November 2, 2026–January 22, 2027
275 W Woodruff Ave
Columbus OH 43210
USA
Yeah, they were All Yellow: Asian Feminist Architectural Possibilities is the latest chapter of a multiyear collective inquiry unfolding through seminars, exhibitions, panels, and publications. It asks what architecture can become when “the Asian,” ”the Feminist,” and “the Architectural” are held not as fixed categories but as three moving anchors, a triangulation opening and holding a generative space.
Contributors position their work on a grid of twelve "nouns-of-profanities" associated with the theme, ordered by an aleatory materialism of encounter. A strut frame, propped from below, hung from above, and braced in the middle, puts a supporting, relational architecture center stage—one that is at once a pedagogical instrument: it activates the development of projects by ARCH5290 students, which in turn activates the exhibition.
This exhibition features and continues the collective inquiry as concretized in the e-flux Architecture special series, “Asian Feminist Architectural Possibilities.”
Roundtable: November 2, 5:30pm
Knowlton Hall, Big Stairs
As part of the opening of the exhibition, Visiting Assistant Professor Ruo Jia will host a roundtable discussion. Panelists include Lilian Chee, Nahyun Hwang, and Samuel Hellmann; Iman Ansari will moderate. A reception will follow.
Ruo Jia is an architect/theorist/historian, founder and director of IfWorks, and a visiting assistant professor at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University. She is the author of Chinese Experimental Architecture Or French Poststructuralist Theory: Different Patches of the Concrete (2026), which extends her ongoing research/practice, envisioning the possibilities of asian feminist architecture and posthumanist sustainability.
Lilian Chee is the Dean's Chair Associate Professor at the National University of Singapore. Author of Architecture and Affect: Precarious Spaces (2023), she uses essay film and architectural ethnography to study domestic labour and everyday care.
Nahyun Hwang is an architect and founding principal of N H D M, whose work explores architecture as manifestations and instruments co-constitutive of its larger socio-political, cultural, and environmental milieu, with a particular interest in the transversal enmeshment across scales, geographies, and populations. She is an adjunct associate professor at Columbia GSAPP.
Samuel Hellmann is a PhD candidate in the East Asian Languages and Cultures Department of Columbia University. His dissertation, International Form / Socialist Content: Revolution and Renewal in the Chinese Built Environment, tracks the architectural profession in China and the Soviet Union, examining how attempts to build the environment of an undefined socialist future led to novel formulations of design labor and social space. His work has appeared in Modern Intellectual History and e-flux and is supported by the Mellon Foundation, the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, and the Weatherhead Institute.
Iman Ansari is an architect and historian. He is co-founder of the design practice AN.ONYMOUS and assistant professor at the Knowlton School, where he chairs undergraduate studies. His work traces a genealogy of microbial modernity, in which regimes of power and knowledge operate through the overlooked and the unseen.
Curator: Ruo Jia
Curatorial and Production Assistants: Ivan You, Kaleb Duarte, Laura Nguyen, and Chloe Lu.
Contributors: Lilian Chee and Lim Kun Yi James, Nahyun Hwang and David Eugin Moon, Samuel Hellmann, Clair Ryu, Chong Gu and Audrey Tseng de Melo Fischer, Malvin Bunata Wibowo, Jennifer Li, Michelle Hauk, Ziyan Jiang, Lara Carolan, Wo-Men Work, Samiha Meem, Shayari de Silva, Nicholas Risteen, Nick Axel, Nikolaus Hirsch, e-flux Architecture, as well as Ruo Jia/IfWorks and students from ARCH5290—Jonathan Barker, Max Brown, Jamison Butz, Ally Dillmann, Brooklyn Hall, Colin Kirchner, MaKya Miller, Ilayda Oguz, Andreas Sakis, Ali Sangay Ruiz, Lizzy Shiplett, and Adam Tenerowicz.
Special thanks: Curtis Roth, Sandhya Kochar, Cole Roskam, Michael Baumberger, Ghida Anouti, Jamie Underwood, Ben Reder, Ryland Wharton, KC Becker, Doug Sershen, Steve Smith, anonymous, Xiaoling Zhang, Kang Jia, Eunice Seng, Pablo Castillo Luna, Xuche Gong, Dan Borelli, Philip Arnold, Amber Bales, Iman Ansari, Sabrina Li, Mitchell Cook, and Scotty Lerdo-Esteban.
