What does it mean to inherit a visual language? (Re)Generations, currently on view at the Asia Society Museum in New York City, is less about answering that question than activating it. Through the eyes of three contemporary artists—Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell—the exhibition forms a layered conversation across time, where contemporary and ancient works are brought into mutual resonance.
By Rupi Sood
Spanning objects made between the second and seventeenth centuries and featuring selections from the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection, (Re)Generations is not a typical juxtaposition of old and new. It’s a curatorial proposal: that artistic inheritance is not static, and that contemporary artists—especially those shaped by diasporic experience—can render new meaning from the past without needing to replicate it.
Set across two floors of the Asia Society Museum, (Re)Generations situates each artist’s new and existing work in close visual and thematic proximity to the historic pieces they personally selected. The goal, according to the exhibition statement, is to “render a capacious proposition of diaspora and international exchange today.” Each artist was drawn to different material, formal, or symbolic qualities—color, surface, iconography—and used those qualities as anchors for new forms of storytelling.
Born in Kolkata and raised in London and Queens, Rina Banerjee’s work exists in the interstices of migration, memory, and transformation. Her sculptures draw from South Asian iconography and global commodities—wedding saris, feathers, glass bottles, cowry shells, colonial bric-a-brac—and reassemble them into figures that feel both mythic and materially real.
In Native, migrant naturally (2018), Banerjee constructs a dome-like form from a vintage silk wedding sari, pheasant feathers, copper nails, gourds, and a Victorian doll. It’s not a literal figure, but a spirit—a diasporic being composed of cross-cultural residue. This idea of the “domed body” connects directly to her selection of a Tang dynasty jar (9th century), whose stout, glazed form she likens to “a stomach with an orifice… like madness and emotion.” For Banerjee, the shape itself becomes a metaphor for the body, containment, and transformation.
She also chose a Tang dynasty court lady sculpture (8th century), noting the joyful extravagance of her coiffure and cobalt-blue sancai glaze. “I’m drawn to what’s luxurious and ornamental,” she explains, “because those are often dismissed, especially when they belong to women or to the so-called exotic.”
Banerjee’s figures are similarly excessive—and intentionally so. By pairing them with ceremonial and functional objects from ancient Asia, she reclaims the aesthetic of excess as a site of power and continuity.
“I’m not interested in preserving the past — I’m interested in how it mutates through us.”
Rina Banerjee
Rina Banerjee’s work reflects diasporic transformation, using sari fabric, cowry shells, colonial remnants, and sacred iconography to build layered figures. Banerjee draws direct connections to objects like the Tang dynasty jar and the cobalt-glazed court lady, translating their forms and ornamental excess into vessels of lived and ancestral memory.
Byron Kim, “Synecdoche” (1991-present), Oil and wax
on panel.
Korean-American artist Byron Kim works in abstraction, but his interests are deeply human. Whether he’s painting the subtle hues of a summer sky or the skin tone of a friend, Kim’s practice is about presence—what endures when everything else is stripped away.
For (Re)Generations, Kim created Maebyeong (Asia Society) (2024), painted on-site in response to a Goryeo dynasty celadon bottle (late 11th–early 12th century). The original object, with its translucent blue-green glaze, became the inspiration for Kim’s minimalist color study. “The celadon color stands for a lot,” Kim said. “Its infinite variations… present themselves in the form of a question. It’s unnameable and difficult to locate.”
He also selected a Northern Song dynasty brush washer (11th–12th century) with a black “oil spot” glaze. Kim called the effect “like galaxies… stars collecting on the bowl.” It’s a moment where science, spirit, and aesthetics meet—where surface becomes cosmos.
Kim’s other major work in the show, Synecdoche, is a grid of painted panels, each representing a different skin tone. The project, ongoing since 1991, challenges assumptions about abstraction, individuality, and collectivity. What seems non-representational at first glance becomes deeply referential.
Paired with historic works that also emphasize surface and subtlety, Kim’s abstractions become propositions for historical continuity—not through content, but through touch, hue, and breath.
“What draws me to these objects is their presence. They’re nearly alive.”
Byron Kim
Byron Kim’s color field paintings are shown in visual dialogue with two Goryeo and Song dynasty ceramic pieces. Inspired by celadon glazes and “oil spot” finishes, Kim’s minimalist panels become meditations on spiritual presence, personal memory, and the silent legacy of craft across time.
Howardena Pindell’s decades-spanning career as artist, curator, and educator grounds her work in rigorous material experimentation and personal history. For (Re)Generations, she revisits a series that began after her transformative travels to India and Japan in the 1980s: Autobiography.
In Autobiography: India (Lakshmi) (1984), Pindell places a mass-market postcard of the Hindu goddess Lakshmi at the center, surrounded by painted textures and collaged photographs of Indian cities, temples, and landscapes. The mix of divine iconography and mundane tourism speaks to Pindell’s experience of spatial and cultural dislocation. “The landscape is extraordinarily beautiful,” she said. “That is the side of India we do not hear about.”
This work is placed in conversation with historical objects like a Chola-period sculpture of Krishna dancing on Kaliya (10th–11th century) and a Kamakura-period Japanese bodhisattva. Pindell’s collages—layered, fragmented, and sewn together—mirror the hybrid spirituality and layered histories in these pieces.
In Autobiography: Japan (Kokuzo Bosatsu) (1982), she echoes the mantra-recitation practices of Shingon Buddhism through repeated photo strips. This spiritual structure is reinforced visually and formally—each cut, pasted, and painted element becomes part of a meditative whole.
The result is a deeply personal take on regeneration: one that acknowledges rupture, memory loss, and recovery through material labor.
“My collages are fragments of memory sewn back together. They are a personal geography.”
Howardena Pindell
Howardena Pindell’s richly layered collages are paired with the religious and decorative objects that influenced them. Through collage, repetition, and sacred symbolism, Pindell creates visual maps of belonging and transformation.
The strength of (Re)Generations lies in its curation. These artists aren’t simply responding to old objects—they’re participating in a continuum. And the museum isn’t simply displaying old artifacts—it’s animating them. Each pairing—Banerjee with her domes and goddesses, Kim with his chromatic studies, Pindell with her spiritual collages—serves as a case study in how art across centuries can speak without translation. As viewers, we’re invited not just to observe these dialogues, but to consider how we carry cultural memory—visually, emotionally, physically—into our present moment. Continuity here is not about repetition, but about reactivation. (Re)Generations shows that the past isn’t a static archive—it’s a living source of creative fuel. In the hands of artists, continuity becomes a choice, an act of authorship, and a powerful form of renewal.
(Re)Generations: Rina Banerjee, Byron Kim, and Howardena Pindell amid the Mr. and Mrs. John D. Rockefeller 3rd Collection is on view through August 10, 2025 at Asia Society Museum, New York City.
