Center for the Art of East Asia

The Heritage Museum of Asian Art (HMAA) is proud to partner with the Center for the Art of East Asia (CAEA) to launch a new Artist & Scholar DUO Residency, created to explore fresh approaches to cross-disciplinary and cross-generational collaboration. This initiative aims to build meaningful bridges between creative and academic practices while fostering mutual support structures within our Chicagoland community.  

We are delighted to announce that Rika Lin (artist) and Cherry Huang 黄唯涵 (scholar) will serve as our inaugural DUO Residents. They will be in residence from November 15, 2025, through May 31, 2026, coinciding with HMAA’s More Things Japanese exhibition. 

This will be a self-guided residency, with both HMAA and CAEA offering ongoing guidance, structural support, research resources, and collaborative conversations to deepen their inquiry and creative process. 

We look forward to sharing updates as Rika and Cherry begin this exciting exploration at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art. 

About More Things, Japanese

More Things, Japanese is a major exhibition at the Heritage Museum of Asian Art, running from November 2025 to May 2026, that explores the depth and evolving influence of Japanese art and culture—both in Japan and within the Chicago community. The exhibition is presented in two interwoven sides, offering audiences both historical grounding and contemporary resonance.  

One side is an encyclopedic display of traditional Japanese art, featuring rare objects from the 6th–7th centuries through the 18th–19th centuries. These include ceramics, textiles, paintings, prints, and religious artifactsdrawn entirely from Chicago-based private collections. This presentation offers a broad yet intimate view of Japan’s visual and spiritual heritage, revealing the craftsmanship and values that have shaped its cultural identity over centuries.   

The other side unfolds over the course of the exhibition through a rotating series of pop-up exhibitions featuring contemporary Japanese and Japanese American artists living and working in Chicago and beyond. Artists such as Mayumi Lake, Kioto Aoki, and Rika Lin will present work that reflects personal interpretations of heritage, identity, and cultural transmission. These exhibitions are accompanied by a vibrant lineup of workshops, performances, and panel discussions that provide multiple perspectives on how Japanese culture continues to evolve and influence communities far from its geographic origins.  

Together, these two sides offer a multifaceted experience—connecting the past with the present and grounding traditional aesthetics in the lived realities of contemporary creators and culture bearers. They also illuminate the often-overlooked stories of Japanese American communities in post-WWII Chicago, as well as the broader impact of Japanese traditions across racial and cultural lines.  

Through community collaboration, artist-scholar residencies, and inclusive programming, More Things, Japaneseaims to foster deeper understanding of how Japanese art and culture have touched Chicago’s cultural landscape—revealing histories that are layered, interconnected, and very much alive.  

Artist in Residence bio:

Yoshinojo Fujima (aka Rika Lin)  

Yoshinojo Fujima (aka Rika Lin) is an interdisciplinary artist, dancemaker, and Grandmaster in Fujima-style Japanese classical dance and is part of the postwar Japanese American diaspora. Her process and art springs forth from the complete immersion in traditional practice and then ‘sonar pings’ as questions, challenges, and then fireworks into a coalesced impression. She has performed her original works and as part of many collaborations at Links Hall, the Chicago Cultural Center, the Pritzker Pavilion, and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA), where she premiered her full-length work Asobi: Playing within Time in 2018. Her works embody her identity and tradition through performance as well as her teaching practice in Japanese classical dance. In 2021 she received the CDF Digital Dance Grant and the CDF Production Residency for her ongoing virtual reality project “Kurokami E{m}Urge, #ChooseYourReality”, which is also nurtured by her time as a Fellow in Residence at High Concept Labs (HCL) (2021-2022), She was honored to receive the 3Arts award for Dance (2023), and presented an iteration of her ongoing “Beyond the Box” series as a CoMission Fellow at Links Hall(2023); iterations of the project in 2024 and 2025 coalesced as her "Spiral Inwards/Outwards" project, a workshop and performance incorporating breathing, Japanese folk dance, and audience engagement while using improvisation to explore principles of Japanese, Chinese, and Indian Classical dance.

Scholar in Residence bio:

Cherry Huang 黄唯涵 

Cherry Huang is a Chicago-based recent graduate and early-career art historian whose work focuses on premodern East Asian print culture and its connections to the contemporary art. She holds an M.A. in Art History and Curatorial Studies from the University of Chicago, where her thesis, “Making the Site: Woodblock Prints and Eighteenth-Century Suzhou,” explored the spatial, material, and cultural dimensions of eighteenth-century Suzhou woodblock prints. Huang also earned her B.F.A. in Printmaking from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, grounding her research in hands-on studio experience and material understanding. Her professional background includes collections cataloging, digitalization, and fabrication instruction, along with experience in community-oriented arts administration. By drawing from both scholarly and studio-based practices, Huang engages the intersections of materiality, image-making, and visual culture.