BEFORE THE LOOK OF LAW

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Organized by Simon Leung & Sora Han; on view from Oct. 3–Dec. 13, 2026, in the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, University Art Gallery, Room Gallery, with an opening reception on Sat., Oct. 10, 2-5 p.m.

IRVINE, Calif., Sept. 29, 2026 — The University of California, Irvine’s University Art Galleries is pleased to host Before The Look of Law, featuring artists York Chang, Tarik Garrett, Ashley Hunt, Zoe Leonard, Alberto Lule, Paul McCarthy, Na Mira, Sheila Pinkel, Cameron Rowland, Samar Al Summary, Tiffany Sia, Lincoln Tobier, Kiyan Williams, Kim Zumpfe & Luke Quezada and organized by Sora Han & Simon Leung

Before the Look of Law is a proposition based on several returns. The first is a return to Franz Kafka's parable, Before the Law (1915). There we encounter an image of a man waiting for permission to enter the Law, only to have the door shut on him in the final moments before death. He learns then that the door of Law was constructed not for everyone, as he had assumed, but solely for him. Law is an all-encompassing, isolating and unknowable framework of power to which our sense of the self and the social are tethered. At the same time, Law’s authority does not exist outside its arrangement of how and why it is given and with whom we come to gather before it. 

The second is a return to The Look of Law, an exhibition organized by Simon Leung for the University Art Gallery in 2006. Responding to the "War on Terror" and wars waged by the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan, it charted the interstitial relationship between surveillance, the police, the prison, the military, the border; the erosion of the public sphere; the constant state of war; and the structural collusion between nationalism, corporate capitalism and mass media. From within these confluences, its artworks crystallized direct and residual effects of state power on the psyche.

The third is a return that layers the first two. It focuses on the intersection of Law and the psyche — the look of law — to ask a fundamental question embedded in Kafka’s parable: what does it mean to desire, to stand before, to be subject to, the power of Law? The difficulty of this question is compounded by unspeakably dire circumstances for society’s most vulnerable, including members of our campus. Ours is a time of a technologically accelerated hostile takeover of the collective psyche by a state/corporate/media collusion perpetuating unprecedented destruction of life and land, domestically and abroad.

The works presented in Before the Look of Law span those made in the early 1990’s to newly commissioned pieces. They reassemble the uncanny parts of real life that follow us into the place and time of waiting before the Law. They testify against militarized policing, mass imprisonment, global war-making, and the suppression of gender and sexual freedom. And they operate in double-time and longue durée to place an arrest on “the present.”

Their aesthetic strategies are far-ranging: from parrhesia to parody, speculative para-fiction to granular studies of materiality; from redistributing auras of the indexical to exploring the extra-legality of the readymade. They reflexively focus on the formation and mythification of Law’s capture of life as, among other dynamics, the work of artifice. Each possesses the ability of returning “the look of law” through dilating apertures in its gaze. Each holds urgent and abiding lessons about disobedience, aesthetic, political, and otherwise, at the edge of democracy and fascism.

About the Artists

York Chang is an artist based in Los Angeles who makes conceptually driven work that considers the slippages between memory, language, images, symbols, and belief in our current epistemic crisis. His projects examine how our sense of truth, reality, and identity is shaped by the velocity of fractured narratives, evolving forms of propaganda, the theatrics of conflict, and the staged presentation of credibility. Related to his work as an attorney, Chang's practice often foregrounds the labor of looking through the searching and sorting of images, finding pattern and meaning within the noise of hyper-information.

Tarik Garrett is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Working across sculpture, video, photography, printmaking, and film, his practice is concerned with epistemologies that challenge Western Humanism, ocularcentrism, and the aesthetic conditions through which race, property, memory, and subjecthood are made sensible. His work has been exhibited at University Art Galleries, UC Irvine; Culver Center of the Arts, Riverside; Phase Gallery and Hunter Shaw Fine Arts, Los Angeles; LUMP, Raleigh; and Loyal, Stockholm. Currently, Garrett is a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University.

Ashley Hunt was born in Los Angeles in 1970 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Hunt is an artist, writer who co-directs the Photo and Media Program at CalArts. His practice examines the social, political, and aesthetic structures through which power is organized, with a sustained focus on the U.S. prison system and the movements that challenge it. Working across documentary, video installation, mapping, photography, and collaborative research, Hunt works directly with grassroots organizations such as Critical Resistance, the California Coalition for Women Prisoners, Underground Scholars and Families and Friends of Louisiana’s Incarcerated Children. His work has been exhibited at MoMA and P.S.1, Project Row Houses, the Hammer Museum’s Made in L.A. Biennial, Tate Modern and Documenta 12. 

Zoe Leonard is an artist and poet based in New York City and Marfa, Texas. Balancing rigorous conceptualism with a deeply personal documentary perspective, her practice spans photography, sculpture, and site-specific installation to probe the politics of representation, looking, and display. Her conceptually charged work engages deeply with themes of gender and sexuality, loss and mourning, migration, displacement and the urban landscape, frequently considering how the photographic medium constructs public and private histories. Her work has been showcased globally in milestone exhibitions such as Documenta IX and XII, multiple Whitney Biennials, and solo retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and MoMA.

Alberto Lule lives and works in Los Angeles. Drawing from his own experiences with incarceration, his practice examines mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex in the United States, particularly the California prison system, and its intersections with immigration, the unhoused, drug addiction and mental health. His work considers the structural similarities between correctional institutions and other institutional systems, including higher education, using art as a means to expose and interrogate how these systems operate. Lule is a Ph.D. candidate in the Performance Studies Program at UCLA and continues to advocate for currently and formerly incarcerated people through his art, teaching and activism.

Paul McCarthy lives and works in Los Angeles. He first established a multi-faceted artistic practice, which sought to break the limitations of painting by using unorthodox materials such as bodily fluids and food. He has since become known for visceral, often hauntingly humorous work in a variety of mediums — from performance, photography, film and video, to sculpture, drawing and painting. During the 1990s, he extended his practice into installations and stand-alone sculptural figures, utilizing a range of materials such as fiberglass, silicone, animatronics and inflatable vinyl. Playing on popular illusions and cultural myths, fantasy and reality collide in a delirious yet poignant exploration of the subconscious, in works that simultaneously challenge the viewer’s phenomenological expectations.

Na Mira works at the edges of perception. Recent and forthcoming projects have been presented at Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Midway Contemporary Art, Minneapolis; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; and Kunsthalle Zurich; as well as the Made in L.A. Biennial, SITE Santa Fe International Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Venice Biennale, and Whitney Biennial. An Assistant Professor of Art at the University of California, Irvine, Wendy’s Subway published the first collection of Mira’s writing, The Book of Na, in 2022.

Sheila Pinkel was born in Newport News, Virginia in 1941 and lives and works in Los Angeles. Her four-decade practice spans experimental light studies, socially engaged documentary projects and public art, making visible structures and phenomena that often remain unseen in nature and culture. Her work has been exhibited extensively since the late 1970s and is held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Denver Art Museum; and Musée National d’Art Moderne–Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Cameron Rowland lives and works in Queens, New York. Rowland has had solo exhibitions at Dia Art Foundation, Beacon; Museum MMK für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Galerie Buchholz, Cologne, Germany; Établissement d'en face, Brussels; Artists Space, New York and Essex Street / Maxwell Graham, New York.

Samar Al Summary was born in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia in 1988. Working across video, installation, photography, text, and painting, her practice disorients distinctions between west and east, progress and regress, and belatedness and contemporaneity to examine the historical, economic and material contexts in which power takes shape. Recent presentations include a solo exhibition at ICA LA, the Istanbul Biennial, and DOK Leipzig, where What Goes Up received the Silver Dove Award for Best International Documentary Short.

Tiffany Sia is an artist, filmmaker and writer who lives and works in New York. Her films and writing explore fugitive and exilic cinema, national identity, and the politics of place. She has had solo exhibitions at Artists Space, New York; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University; and Mudam Luxembourg, and her work has been presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Seoul Museum of Art; Hessel Museum of Art; New York Film Festival; and Toronto International Film Festival; amongst others. She is currently at work on a forthcoming book, They Prefer Us When We're Dead, to be published by no place press (MIT).

Lincoln Tobier was born in New York in 1964 and lives in Los Angeles. Working across sculpture, painting, photography, video, sound, radio, installation, public projects and theater, the basis of Tobier’s artwork is a critical reflection on the public sphere; the systemic erosion of forms for open exchange and debate; and the structural and legal encroachment on democratic ethos and institutions. Linking the relationship between aesthetics, ideology and media, Tobier’s work examines the power and effects of contemporary mass communication in both the affirmative sense of its possibilities for cultural production and community building — and also its function as a deleterious means for financial and political gain by way of emotional manipulation. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Biennale di Venezia; MAK Center, Los Angeles; Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; amongst others.

Kiyan Williams works fluidly across sculpture, installation, performance and interventions in public space. Williams traces legacies of dispossession and diasporic subjectivity embedded in the landscape and the built environment. With a sensitivity to the relationship between material and place, and informed by architecture, archaeology and ecology, Williams’ practice attunes us to the histories that hum beneath the surface of the soil. In their elemental works, the earth and weather are both protagonists and collaborators. Williams has been the subject of solo presentations at the Hammer Museum, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, and Art Omi. They were included in the 2024 Whitney Biennial: Even Better Than the Real Thing. Their work has been featured in exhibitions presented by Public Art Fund, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, ICA Boston, the Baltimore Museum of Art, MIT List Visual Arts Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum among numerous others. 

Kim Zumpfe is an interdisciplinary artist and educator who lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited and performed at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Gallery TPW, Toronto; Bangkok Biennial’s MAHA Pavilion; MOCA Geffen; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego; Human Resources Los Angeles; Torrance Art Museum; CSUF Grand Central Art Center; among others. Zumpfe is also co-producer of Voidwave, a radio program featuring experimental sound works by femme, queer, wayward and non-conforming artists. Zumpfe is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at University of Southern California, and a Visiting Associate Professor in MassArt’s Graduate Program.  

Luke Quezada is a media artist and designer from Los Angeles whose practice draws on interaction design, scientific visualization, and emerging technologies. He currently develops interactive scientific visualizations for quantum computing and specializes in large-scale photogrammetric reconstructions. He is an adjunct assistant professor at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. His recent projects include scientific visualizations of semiconductor fabrication methods and interactive and media-based elements for Sacrifice Zones: Los Angeles at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

About the Curators

Sora Han is professor of criminology, law and society, comparative literature, and Law at the UC Irvine. She is the author of Mu, 49 Marks of Abolition (Duke UP 2024), Letters of the Law (Stanford UP 2016), and co-author of the law casebook, Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law, 3rd Edition (Edward Elgar, 2020). Her first book of poetry, to regard a wave, was published by Selva Oscura Press in 2024.

Simon Leung is a project-based artist whose work in various media addresses “the ethical,” broadly defined, as challenge, possibility and limit. They have presented work internationally since the 1980s, including at the Whitney Biennial (1993), Venice Biennale (2003), and Gwangju Biennale (2018). Leung is professor and head of the new genres area in the Department of Art at UC Irvine.

About the UAG: The University Art Galleries are committed to promoting an intergenerational dialogue between 60s/70s neo-avant-garde art and contemporary visual culture. Accordingly, the curatorial mission is to keep an eye on the modernist past while promoting the most innovative aesthetic and political debates of the postmodern present. From this vantage, the projects commissioned provoke intelligent debate on the subject of art in its most expansive poetic definition. What distinguishes the program is its unwavering commitment to publishing scholarly texts in catalogue/book form in order to disseminate research-based information into the community, providing a venue for the promotion of innovative discourse surrounding mixed media production today. The UAG program provides several exhibition platforms for inter-generational and interdisciplinary dialogue. The Major Works of Art Series commissions original projects by canonical artists working today. The Emerging Artist Series features solo projects by a set of younger artists informed by the legacies showcased in the Major Works series. The Critical Aesthetics Program commissions new work by internationally renowned mid-career artists. Augmenting this intergenerational dialogue, UAG also produces larger thematic group exhibitions alternately showcasing historical and contemporary art and film projects. UAG further promotes an active dialogue between UCI residents and the local and international art communities through colloquia, conferences, visiting artist lectures and theme-based films series, all of which are open to the public. As the galleries continue to mature, they stand committed to being an experimental exhibition space different from the current — but largely traditional — art biennial and film festival. For more on UAG, visit uag.arts.uci.edu. 

About the Claire Trevor School of the Arts: The UC Irvine Claire Trevor School of the Arts is where scholarly research and creative activity converge. As the only comprehensive arts school in the University of California system, it includes four departments: art, dance, drama and music. The school offers 15 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and two minors that combine rigorous artistic training with a world-class liberal arts education. Named for Academy Award-winning actress Claire Trevor, the school presents more than 200 public performances, exhibitions and lectures each year. Students and faculty engage in studio practice, performance, academic study and interdisciplinary research, often collaborating across campus and within the community. Recognized nationally for its excellence, access and affordability, the school prepares the next generation of creative leaders who shape culture, drive innovation and make a difference in the world. For more information, visit arts.uci.edu.

About the University of California, Irvine: Founded in 1965, UCI is a member of the prestigious Association of American Universities and is ranked among the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. The campus has produced five Nobel laureates and is known for its academic achievement, premier research, innovation and anteater mascot. Led by Chancellor Howard Gillman, UCI has more than 36,000 students and offers 224 degree programs. It’s located in one of the world’s safest and most economically vibrant communities and is Orange County’s second-largest employer, contributing $7 billion annually to the local economy and $8 billion statewide. For more on UCI, visit uci.edu.

Media access: Radio programs/stations may, for a fee, use an on-campus ISDN line to interview UCI faculty and experts, subject to availability and university approval. For more UCI news, visit news.uci.edu. Additional resources for journalists may be found at communications.uci.edu/for-journalists.