Antonius-Tín Bui: here, there is a different sun

Antonius-Tín Bui

here, there is a different kind of sun

Antonius-Tín Bui here, there is a different kind of sun

Monique Meloche Gallery

January 31 - March 14, 2026

Introduction by Alyssa Brubaker Essay by Kai Ngu

Photographed by Bob.

Designed by Julia Marks

This catalogue was published on the occasion of here, there is a different kind of sun, a solo exhibition at Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.

Introduction

by Alyssa Brubaker

moniquemeloche is pleased to present here, there is a different kind of sun, a solo exhibition by Antonius-Tín Bui. Bui’s poly-disciplinary practice traces a lineage of hand-cut paper, community engagement, and spiritual inquiry rooted in queerness and diaspora to carve space for narratives too often omitted from dominant cultural histories. For their third solo exhibition at the gallery, Bui expands upon their hand-cut paper practice, incorporating cyanotype, air brushing, joss paper, scent, and sound to investigate themes of intimacy, ritual, grief, and transformation.

Upon entering the first gallery, visitors are greeted with a series of collage works on paper embedded with narratives of erotic resonance and sacred attentiveness. Visceral and colorful, these collages employ various techniques including cut paper, photo transfers of vintage and contemporary porn magazines, wax, and evidence of burning. Generated by collaged layers of joss paper (also called spirit money, ghost money, or ancestral paper), Bui’s figures depict the joys, desires, longings, and fantasies of Queer and Trans ancestors. Traditionally held within spiritual practices in China and broader East and Southeast Asia, joss paper is burned as an offering to the spirit world, providing care, resources, and comfort for the deceased in the afterlife. In burning their work, Bui honors the pleasure, satisfaction, and lust of an afterlife, especially for those who were denied access, autonomy, and freedom while on this planet. A small altar features custom incense sticks by multidisciplinary artist Hyungi Park, an olfactive welcome and a participatory invitation for viewers to burn the incense, situating oneself within a space of remembrance and attunement.

The second gallery invites viewers deeper into an ecosystem where human and non-human entities intermingle and evolve. Influenced by the artist’s recent journeys through Southeast Asia, science fiction imaginaries, collaborative exchanges, and personal rituals, Bui’s hand-cut paper works and cyanotypes evoke hybrid spirits, guardians, and beings of transformation. These larger-than-life figures bloom and metamorphose in shades of blue that echo the intimate exposures of the cyanotype process, their textures born from flora and fauna gathered on walks across New Haven, North Adams, Chicago, and beyond. Here, we see Bui’s intensive paper cutting process at its fullest, where delicate strands imitate the deep entanglements of memory and desire, our relationship to time and the land. In a cyclical process, Bui incorporates airbrushing to trace, layer, and echo the contours and negative spaces of each cut paper work, informing each other’s surfaces – a mycelial network of contact and transformation. Humming gently in the background is a mystical soundscape by MIZU, a New York-based cellist, composer, and experimental producer whose work crafts immersive auditory worlds, and who is an ongoing collaborator with Bui. Weaving overlapping plucked, bowed, and reverberant tones, the sonic landscape feels both intimate and otherworldly, akin to walking through a forest.

Taken together, here, there is a different kind of sun posits a vision grounded in care, memory, attunement, and transformation. By centering ritual, pleasure, and the more-than-human, Bui reimagines futures that are not built on extraction or erasure, but on remembrance and our collective vitality across various states of being.

To gaze at another

By Kai Ngu

Antonius-Tín Bui is a little tired of gazing back at humans.

In their first two solo exhibitions in 2021 and 2023, their hand-cut portraits showcased humans, largely alone or in pairs, staring directly at us the viewers. In Bui’s current exhibition, here, there is a different kind of sun, there are still portraits of humans, but no one is interested in looking at us. Instead, they are gazing askance or at each other, melding skin-toskin, or flesh-to-leaf.

Notably absent are the Orientalist porcelain shards that featured prominently in the first two exhibitions. The shards, spiraling apart, was part of how Bui’s work strove to break outside of the all-too-human, racialized Orientalist gaze. In this exhibition, that gaze is absent. Humans are not breaking free from gazes, but surrendering into more-than-human embraces of draping willow leaves or curling vines, mosaics of joss paper offered to ancestral spirits. Binaries are still being blurred, this time between species and beings.

Bui blurs the lines of the human while managing to stay firmly rooted in the shock of its flesh. The first gallery room that one walks into is covered with large collages of bodies in the throes of sex, cut from joss paper and porn magazines found in a local New Haven shop. For some of the artworks, the edges of the art are burnt, emphasizing their ephemerality as paper and their possible eventual destination: as offerings to ancestors, deities, and spirits. In Vietnamese, as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean ancestral traditions, one offers items that ancestors might want or need in their current lives through burning them. To burn something is to transfer it from this material world to their unseen realm. Conventional offerings include paper money, paper cars, paper houses, you name it. Bui’s collages prompt us to wonder: What about our ancestors’ sexual and bodily wants? What about the wants of our Queer and Trans ancestors, those we know and who we do not know? The once-human ancestors moved invisibly around the artwork, revealing their desires through the nibbled burnt edges of the paper collages.

At the end of the gallery room, I come across a small altar with custom incense sticks by a multidisciplinary artist, Hyungi Park. A memory moves through me. I have my own ancestral and spiritual altar, with photos of relatives at the top. When I was living in New Haven, where I first met and befriended Bui, I was living in a tiny studio and kept my altar near my bed. It wasn’t until later that I realized I had inadvertently given my elders a frontal view into my queer/trans sex life. Self-conscious, I thought of turning the photos around, until I concluded: if they want my offerings, then they should know whom they are getting it from. Bui’s work with joss paper, for me, moved between two ends: offering one’s queerness to ancestors, and offering to queer ancestors.

In the second gallery room, I smiled as I watched Bui’s cousins and friends, at least twenty of us came for the opening, play in front of the artwork. Pairs of them embraced each other’s faces in front of paper-cut lovers who, too, are holding each other’s faces. Their paper-hair branches into vines and branches that also hold them snugly. Or is it that the trees are turning into humans? A friend reminds me of the story of Baucis and Philemon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, an old couple whom the gods turn into an intertwining pair of trees when they die as a thank you for their hospitality.

If we, the viewers, are gazed at by anyone, it is by two otherworldly creatures of leaves, vines, and branches, swelling up to greet us. The vines and leaves that were bordering on orderly in prior exhibitions are, in this exhibition, fully alive and their own creatures, commanding our attention. Next to one of them, Bui has gifted the phrase or name:

When the fact of your gaze means nothing, then you are truly alongside.

A few of Bui’s kin lifted and twisted their long hairs to mimic the sprouting leaves coming out of the heads of otherworldly creatures emerging out of paper, oncetrees. These creatures were composed of leaves, flowers, including a few dandelions, and sticks that Bui found along their daily walks in their home neighborhoods (New Haven, now Chicago) and in residency stays in North Adams and upstate New York.

The only portrait of a “single” person is someone who, looking remarkably like Bui, is quadrupled in motion, dancing to the rhythm of the wind, arms moving up and down, while their body mid-waist and below transforms into a mermaid swirl of willow leaves. From a corner streams a rattling, haunting soundscape with voices calling and responding to one another, Beneath the Siren's Gaze, by MIZU, a cellist and electronic producer. A friend of Bui’s, she composed the soundscape just for this exhibit.

Willow trees, it turns out, have two ways of reproducing sexually. After the flowers of the female trees are fertilized via wind or bees by the pollen of the male trees, they produce seeds. But they also reproduce asexually through “cloning.” If a branch or twig snaps off, so long as it roots in the wet ground, it can grow and self-propagate itself into a tree without any need of pollination. A severance of a branch does not have to spell its end. In fact, it can spell its new beginning.

In this light, the four faces are perhaps not a single person in motion, but in self-propagation, cloning and rooting themselves anew. The central face in this artwork is not really looking at the viewer but down at their body-willow, twirled around by stormy winds. The title of this work is an invitation:

Growl out with howling, blue vibrato, and own everything weather has done to you.

To speak an unhuman language of how we are done and undone by the wind, the earth, the fire, the water, the wood, the metal.

May they all be an offering.

Installation Views

Artworks

skin was where you belonged, a who you were with, a reason someone might, 2024 joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, and marker

73 x 49 in 182.9 x 152.4 cm

Reading clouds beyond the road I calculate our distance, survey the space between our clothes where rising curves and mountain tug for air, touch, release., 2026

joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, marker, personal photographs, and handmade paper

44 3/4 x 94 in 113.7 x 238.8 cm

Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat, 2024 joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, and marker 69 x 44 1/4 in 175.3 x 112.4 cm

here, there is a different kind of sun, 2024 joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, and marker

49 1/2 x 58 1/4 in 125.7 x 148 cm

In what little time we have left, let me remember you, let me remember what lay beneath your weather, 2026

hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

62 1/2 x 41 1/2 in 158.8 x 105.4 cm

When the fact of your gaze means nothing, then you are truly alongside, 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush with cyanotype collage 36 x 49 in 218.4 x 124.5 cm

no need for heaven, this is how it started: way out beyond below, the sweet of your lips dipped in promise, 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

63 x 49 1/4 in 160 x 125.1 cm

Growl out with howling, blue vibrato, and own everything weather has done to you., 2026

hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

105 x 44 1/4 in

266.7 x 112.4 cm

Feel the warmth, the heat, the glow, it's ours to know. I want to give it name and say it to you, but I don't know the words., 2026

hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

61 x 49 1/2 in 154.9 x 125.7 cm

Like you, it too was often just storm of not knowing why., 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush with cyanotype collage 86 x 41 in

218.4 x 104.1 cm

Antonius-Tín Bui (they/them) is a polydisciplinary artist and shapeshifter invested in the transformative potential of improvisation, portraiture, craft, and ritual. A monsoon in a past life, they see themself most in movement—in wind, in the shifting blues of the sky, in the quiet sway between presence and disappearance. The child of Paul and Van Bui, two Vietnamese refugees who carved futures from grief and grit, Antonius-Tín carries their legacy in every gesture. Their work honors the spectral, the tender, and the unruly—crafting portals for what cannot be named, only felt, only danced with ancestral shadow.

Bui (b.1992, Bronx, NY) received their BFA from Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD. Bui has had recent solo exhibitions at Various Small Fires, Dallas, TX (2024); moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL (2026; 2023; 2021); Hudson D. Walker Gallery, Provincetown, MA (2020); Laband Art Gallery, LMU, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Lawndale Art Center, Houston, TX (2018). Bui’s work has been presented in group exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Portland State University, OR; The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Saratoga Springs, NY; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, NC; Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, Sacramento, CA; Picker Art Gallery, Colgate University, Hamilton, NY; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, TX; Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, New York, NY; USC Pacific Asia Museum, Pasadena, CA; Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX; Blaffer Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX; among others.

Public collections include the Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC; University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, MI; New York Historical Society, New York, NY; BMO Harris Bank Corporate Art Collection, Chicago, IL; Bank of America Art Program, Newark, DE; JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, New York, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Portland, OR; Eaton Workshop, Washington D.C.; Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts, Little Rock, AR; Wesley Theological Seminary, Washington D.C.; and the Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Lancaster, PA. They are a recipient of The Outwin Boochever Prize (2021) and MICA Alumni Grant (2018). Bui is a fellow of the 2022 Queer|Art|Mentorship program, and has received additional fellowships from MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2025); Golden Foundation, New Berlin, NY (2024); James Castle House, Boise, ID (2022); Kimmel Nelson Center for the Arts, Nebraska City, NE (2022); Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA (2019); Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2024, 2019); The Growlery, San Francisco, CA (2019); and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston, TX (2018). Bui lives and works in Chicago, IL.

Kai Ngu is a writer and PhD student at University of Michigan in Anthropology & History. They have written for publications such as The Revealer, Religion & Politics, The Guardian, Vice, and Asian American Writers Workshop. Hailing from Malaysia, they call NYC home.

Exhibition Checklist

skin was where you belonged, a who you were with, a reason someone might, 2024

joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, and marker

73 x 49 in 185.4 x 124.5 cm

Reading clouds beyond the road I calculate our distance, survey the space between our clothes where rising curves and mountain tug for air, touch, release., 2026

joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, marker, personal photographs, and handmade paper

44 3/4 x 94 in 113.7 x 238.8 cm

Touching you I catch midnight as moon fires set in my throat, 2024

joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, hand-cut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, and marker

69 x 44 1/4 in 175.3 x 112.4 cm

here, there is a different kind of sun, 2024 joss paper (ancestral burning paper), vintage and contemporary porn magazines, gold leaf, handcut paper, candle wax, evidence of burning, and marker

49 1/2 x 58 1/4 in 125.7 x 148 cm

In what little time we have left, let me remember you, let me remember what lay beneath your weather, 2026

hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

62 1/2 x 41 1/2 in 158.8 x 105.4 cm

When the fact of your gaze means nothing, then you are truly alongside, 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush with cyanotype collage

86 x 49 in 218.4 x 124.5 cm

no need for heaven, this is how it started: way out beyond below, the sweet of your lips dipped in promise, 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

63 x 49 1/4 in 160 x 125.1 cm

Growl out with howling, blue vibrato, and own everything weather has done to you., 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

105 x 44 1/4 in 266.7 x 112.4 cm

Feel the warmth, the heat, the glow, it's ours to know. I want to give it name and say it to you, but I don't know the words., 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush

61 x 49 1/2 in 154.9 x 125.7 cm

Like you, it too was often just storm of not knowing why., 2026 hand cut paper and acrylic airbrush with cyanotype collage

86 x 41 in

218.4 x 104.1 cm

Additional credits:

Custom incense by Hyungi Park

Gallery soundtrack, Beneath the Siren's Gaze by MIZU

Monique Meloche Gallery is located at 451 N Paulina Street, Chicago, IL 60622

For additional info, visit moniquemeloche.com or email info@moniquemeloche.com