences—both delicate and enduring.
Charlene Tan in her large-scale weavings, intimate prints, and intricate relief works reinterprets traditional Filipino weavings, using contemporary processes, creating mosaic-like compositions that blend regional patterns with modern techniques. Her work bridges past and present, connecting her to ancestral craftsmanship while resisting colonial narratives. Through painstaking research and layered processes, Tan transforms traditional weaving materials into new visual systems that explore cultural memory and envision multiple diasporic futures. In her Researching and Remembering, Salvaged Post-consumer plastic 1, 2020 and other large-scale works, Tan not only recognizes histories, but empowers the present by making the process of creating communal, enlisting the public to actively participate in the intimate and guarded history of weaving.
In two different bodies of work, Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩 addresses ancestral connections and histories revolving around water. In her Bodies of Water series, an installation of 49 seawater developed cyanotype prints, she attempts to capture traces of lives lived in and around specific bodies of water, envisioning the sea as a maternal being ever present in past, present, and future. Continuing to focus on future histories, Chan imagines the relics and remnants of alternative timelines of migration and labor, speculating on a mythologized civilization holding reverence for their aquatic ancestry in her ceramics from the Future Artifacts series. The artist’s work actively engages with past and present to present a divergent lineage of ancestors who are free to write their own destinies as if colonial powers had not invaded and intervened.
Nancy Nguyen's painting practice is guided by spontaneous encounters with animals and events that seem to arrive unbidden. These moments become touchstones, alongside her study of the Buddhist text Śūraṅgama Sūtra. Central to her work is the concept of Tathāgata-garbha—"the womb of the Thus-Come One"—a state of pure potential. Through painting, Nguyen seeks to capture and briefly inhabit these liminal moments of possibility. Through this practice, Nguyen finds a connection with her ancestors and descendants, bringing awareness to the past and futures through the physical act of painting.
Ancestral Resonance will be on view at 445 S First Street, San José, CA 95113 from September 5 to October 11, 2025. The gallery will be open on Fridays and Saturdays from 12:00 to 5:00pm, and by appointment. For inquiries, please email info@morganntrumbull.com or call 650-257-0485.
About the Artists
Ahn Lee is a queer Cantonese artist, self-taught ceramicist, and researcher. Their interdisciplinary ceramics practice is a combined methodology of autobiographical re-making and archival research on the Cantonese diaspora. They studied at UCLA as a Eugene V. Cota Robles Graduate Fellow and received their MFA from UC Berkeley in 2022. They have received multiple fellowships, residencies, and honors, including the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, a Watershed Ceramics Zenobia Fellowship, a Headlands Center for the Arts Graduate Fellowship, a residency at Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and was an SFMOMA SECA Award finalist in 2024. The artist lives and works in Oakland, CA.
Charlene Tan studied History and Theory of Contemporary Art, with a specialization in New Genres, at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Craft and Design and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, both in San Francisco, and at the Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, where she was an artist-in-residence. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). The artist lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Tan's work is presented in collaboration with re.riddle, San Francisco.
Kristiana Chan 莊礼恩is visual artist and educator based in the Bay Area and Santa Cruz, California. Her work examines the material memory of the landscape and the excluded histories of the Asian American diaspora. She has shown at the Asian Art Museum, Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, University of San Francisco, Stelo Arts, SOMArts, Vessel Gallery, Kearny Street Workshop, and the David Brower Center.
Nancy Nguyen is an artist whose work examines paradoxes found in Buddhist texts and aims to dismantle nature into transphenomenal experiences. The act of painting attends to the tension between awareness and the inconceivable, in mutual annihilation. She received her BFA in Pictorial Studies from San Jose State University and has exhibited throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including at Personal Space, Pt. 2, Et al., and Slash. Nguyen lives and works in Berkeley, CA.
