Eva Lin Fahey considers the impact of family separation under China’s One Child Policy through the creation of personal mythologies and manifestations of past, present, and future ghosts. Her work is informed by her experience as an adoptee, an artist, and a mother, negotiating the tension between the instability of memory, the slippages of cultural translation, and the ways identity is pieced together from disparate sources. Through layered mark-making and visual storytelling, she constructs spaces where absence and belonging coexist.

Madeleine Conover’s work explores her ideas of the Asian American diaspora, her adoption due to China’s former one-child policy, and the personal ramifications of displacement. She questions the notion of missing someone you cannot remember—tracing this experience through her own history as a Chinese American adoptee. Much of her recent work considers her biological sister—raised in China by their birth parents—whom she discovered in 2014 after more than two decades of separation. The anticipation of their eventual reunion informs her practice, as she contemplates the stories she wants to share, the gaps in language and experience, and the ways their lives have unfolded in parallel yet apart. Spanning across sculpture, painting, drawing, printmaking, and animation, her compositions evoke the complexity of forging connections across time and distance—where absence transforms and expands into a new form of memory.

Through printmaking, drawing, and painting, Both, Neither asks: What does it mean to exist in a space of cultural duality? How do we reconcile the scattered fragments of history, language, and identity into something whole? And what does wholeness look like when belonging is always in flux? This exhibition does not seek to answer these questions outright but instead invites viewers to sit within the contradictions—to embrace the tension between both and neither.

Scattering and collecting—two opposing yet intertwined actions—serve as the foundation of this exhibition, which examines identity, belonging, and cultural inheritance through the lens of transracial adoption. Both, Neither features the work of Chinese American adoptee artists Madeleine Conover and Eva Lin Fahey, considering the fragmented nature of personal and collective histories, the ways identity is assembled from scattered pieces, and the liminal spaces between presence and absence. This exhibition is part of Scattering/Collecting, an ongoing collaboration between Conover and Fahey that extends to include other Asian adoptee artists.

Both artists navigate what Homi Bhabha describes as the “Third Space”—a site where cultural identity is neither singular nor fixed but exists in a state of constant negotiation. Their work does not attempt to resolve cultural displacement but instead lingers in the ambiguities of in-betweenness, exploring identity as something in flux rather than a fixed destination.