Nunu Hung’s Year of Ambition, Intellectual Depth and Unapologetic Openness
In a city like New York, where cultural capital is theoretically abundant, the gallery world can still feel like a closed system, calibrated for insiders already fluent in its coded language. What makes Nunu Fine Art stand out in that crowded ecosystem isn’t just its program, which is rigorous and international in scope, but the warmth with which visitors are received and the seriousness with which their curiosity is treated. There is a generosity to the space and to its founder, Nunu Hung, who operates her gallery less as a transactional environment and more as a place for sustained engagement, where the art of conversation is as important as the art on the walls.
Hung founded the gallery in Taipei in 2014 after seeing how local audiences were often cut off from meaningful engagement with global contemporary art. In particular, it was the lack of exhibitions featuring internationally established artists that motivated her to create a gallery that could connect those audiences and artists to the global art discourse. Her commitment to cultural translation quickly became the gallery’s defining characteristic, as Hung introduced American and European artists to Taiwan while simultaneously helping Taiwanese and Asian artists more broadly achieve widespread recognition.
She expanded into New York almost three years ago, with a 3,000-square-foot space on Broome Street, becoming the first Taiwanese dealer to establish a permanent gallery presence in the city. Today, Hung is candid about her priorities. “Part of why I came to New York to open the gallery is because I wanted to place my artists within the museum system,” she said when I visited the gallery last month to catch up and walk through “Mia Westerlund Roosen: Then and Now” (which closes this weekend). I also wanted to see the tightly curated Project Space presentation showcasing four Taiwanese artists—Chiao-Han Chueh, Guan-Hong Lu, Shida Kuo and En-Man Chang—whose work has recently entered museum collections. “Mia and Rona Pondick, for example, built careers through museums, through the curatorial ideas, and so I’ve spent a lot of time and energy visiting museums, speaking with curators and developing exhibitions that can help position our artists within that institutional context,” she added.
It’s a strategy that requires patience, but also one that tends to pay off, and that long view is evident in the gallery’s roster, which spans generations and continents, from established figures like Petah Coyne, Rona Pondick, Peter Zimmermann and Kees Goudzwaard to emerging and underrecognized artists whose work complicates dominant narratives of contemporary art. The gallery’s 2026 programming reflects Hung’s intellectual ambition. After the Westerlund Roosen show, the New York space will host a three-person exhibition organized in collaboration with Sonnabend and Ubu Gallery that places Hans Bellmer’s psychologically charged photographs alongside Bruce Nauman’s videos and Pondick’s sculptures, tracing a lineage of artists who have used the body as a site of both formal and political inquiry. Subsequent exhibitions will highlight Nancy Bowen’s materially layered investigations of craft and myth, Yu-Wen Wu’s meditations on migration and identity and Madeline Jiménez Santil’s sculptural interventions into systems of cultural meaning and displacement.
Hung is always quick to emphasize that while selling is important, galleries should function not just as commercial spaces but as platforms for experimentation and, more importantly, dialogue between artists and audiences who might otherwise never encounter one another. What follows are insights into how this year’s programming came together and what the gallery is doing to support and amplify artists beyond the shows.
In New York, you created an all-women program for 2026. What prompted that decision, and what conversations do you hope it inspires?
When I opened my first gallery in Taipei in 2014, my inaugural exhibition, “Holy and Profane,” featured six women artists from around the world, each at a very different stage in her career. This show set the tone for what would become a core part of my curatorial identity and my mission at Nunu Fine Art. As a Taiwanese woman working within the global arts landscape, it has always been crucial to me to not only highlight women artists, but also a cross-section of emerging and established voices from diverse cultural backgrounds.
This perspective naturally informed the decision to dedicate our 2026 program to women artists. It’s not a shift in direction so much as an extension of the gallery’s longstanding commitment to showcasing multicultural, intergenerational and diverse artistic viewpoints. The program brings together artists with whom we have already formed deep, ongoing relationships, such as Rona Pondick, whose work we’re excited to recontextualize in a new light, alongside artists we are collaborating with for the first time, such as Mia Westerlund Roosen and Madeline Jiménez Santil.
How did you approach selecting the artists for the 2026 lineup? Are there threads, conceptual, historical or material, that connect their practices across generations and geographies?
This will be Nunu Fine Art’s third year in New York, and we wanted each exhibition to have a strong curatorial focus and concept. Each show demonstrates that the relationship between art and identity is complex. The artists draw on personal histories, lived experiences and broader social and cultural narratives to engage with many rich topics, including the body, migration, identity and decolonization.
For me, the connection between these artists is not grounded in any single conceptual or material similarity. Rather, each artist meaningfully engages with the world around her in a way that is singular and thought-provoking. Their work sparks ideas and conversations that I find invigorating, and given that my primary goal as a gallerist is to foster dialogue, I was compelled to present them within the stimulating intellectual context of New York.
The program spans generations; what does this generational range let you say about women’s contributions to contemporary art?
The generational span indicates that the quality of women’s artwork has not changed. Women artists have made and continue to make challenging, exciting work that stimulates and enriches our cultural conversation. The primary difference, particularly when looking at recent history, is the visibility these artists have been afforded. Women artists are only now being given the exposure necessary to showcase their exceptional work, and I am very excited that Nunu Fine Art has the opportunity to work with these brilliant artists.
The program opens with a solo exhibition of Mia Westerlund Roosen and closes with a show of Madeline Jiménez Santil’s work. What inspired you to bookend next year’s program with those artists in particular?
Though Mia Westerlund Roosen and Madeline Jiménez Santil seem to have distinct concerns, they engage with space in similar ways. They share an interest in exploring how the body navigates and responds to objects. Westerlund Roosen provokes visceral reactions in the viewer by using highly textured materials, manipulating scale and referencing human body parts, either obliquely or directly, through her forms. Meanwhile, Jiménez Santil investigates the relationship between her own body, surrounding space and geometry.
Including Boston-based Taiwanese artist Yu-Wen Wu feels timely, given everything going on in the U.S. right now. What drew you to include Wu in the 2026 program, and how do you see her work conversing with the other artists in the season?
Yu-Wen Wu was born in Taiwan and immigrated to the U.S. at a young age. Wu’s immigrant experience is central to her practice, which, in her words, creates “an intersection of personal narrative and global discourse.” As an immigrant myself, living and working between Taiwan and the U.S., this exhibition feels deeply personal, especially given that our gallery on Broome Street is located just steps from Chinatown. Wu’s work resonates deeply with our local community and gallery visitors, many of whom are Asian or Asian American. Now, more than ever, it is crucial for me to support artists whose experiences are shaped by immigration.
Yu-Wen Wu’s exhibition will also complement our Project Space, a dedicated space on the gallery’s lower level that highlights experimental voices from Asia and the Asian diaspora. I’m honored to share that many of our Asian artists, such as Chiao-Han Chueh, Shida Kuo and En-Man Chang, have recently had their works acquired by major museums, ensuring their work will reach even more diverse audiences.
How does the New York Project Space program there expand or contrast with the main gallery’s 2026 curatorial direction?
I’ve been thrilled by what Project Space has accomplished thus far. We inaugurated the space with an exhibition for the contemporary art collective Alchemyverse, a duo of artists from China, who explored how natural forces have shaped human perceptions of time, materiality and life itself through a multisensory installation that transformed their research into drawings, photographs and an immersive platform at the center of the room. In the first year, we showed artists such as Taiwanese painter Guan-Hong Lu and Mimian Hsu, who was born and raised in Costa Rica.
Most recently, we presented Indigenous Taiwanese artist En-Man Chang’s work, “Mapping Snail,” which is a continuation of her project shown at documenta 15 in Kassel in 2022. Combining video and embroidery, the exhibition explored the impacts of urbanization on Taiwan’s Indigenous communities through the motif of the Giant African Snail, offering a socially and politically resonant reflection on displacement, land sovereignty and cultural resilience.
Building on the momentum of Chang’s show, we plan to feature more artists whose work brings visibility to critical social issues that often go overlooked. With Project Space now past its one-year milestone, we are also looking ahead, with the goal of expanding and diversifying the artists we present, reaching across a wider range of geographies in Asia.
Nunu Fine Art Taipei is reopening with a renovated space—what can you tell us about that?
The Taipei gallery underwent a months-long renovation, and we are thrilled to inaugurate the new space with an exhibition by Manila-based Filipino and Spanish artist Jose John Santos III. I first visited the studio that he and his wife, Pam, shared in 2011, and Pam was one of the artists featured in the inaugural exhibition of my Taipei gallery. It feels truly full circle to now present John’s work in celebration of our new space.
Following Santos, we will host an exhibition by German artist Peter Zimmermann. We presented his first exhibition in Asia in 2015, and I’m honored to mark that anniversary with an exhibition of his new work in our renovated space. The response to his work in Asia has been tremendous. Audiences have deeply connected with his evocative epoxy resin images. As the first gallery in Taipei with a distinctly multicultural outlook, we have been honored to play a defining role in introducing artists from around the world to Asian audiences. Over the past decade, our Taipei space has premiered the first solo shows in the region for Peruvian textile artist Ana Teresa Barboza and Cuban artist duo Ariamna Contino and Alex Hernández Dueñas, among others.
What do you hope audiences understand about the gallery’s identity when they look back on the full arc of the 2026 program in both Taipei and New York City?
At its core, Nunu Fine Art is both a multidisciplinary and multicultural community, an identity reflected in our 2026 programs across both galleries. The program is more than simply a series of individual exhibitions that end once they are deinstalled, and when audiences look back on the full arc of the year, I hope they see a space deeply committed to intergenerational, intersectional and global narratives. I’ve been thinking about how we can continue to support and amplify these artists beyond the exhibition itself, and how we can keep conversations alive by placing artists in dialogue with one another, whether through gallery events or printed publications.
In support of this longstanding commitment to multidisciplinary and cross-cultural storytelling, our gallery publishes a quarterly print publication titled Nupaper. Each issue provides an in-depth introduction to the gallery’s current exhibition, a behind-the-scenes exploration of the artist’s process and supplemental essays by writers and art historians. Looking ahead, we also hope to pursue a more rigorous publication program, building on the innovative biographical catalogue we debuted for Rodney Dickson’s exhibition “PAINTINGS” in 2024. This past year, we also launched a monthly event called Writer’s Stage, which brings writers, artists and other creatives into the gallery to share their literary work and engage in thoughtful discussions with audiences.
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