Craig Jun Li
November - December 2025

For the final lower_cavity residency of 2025, Brooklyn-based artist Craig Jun Li will develop and mount a four-person exhibition with works made over the last three decades by artists Joy Episalla, David Nelson (1960-2013), and Carrie Yamaoka, alongside new and recent works by Li. Utilizing various spaces across lower_cavity two buildings, Li's project "Everybody Here Wants You" expands ongoing reflections and resonance among the four artists' oeuvre into a site-responsive overview.

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"CJ" Craig Jun Li (b. 1998, China) is an art worker and artist based in New York. Li’s work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions including Kurtkubin, CDMX; SYSTEMA, Marseille; François Ghebaly, LA & New York; Taon, Ivey-sur-Seine; ROMANCE, Pittsburgh; Chris Andrews, Montréal; RAINRAIN, New York; September Sessions, Stockholm; hatred 2, New York; Prairie, Chicago; and Canal Projects, New York, among others. Li operates a curatorial project “Benny’s Video,” currently hosted in a studio sublet in Bushwick. Li 's upcoming solo exhibition at Chapter NY, New York opens in Spring 2026.

Joy Episalla (b. 1957) lives in New York City and works at the intersection of photography, video, and sculpture. Episalla has exhibited nationally and internationally including solo exhibitions and screenings at Benny’s Video, Brooklyn; MoMA, NYC; Eastman Museum, Rochester; Tibor De Nagy, NYC; Galerie Joseph Tang, Paris; International Center of Photography, NYC; Participant, Inc, NYC; Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago; Debs & Co., NYC; Phoenix Art Museum and Mercer Union, Toronto. Group exhibitions include Participant, Inc, NYC; /(slash), San Francisco; Centre Pompidou, Paris; ICA Philadelphia; Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, NYC; Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard, Paris; Bronx Museum of the Arts; Central for Contemporary Art, Brussels; MoMA PS1; Rose Art Museum, MA; Brooklyn Museum; Artists Space, NYC; Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; White Columns; Buffalo AKG; and The Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

David Nelson (1960-2013) was an interdisciplinary artist who worked across photography, drawing, sculpture, and painting. Rigorous and precise, Nelson engaged process, time, chance, and a finely tuned attention to the natural world. Nelson’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Petersburg Gallery, Debs & Co., and Barbara Gladstone in NYC, at Tracy Williams in Paris, as well as many group exhibitions, which include Artists Space, The Drawing Center, Boston Center for the Arts, and the Academy of Arts and Letters. A posthumous survey exhibition at 80WSE Gallery was curated by Jonathan Berger and Nancy Brooks Brody in 2015, with an accompanying catalogue. More recently Nelson’s works have been exhibited at Parent Company (New York), Benny’s Video (Brooklyn, NY), Ulterior (New York). 

Originally from California, Nelson moved to NYC and began making art in the mid-1970s. By the 1980s, he had a studio on East 14th Street and became friends with the artists Robert Bordo, Nancy Brooks Brody, Joy Episalla, Tony Feher, Zoe Leonard, Angela Muriel, Nicolas Rule, Rafael Sanchez, and Carrie Yamaoka. This peer group’s formative years coincided with the onset of the AIDS crisis, which deepened their camaraderie, with many of them becoming involved with ACT UP (The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1985, Nelson met the artist David Knudsvig, who remained his life partner until Knudsvig’s death from AIDS in 1993. David Nelson’s estate is maintained and operated by Barry Paddock.

Carrie Yamaoka (b. 1957) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work ranges across painting, drawing, photography and sculpture. She is deeply engaged with the topography of surfaces, materiality and process, the tactility of the barely visible and the chain of planned and chance incidents that determine the outcome of the object. The work addresses the viewer at the intersection between records of chemical action/reaction and the desire to apprehend a picture emerging in fleeting and unstable states of transformation.

Yamaoka’s work has been exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), MoMA PS1 (New York), Palais de Tokyo (Paris), Zilkha Gallery/Wesleyan University (Middletown, Connecticut), Centre Pompidou (Paris), Fondation Ricard (Paris), Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington (Seattle), Artists Space (New York), Wexner Center for the Arts (Columbus, Ohio), Participant Inc. (New York), Victoria and Albert Museum (London), Grey Art Museum (New York), and MassMOCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Writing on her work has appeared in the New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Artnews, The New Yorker, Time Out/NY, Hyperallergic, Interview, Ursula, and BOMB. Her work is included in the public collections of the Buffalo AKG, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Pompidou, Dallas Museum of Art, Henry Art Gallery, Sunpride Foundation, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. She is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (2019) and an Anonymous Was A Woman award (2017). A monograph, RE: Carrie Yamaoka, will be published by Radius Books in July 2025. Yamaoka is represented by Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles), Kiang Malingue (Hong Kong/New York) and Ulterior (New York). Yamaoka is a founding member of the queer art collective fierce pussy. She lives and works in New York City.