Doki Doki Tutu’s Delivery at Tutu Gallery

In the exhibition Doki Doki Tutu’s Delivery, artists Yizhi Liu and Amos Kang create microcosmic experiences of immigration and assimilation. Tutu Gallery, a DIY space in Bedstuy named for its resident black cat, makes a fitting environment for curator Shuang Cai’s interventions. Between Liu’s paintings and Kang’s sculptures, aesthetics with Asian roots and with global reach—Manga visuals, for example—nettle and nuance the inherent flattening of the descriptor “Asian American.” Tutu’s domestic space serves the show’s narrative setting. In mounting works like the trophy-trout parody “Bass Super Grand Slam Club” over the living room hearth, Cai lets the show’s implicit themes of stability and comfort—or the lack thereof—come to life. 

Take the entryway pairing: Kang’s farmhouse maquette, “A letter to our daughter- Your mother and I don't yet have the words to describe the hope you give us for the future. -Mark Zuckerberg,” and Liu’s vertical diptych, cryptically titled “ヾ( ́∇`○).” In a fantasy image of home and garden, Kang adorns the home’s surface with an idyllic farmscape and paints the roof in a puffy clouded sky. In “ヾ( ́∇`○),”  the night-blue canvas that hangs above, an Astro Boy-like figure reaches their hand to the painting’s top-left edge: a levitating spirit haunting or leaving the home below.

And that home is indeed haunted. It sits atop a sculpted cross-section of earth where potatoes  grow in two parallel root systems.  Red handwritten names label each spud—two family trees. According to the press release, the work concerns the fictional Cho family: Korean immigrants who found no luck as Idaho potato farmers. The father abandons the family with debt, while the mother has an affair with a married white neighbor.

I find that the included details overshadow the work’s inherent worldbuilding. Does it matter that the toy monsters in “Brachichi, Tricici, Stegaogao, Alamomo, and Anikiki (For mom)” belong to the white neighbors? No matter their origin story, those Pixar cast-offs absolutely nail the reference. On their own, they provide a Western counterpart to the show’s Asian reference points.

The one backstory I did appreciate concerns “Bella Boo,” the foot-and-half-tall cockroach with an anime girl’s head. She hangs close to the ceiling—the presiding centerpiece between the basement room’s windows.  As Cai informed me, this cockroach successfully manifested her wish to become a K-pop star but still retreats to her lonely subterranean life after every performance. In this reverse Kafka tale, aspiration transforms but does not redeem the heroine. 

Next to the fireplace, “Be Our Guest (Blue)” looks like a pack of kawaii playfood, except the concentric circles of smiling treats—Americanized versions of traditional Asian dishes—look like figures dancing in some kind of ceremony or ritual. In Brooklyn, Kang 3D prints these valuable sculptures to look like Happy Meal toys: cheap objects produced, assembled, and painted in factories across the Asian continent. Who is playing with what? What is consuming who? If food and toys are assimilative agents, then in Kang’s hands, there’s a sly reciprocal effect between adopted and homeland cultures. 

Liu takes a more subtle approach in her intimately sized swirling abstractions. Within these mesmerizing compositions, shapes shift between foreground and background in kinetic tension. While she paints with intentional flatness, the sharp-edged colors still bounce right out of the canvas. No brushstrokes, no drippy tricks—just glowing earth and skin tones playing on each other in elliptical motion.

The names of the paintings, challengingly non-verbal, reveal each work’s embedded protagonist. One cannot utter the title,  “┓(∵)┏ ┓(∵)┏,,),” but we can’t help but see the emoji faces. These typed shruggers depict the wall-eyed faces dissociating within the bottom of the painting. In this I-spy game, Liu’s beings occupy an undefined space, neither the work’s subject nor the background.

These works germinate from an intuitive daily painting practice. As Liu orders the chaos of each line and shape, she finds space for a cartoonish face or figure, distorting it to fit within the composition. Perhaps we can read this as the artist's distillation of adjusting to a new country. In her paintings, Liu bears witness to a daily life occupied by a taxing and unfair immigration system. The works show the interior, emotional impact of the process that Kang’s sculptures document.

Cai culminates the show most obviously and effectively in the kitchen. Beneath Liu’s large, nearly serene meal scene “( °Д)( °)( )(°; )(Д° ;)” sits “They say home is where the heart is, but God, I love the English. -Taylor Swift-,”  Kang’s miniature cardboard castle. Using a hand truck as a pedestal and 3D-printed spirits as the populace, the fortress articulates a child’s experience of moving—the excitement, the anxiety, the fun. Liu’s painting, on the other hand, offers a sense of comfort. Here, the well-delineated figures occupy a clear space. They gather around a grassy table like a family settling in for a meal.

This mix of mobility and stillness echoes through the entire show.  It harkens back to the serenities and longing within the wistful blues of the greeting duo, “A letter to our daughter…” and “ヾ( ́∇`○).” Cai situates these opening and closing duets on either side of the archway that divides the living room from the kitchen. It suggests both a narrative arc and a degree of symmetry: that the promise of immigration exists not as a destination but in short-lived moments within a fundamentally dehumanizing system, one which only views people as assets and commodities.


Doki Doki Tutu's Delivery runs at Tutu Gallery from February 14 - April 11, 2025.
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