Thanks to Trusted Advisor and Sam Pugatch of NFP, I co-hosted a studio visit with Greg Ito for a group of business advisors. Over Yama Sushi and sake, we discussed Greg’s upcoming solo show at the Institute of Contemporary Art San Jose and the artist’s creative approach to the art market.

It felt good to get kind of get back in the swing of things with a Yu Kobayashi installation at a client’s home. The perfect spot was on a narrow stair passageway so I couldn’t get a good overall shot, but it makes me happy to know that the client will see this beautiful piece each morning first thing and every night before bed!

Took the whole family to preview the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art (opens in a few weeks)…I skipped the Star Wars portion (blasphemy, I know) and focused on the art. The first thing I saw upon entering the building, after the retro-futuristic tube elevators, was the very famous 1964 Norman Rockwell painting of Ruby Bridges on her first day of school after desegregation, pointedly titled The Problem We All Live With—it was incredibly moving to see. The museum also boasts one of the few Frida Kahlo self-portraits held in publicly accessible collections in the United States. And, there is a whole (fantastic) trove of Ernie Barnes paintings!

Both kids started a new school on Abbott Kinney and I feel like I’ve officially added Venice to my personality, for better or for worse…. Ren and I did a shift at Our Big Kitchen this month, helping to cook food for Food on Foot of which we are regular supporters/volunteers.

Until next time, please stay in touch! IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

I’m really happy with my summer reading so far, thanks to my book club (shoutout Courtney and Chia) and my author extraordinaire friend Maurene Goo. My fave so far is Colored Television by Danzy Senna: irreverent, funny, so smart. It reminded me of the cringy-midlife protagonist of Miranda July’s All Fours, and the racialized meta-fiction of Yellowface by R.F. Kuang and/or American Fiction by Percival Everett…so color me shocked and tickled when I googled her and discovered Percival Everett is her husband!

In between trips I had a couple days to do laundry, unpack, repack; and also do a studio visit with artist/weaver Christy Matson before she ships a brand new body of work to Chicago for her solo show. I had just seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey the night before. Anne Hathaway actually learned to weave from a Marin County–based artist for her role as Penelope, adding authenticity to her portrayal of queen Penelope’s clever cycle of weaving and unraveling.

Working on a few new things for the fall, but excited to share some shots that finally came out from a project completed back in May.

Until next month, please stay in touch! IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

Until next month, please stay in touch! IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

These Yi Gao paintings on mounted rice paper reminded me of the important artist Silke Otto-Knapp and her monochrome watercolor on canvas method, where she both adds watercolor as well as burnishes the canvas and wipes away pigment to reveal areas lighter in color to build up the pictorial surface. I asked the gallerist and they revealed that indeed, Yi Gao did study under Otto-Knapp during her MFA at UCLA.

I’m not sure how I feel about AI generated art, but I did visit Refik Anadol’s studio this month—he opens his museum DATALAND, across the street from the Broad and the Disney Hall, next month (no, I don’t use ChatGPT to help me write but a friend that basically uses ChatGPT as her personal on-call therapist did inform me that the em-dash is a huge tell for AI-generated writing—which makes me sad because I would use an em-dash in every sentence if my editors allowed it). No matter my personal feelings on AI and AI generated art, I did appreciate the chance to be forced to confront the inevitable and to learn more IRL.

Also IRL was my first gala experience, the signing of the final beam on the new addition of the Broad, a visit to MarmolRadziner’s office, an opening at Hauser & Wirth paired with a performance by violinist Amelia Sze, lots of visits to LACMA’s new Geffen Galleries and more.

Until next month, please stay in touch! IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

P.S. My bookclub read Taiwan Travelogue this month, which, a few days before our meeting, was announced as the very first International Booker Prize winner! It’s weirdly often billed as a love story, but really it’s an incredibly layered, super smart metafiction exploring the power dynamics of colonizer and colonized (Japan’s 50-year rule over Taiwan, 1895-1945). We all loved the book and our discussion was so multilayered and engaging… but the best part was that it was a great excuse to serve Taiwanese food like lu rou fan (stewed pork belly rice) and Wintermelon tea during our book club meeting. I’m excited to continue the discussion in July, when I go to Taiwan and see my bestie Fiona, who will have read the book in its original Mandarin version.

Having been in the art world for over 20 years (and a mom of two with soccer and baseball games every weekend), I actually don’t really go to art openings... I remember going to a Fred Eversley opening at Art + Practice back in 2016 that was so crowded I was scared someone would knock over an artwork. And Eversley’s signature resin sculptures looked terrible because they reflected the teeming crowds within the gallery instead of the serene transparency and refraction of light they usually embody. I ended up going back the next week to an empty gallery and was astounded by the beauty I had missed, a beauty that was diminished by hoards of people at the opening. This month was an exception, as I went to the above mentioned LACMA preview, Sea View’s reception with Yu Kobayashi’s new body of work, a preview at Phillips auction house and even a hard hat tour of the future One Beverly Hills.

I loved seeing Yu Kobayashi’s work at Sea View, which I visited multiple times by myself as well as with clients. The artist lives by the sea at the base of Mount Fuji and her whole life exemplifies the creative impulse. It was a pleasure to meet the artist, and an honor to place a work from the show with clients.

Next month I’ll be attending my very first gala (thanks to my buddy Dabito whose New Orleans home is in the May issue of Architectural Digest) and I’m taking it super seriously, even hiring hair and makeup (can you believe I don’t own eyeliner or lipstick and I didn’t even have a makeup artist at my wedding). Stay tuned and stay in touch!

IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

On the art front, I had a fun install with a client who acquired a few things including a gorgeous 1982 painting by Dansaekhwa artist Chung Sang Hwa, whose process-based abstraction appears simple at first glance, but, upon longer looking, rewards with multitudes.

Like many of the Dansaekhwa (Korean Monochrome) artists, Chung Sang Hwa’s highly meditative, repetitive, process-based practice hews to the Buddhist practice of repetition to empty oneself, for humility and non-attachment as well as to reduce suffering. These abstract methods also began as a way to evade political censors under the authoritarian military rule of 1970s South Korea. It was also a wholly Korean form of art, not seen in the West or in Chinese and Japanese art histories. These works are also still relatively undervalued compared to Western counterparts, making them a prudent investment for the longterm.

Another highlight was seeing Roksana Pirouzmand’s astounding show exploring cause and effect, the long shadow of history, and the grip of family ties. With everything going on in the world right now, her show felt incredibly meaningful—a must-see to meet the present moment, for sure.

In between all this there were tons of coffee and lunch meetings and Zooms, including a Mahjong and Mariachi networking event!

Until next month…please keep in touch!

IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

The month was also busy with studio visits, a behind-the-scenes with Mixografia print shop, gallery viewings, lunches and more.

In writing news, I covered the Architectural Digest March Issue (“The LA Issue”) party, celebrating our fair city (so evident as New Yorkers scrambled to make it out of the blizzard to 70-degree and sunny weather in LA!). It was fun but I found it hard to juggle small talk, interview questions, my notebook and pen AND a margarita in hand 😜 (I ended up foregoing the margarita).

Slipped in this monthly newsletter just in time, and on the shortest month no less. Please keep in touch!

IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

A January highlight for me was helping a Palo Alto client acquire Frida Escobedo’s Creek Chair 02 (2023) at FOG fair (named for the typical weather in San Francisco). Mexico-based architect/designer Frida Escobedo is overseeing the new wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art AND the Centre Pompidou renovation! The fluid lines of her chair are partly inspired by Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta’s performance/photograph, Creek (1974). Escobedo’s super sexy seating is in the collection of SFMOMA and the MFA Houston—and now, also in my client’s collection!

Next month is sure to be action-packed as well, with Frieze LA (Feb 26 - Mar 1) on the books. Please keep in touch!

IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

The art year started in February 2025 with a client trip to Mexico City, full of studio and gallery visits, and ended with tons of walkthroughs at Frieze LA. For an in-depth review of Los Angeles’s art scene this year, from the fires to LACMA’s new building, plus gallery closures, biennials and more, checkout my city guide for ArtAsiaPacific’s yearly Almanac: "Los Angeles: Mapping the Aftermath”.

2025 also brought me to New York for art fairs and meetings with clients. Press trips took me to Houston and Savannah, both charming cities that I fell in love with.

Fast forward to this past month, I had a successful Art Basel Miami, helping clients acquire artwork from Art Basel, Untitled, and NADA. I already booked my hotel for next year, while sitting in the confines of my room in South Beach a few weeks ago!

Now, onto 2026! I’m headed to Zonamaco in Mexico City, Frieze LA and NY and beyond… See you all on the other side, and please keep in touch in the new year.

IG: @jenlime - email: jennifersli@gmail.com - phone: 818 395 8623

2026 at a glance:
February 4–8, 2026: Zonamaco, Mexico City
February 26-March 1: Frieze LA, Santa Monica Airport
March 27–29: Art Basel Hong Kong
May 13-17: Frieze NY, The Shed
June 18-21: Art Basel, Basel, Switzerland
October 14-18: Frieze London, Regent’s Park
October 23–25: Art Basel Paris, Grand Palais
December 4–6: Art Basel Miami Beach

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Presenting an elaborate network of sculptures, installations, and photographs across the two-story Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, in materials as varied as rammed earth, hand-blown glass, cast bronze, carved stone, found objects, and even chewing gum, Kelly Akashi’s latest show “Infinite Body” explored equally diverse and ambitious themes, including time, the body, the universe, transformation, and more. Spread across the gallery in various tableaux, the viewer was cycled between the macro and micro, timeliness and timelessness, and the universal and deeply personal.

Two craggy calcite stones anchor the two platforms—both titled Polar Vistas (1993–2023) and (2022–23)—each carved with inset niches, further enshrining a sense of religiosity, spirituality, and ancestry. On one side, the larger rock is impressively hewed (especially as this is the artist’s first foray into stone carving) with a perfect circle in a thinness that allowed a spotlight to shine through, mimicking a fiery sunset. The arrangements juxtapose and merge the human and the transcendent: a partial bronze cast of the artist’s face, replete with wrinkles and moles, topped with a sweeping, regal glass crown of enlarged flower petals; an initial “K” necklace, a sentimental trinket from when the artist was a teenager, dangles over an ethereal pink glass orb of flower petals; and a branch salvaged from Poston Internment Camp, where Akashi’s Japanese American father and grandfather were interned, immortalized in bronze.

Daisy Oracle (2022–23), a life-size bronze cast of the artist’s lower body, sits on a tall rammed-earth platform, its elevation resounding the din of ritual, ceremony, and rarity. The mold had been flung to the ground and purposely shattered before casting, emphasizing a sense of fragmentation and hence its opposite: wholeness. A delicate daisy chain made of glass, complete with knotted green-glass stems, encircles the waist. The artist’s hands are on a nearby platform, the forefingers and thumbs forming the vesica piscis, a symbol of the merging of physical and spiritual worlds.

Emerging from the dimly lit first floor and ascending the stairs to the skylit second floor as if from earth to the heavens, was Cosmic Axis (2022–23), a feat of glass-working involving a filigreed orb topped with delicate pink cherry blossom flowers, whose bright green stems descend down through the glass latticework. The orb sits high atop a cement pedestal upon which it rotates, a miniature but mighty reminder of the very movement we are all a part of at any given moment. In contrast to the cherry blossoms, a symbol of fleeting beauty and a brief moment in time, was a new series of photographs—the medium Akashi originally trained in—made from archival glass plate negatives taken by telescopes. Picturing various nebulae, the images picture the formation and dissolution of stars and entire cosmological landscapes. Together, the sculpture and the photographs are a powerful consideration of time: a star takes millions of years to form and die; cherry trees blossom for just 14 days.

Elsewhere, a dozen large Venetian glass petals, each titled Seismogram (2023), interspersed throughout the exhibition, acted as breadcrumbs in a forest, situating the viewer back to the material, physical reality of the show after more spiritual moments. Curdled chunks of chewing gum, embedded with Akashi’s own teeth marks and saliva, serve as a stark reminder of the physical, human function of breath involved in glassblowing—a practice which, involving flames, fire, and a seemingly mystical transformation of liquid to solid, can feel otherworldly and alchemical. Found best-friend necklaces draped over the glass petals nod to the fragmentation, connection, and other changes that occur in human relationships throughout our lifetime.

A longtime follower of the artist’s work, I noticed an observable development in Akashi’s sheer prowess with her chosen materials, especially in difficult mediums with longstanding traditions such as glass-blowing and stone carving. Akashi masterfully wove myriad material and conceptual elements together to create a cogent worldview, like an omniscient, enduring narrator, bringing to mind the adage that while beauty perishes in life, it is immortal in art

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