New York, NY — In July 2025, Accent Sisters presented After Hours, a group exhibition honoring artists who work outside the confines of formal art education and conventional art-world narratives. Curated by Jiaoyang Li, Colleen Galusong, and Aurora Chen, the exhibition showcased a dynamic range of voices and highlighted practices shaped by lived experience, personal labor, and rich emotional landscapes.
After Hours brought together artists including Ashley Deng, Bonnie Zhou, Chang Liu, Eileen Ramos, Eliane Yeung, Five Ghosts, Jimmy Zhao, Siqin Bian, Sharon Yalan Li, and others working across ceramics, painting, photography, video, installation, text, and digital media. Throughout the exhibition, the artists drew from personal histories, cultural heritage, and daily life—whether it was Chang Liu’s ceramics inspired by Chinese ink landscapes, Bonnie Zhou’s calligraphy and neon pieces exploring language through rhythm and flow, or Siqin Bian’s photography capturing memory, light, and fleeting moments.
One of the featured works was Gift Supposed For You, a digital sculpture by New York-based artist Mingna Li. This piece transforms an intimate memory into a reflection on how love evolves, shifts, and begins again.
Li’s work began with a seemingly ordinary moment at a Christmas party, during a white elephant gift exchange. Viewing this gathering as a chance to create, she made a tiny Christmas tree with LEDs on a breadboard. “I knew someone I had a crush on would be at the party,” she recalls. “I secretly hoped he’d get my gift, but he didn’t. The gift went to someone else.” Years later, Li revisited the memory, reconstructing the work digitally and turning it into a sculpture that weaves narrative and form together.
For Li, the breadboard—usually used for prototyping circuits—becomes more than just a technical tool. “I see breadboard and LED as a metaphor for how we keep prototyping love in life,” Li explains. “It’s about how love can evolve, shift, and sometimes begin again.” Just as one tests and reconfigures electronic components in search of a working circuit, Gift Supposed For You suggests that we continually prototype love—trying new connections, learning from each iteration, and accepting that some connections will fade while others spark unexpectedly.
After Hours echoes this spirit. The exhibition shines a light on work created at the edges of daily life, often outside the spotlight of conventional art discourse. Li’s piece fits seamlessly here: an artifact of intimate experience and quiet contemplation, situating the personal within wider rhythms of making, longing, and reflection.
Mingna Li is a new media artist, technologist, and performer whose work spans digital sculpture, performance, and installation. Her practice draws deeply on personal stories and emotional landscapes, creating poetic visuals that explore the subtle threads between people—moments of closeness, coincidence, and longing that reveal the ways lives interconnect. Li has exhibited at prestigious venues such as Mana Contemporary, the Times Art Museum in Chengdu, the Network Music Festival, and NYC Media Lab, and she has been an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and The Center at West Park.
Founded in New York in 2018 by Na Zhong and Jiaoyang Li, Accent Sisters began as a writing community for diaspora writers working in English. It has since blossomed into an academy offering creative writing classes and consultations, a bookstore carrying multilingual literary and art books, a bilingual publishing house dedicated to discovering original and authentic voices, and an art gallery focused on multidisciplinary art.
