“Working Conditions” is the culminating exhibition of Residency Unlimited’s 2026 NYC-Based Artist-in-Residence (NYCBAR) Program.
Artists: Catherine Chen, Ekene Ijeoma, Rehan Miskci, Jiangshengyu Nova Pan and LuLu Meng (2015 RU Alum)
Curated by Phil Zheng Cai
Opening: Tuesday, April 28, 2026 | 6-8pm
On view: April 28 – May 17, 2026 | Wednesday – Sunday, 1-6pm
Location: Westbeth Gallery, 55 Bethune St, New York, NY 10014 (map)
“Do you plan on being a professional artist for the rest of your life?” has always been a common screening question asked by curators and gallerists. This arrogant request for proof of dedication undermines the hardship of treating art as a profession, especially in a city like New York. More often than not, artists in the City have other jobs and find a balance between their art and non-art practices. To some, their “day jobs” are a soulless exchange for material cost, and to others, these occupations inspire and inform, providing for their art practices in the form of subject matters, methodologies, habits, constraints, or guidelines.
Taking its title from Hans Haacke’s collected writings, “Working Conditions” seeks to dissect the notion of the “artist” into two intertwined identities: the one who makes art, and the one who performs “artist” as a profession. By acknowledging their indivisibility, the project invites five artists who maintain other “day jobs” to reflect on how those experiences inform their practices. Within the negotiable environment of an artist residency, artists navigate a push and pull between their roles as pure creative agents and professional practitioners.
There will be an open working office accessible to everyone to sit down and do some admin work at and during the exhibition. Please feel free to join the on-site manager of the day, and pay some bills, do your taxes (if you are late), brainstorm an idea, or curate your next show. No credit-giving is required. You may book a slot via this link.
Catherine Chen (Product Manager, Connected Banking Growth at J.P. Morgan Chase) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work enacts and embodies the ways in which digital platforms made by corporate structures gamify everyday life. In her studio practice, Chen creates paintings and drawings through a labor-intensive and accumulative process of mark-making as a way to map the immateriality of her fancy wagecuck into a messy physicality. During the residency at RU, Chen expands this logic off the picture plane into a physical sculpture to shift the negotiation from individual accumulation to collective aggregation. Gamification is also staked in the process of making. Chen’s mother does not necessarily believe in her work as art, but agreed to help produce the sculpture once she learned of the artist grant, as the money, which she does believe in, reorients her faith in her daughter as an artist.
Chen frames her works as “brute gamification” – in which one engages with games via total-body involvement rather than simulation. Her work gently nudges the viewers’ perceptions to reveal that those appears to be a free-for-all exploration might in fact be an orchestrated trick: “Though users of the Chase app click through with a sense of absolute agency, I am aware of the physical labor that makes this immaterial journey possible, as well as the fact that there is no agency–every step of their path has been predetermined by me.”
Ekene Ijeoma (Founder, Black Forest | Founder, Poetic Justice at the MIT Media Lab) is a conceptual artist, computational designer, and experimental composer researching social, political, and environmental systems to develop multimedia works that expose inequities and empower communities. As a project-based artist working without a permanent studio space, Ekene constantly navigates the duality between a maker and a professional survivor. He believes that to be of service to society requires building the very infrastructure that sustains that service.
The installation on view, “Tree Hustler,” is both a sculptural critique and a functional, poetic gesture of resilience, acting as an organic continuation of Black Forest—a participatory art and community forestry initiative planting trees for Black lives across all 50 states. “Tree Hustler” was motivated by the Fall 2025 cancellation of a $1.5B urban forestry grant, which forced Ekene’s practice into survival mode. Instead of stopping planting, he hustles to plant more. The Tree Hustler Coat will be exhibited as a suspended, living sculpture where a multi-layered forest thrives from within. Photographs will be on view, documenting the artist performing as a street vendor hustling bare-root tree saplings and exotic floras across NYC sites historically synonymous with street vending and Black commerce.
Rehan Miskci (Photography and Digital Imaging Manager, the Woodman Family Foundation) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her practice weaves together layers of archive, photography, and text to reimagine traces lodged within both individual and collective memory. Working with archival materials provides Miskci with a unique perspective towards the ontology of an archive: not as a fixed repository but as something porous and negotiable. Her installations propose that the physical manipulation of photographic forms—layering, reprinting, reframing—is a way to imagine alternative futures for the histories that have been only partially recorded. Her cultural heritage as an Armenian growing up in Turkey reflects in her works as paying attention to gaps, discrepancies and interruptions in archives.
Inspecting how her practice as an artist is informed by her job as a Photography and Digital Imaging Manager, Miskci zooms in on the archival documentation devices, such as a copy stand anda scanner—both a tool and a site—which she set up for the foundation where she works and later replicated at her own studio. With these devices, she performs surgically on the afterlives of photographs, and highlights the labor required to sustain them. Even though how the machines function remains consistent between her studio and work, the intentions of the surgeries performed differentiate eerily across the two sites, calling for the often omitted differentiation between labor at work and labor when working for one’s self.
Jiangshengyu Nova Pan (Conservation Technician, Baltimore Museum of Art) is a moving image and installation artist who is always in motion. Her works explore the transformations of space, power relations, and social networks faced by a mobile population, often exemplified by the artist’s own nomadism. Instead of seeking clarity, Pan’s worldview centered on blurriness, and it usually starts with texts that are neither ‘facts’ nor ‘fictions.’
As a conservation technician, Pan’s routine includes using a soft, small oil-painting brush to sweep dust from the surfaces of artworks, which the artist perceives as a quiet form of spatial reorganization on the object’s surface, depending on exclusion and withdrawal. The video on view depicts one of her colleagues performing a routine sculpture brush-off. When the museum-grade machinery is turned on, the noise element becomes an invisible warding mechanism for the sculpture, which has momentarily become an active site of construction. The objects’ occupation of a space is contingent upon the withdrawal of others, and so is our access to power. As an artist who is fascinated by the distance between entities, Pan, on this occasion, compresses the “safe viewing distance” of an artwork by the proximity of labor required to maintain it. Other works on view include spatial objects Pan reconstructed from the Baltimore Museum of Art’s discard pile, blowing new life into what was traditionally a lifeless support system for the true masterpieces.
LuLu Meng (Operations Director, Residency Unlimited) works across media to explore the interplay between the individual and the collective in contemporary society. Employing everyday materials, digital components, clothing, drawings, and photographs, they create durational installations that invite interaction and reflection. With “Working Conditions,” their installation invites the viewers to attempt a balance. Inspired by the seesaw, an object that is almost never in balance, the structure seduces with the simplicity of the task, but offers a harsh reality check once movements are attempted.
Working as an integral part of the organizing institution for this residency and exhibition, Meng’s very position both within and overseeing the exhibition is a simulation of a “working condition,” for their role as an artist and as an administrator is ushered into one site. With this unique perspective, in collaboration with the curator, they co-design and co-initiate a working space in the form of an open office that is accessible to the public for everyone to sit down and do some desk work. Thinking about the residency model as a “third space” between artist studios and their final destinations (galleries and museums), this act of relational aesthetics argues for an insertion of utility in “art for art’s sake” when labor is constantly generated and consumed during the process.
Please feel free to sit down, pay some bills, do your taxes (if you are late), brainstorm an idea, or curate your next show. No credit-giving is required.
About the Curator
Phil Zheng Cai is a curator and writer based in New York. He graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a BA in Social Science, and received his MA from Sotheby’s Institute of Art. He has held posts at Mary Boone Gallery, Phillips Auctioneers, and is currently a partner at Eli Klein Gallery. Cai’s research focuses on systematic critique, providing recontextualized commentaries following the traditions of institutional critique, highlighting the non-severability of framework and context.
Cai’s curated exhibitions have received critical acclaim. His curated exhibition “(In)directions: Queerness in Chinese Contemporary Photography” was reviewed by Hyperallergic, Musee Magazine, Asian American Arts Alliance AMP Magazine, and many others. His curated exhibition “Alienation?” was reviewed by the Brooklyn Rail. He has participated in panel discussions and talks at institutions such as the Asia Society Museum New York, the SCAD Museum of Art, Columbia University, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, among others.
Phil Zheng Cai’s writing “Assimilational Antagonism: The third place bites back” accompanies the exhibition, and it is on view in IMPULSE magazine.
Special thanks to curatorial assistant Vu Thien An Nguyen who made this project possible.
Special thanks to Westbeth Gallery for hosting this exhibition.
The 2026 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. In-kind support is provided by Materials for the Arts.
