Graduate Students

Personal Statement: My name is Hongwei Cao. I am a young artist from China. I graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts. My work focuses on the symbiotic relationship between human machine and nature. The techniques and materials I am good at working with are materials such as 3D printing, glass firing, and metal.

“The existence of space is not only composed of physical factors, but also constructed by the perception of our body. Its presentation is often between objective truth and personal history.”

Xingyu Huang graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a bachelor's degree in Interior Architecture Adaptive Reuse. She works and lives in Shanghai and Chicago, currently studying fine art sculpture at SAIC.

With a background in space design, Huang Xingyu is sensitive to the relationship between social phenomena and personal emotions. Her works control the spatial structure and atmosphere, and narrate subjective events from a calm and detached perspective, suppressing subtle emotional changes under the plain appearance, forming a strange tension. Xingyu explores personal consciousness, intimacy, and memory expression through media such as sculpture, installation, photography, and moving image.

Ethan Chan (he/him) is an artist working in sculpture, installation, and performance art. Using off-kilter materials including Happy Meal toys, bubble gum, and sauce packets, his work examines a love for all things kitsch, cookie-cutter, and plastic; the place these objects hold in American culture, and how their history and usage can affect the ways in which we perceive them, highlighting the absurdity of the objects and concepts that shape our society.

Exploring the lifespan of ideas; including the topic about the impact of high speeds, particularly through commercial consumption on our psyche. The work oscillates between industrialism, vandalism and land art.

AT Huth works with objects and environments that have become obsolete through transformation. In doing so, he encourages reflection on economic, social and environmental impacts, as well as personal issues.

His practice aims to integrate diverse backgrounds in art and technology.

Corey Hagelberg (he/him) (born Gary, Indiana, 1983) is an interdisciplinary artist and teacher. He is co-founder and director of the Calumet Artist Residency (CAR), which aims to connect people, art, and nature.

For the last 15 years, his work in woodcut printmaking and social practice has highlighted the relationship between the human and natural world. His work in recent years has increasingly addressed issues of food justice, community growing spaces, and permaculture as it relates to creating regenerative local economies and a livable planet. He lives and works in Gary, Indiana.

Personal Statement: My work centers itself on the interest of safety and its relationship to fear and their function as tools of influence. Through sculpture and sculptural installations, I look to objects and narratives fetishized as tools of influence within the scope of Americana. I continue to investigate this relationship by using altered found objects and installation environments that bind themselves between these positions.

Specifically looking at symbols from fire extinguishers to firearms, I alter their forms and functions through fabrication, programmed electronics, and engineered mechanisms. The works created are influenced directly by the exhibition of fear, military posturing, and reactionism presented throughout American discourse. 

Oneg Lim (Won Ji Lim) (she/her) (b. 1999, South Korea) is a visual artist based in Chicago, where she is currently pursuing her MFA in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She earned her BFA in Ceramics and Glass from Hongik University in Seoul, South Korea.

Oneg’s practice navigates the intersections of the human body, physical traces, and spatial memory. Through sculptural and performative approaches, her work examines how traces—often left unconsciously—emerge through weight, movement, and repetition. Her recent research focuses on the body’s morphological qualities—symmetry, uprightness, gravity, and collapse—to evoke a presence that is both intimate and totemic.

Moving forward, she continues to explore how ephemeral contact between the body and space can reveal layered histories and generate new spatial narratives.

Personal Statement: My work is an eco-social restoration project that attempts to compost encrusted ideologies about what it means to be human, by following the roots of phenomenologically transformative affects like grief and rage. I employ two, three, and four dimensional objects in a reciprocal co-creative relationship between concept, material, and research, frequently by modifying and combining found objects and everyday ingredients to illuminate overlooked violences and open gateways to remembrance, speculation, and healing.

Luisé Cisneros (ze/hir/elle) is a non-binary Mexican-Canadian artist born in Mexico City. As part of these two cultures, ze explores the ideas of land, ethnicity, immigration, identity, family dynamics, and queerness by questioning the biopower, otherism, body, and gender politics in hir diaspora experiences. Ze creates works in sculpture, wearable art, and film where ze questions the barriers that ze faced as a queer immigrant but also celebrates hir Mexican heritage and its cultural traditions and hir identity as a Canadian immigrant.

Luisé completed a baccalaureate degree in Arts at the UAM-Xochimilco in Mexico City in 2001. Ze worked as a graphic designer in some studios until 2005, when ze moved to Canada. As soon as ze arrived in Toronto, Luisé participated in hir first art group show Artwherk! Collective where ze sold hir first artwork to the city of Toronto. After participating in multiple group shows in Canada, the USA and Colombia, Luisé applied to University to both further hir knowledge in art and to advance hir professional art career. While having solo shows in Toronto and Belleville, ze was awarded the Craft Ontario Community Award for an art installation honouring 2024 Pride Month, exhibited at the Quinte Arts Council Gallery in Belleville. In December 2024, ze designed the Statue Award for the Writers Guild of Canada. In May 2025, ze graduated with distinction from OCAD University's Sculpture and Installation program, with minors in Gender and Sexual Studies, Art in Public Spaces, and Materials Art and Design.

Personal Statement: In my practice, I am realizing A Metaphysical Guide to Surviving the Anthropocene. This work imagines the ways that collaborative institutional, spiritual, and ideological paradigms could enable humans to create a non-hierarchical interconnectedness with the Earth and the natural worlds—one that is healing to both human beings and to our planetary co-inhabitants. Through highlighting the rapidly occurring collapse of the extractive institutions of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and speciesism, a space is created where it is possible to manifest the world that will be made in the absence of these institutions. A new form of faith is posited; one where reverence and connection with Creation and all Beings is the genesis for humans to change their role from environmental extractors and exploiters to ones of Guardians and Caretakers of the living world.

Personal Statement: I am drawn to moments that feel timeless—experiences that exist outside linear chronology, yet remain anchored in personal perception. My work explores the connectivity of the invisible, where art becomes a medium to restructure sensory experiences and evoke mental journeys through time and space. I see the relationship between the city and its people as something woven, and I seek collisions that leave unexpected marks on the fabric. 

Through installations and visual experiments, I explore organic cycles unfolding at the boundary between reality and imagination, where sensory perception becomes a way of recognizing the world and a corridor to new perceptive dimensions.

Huang I-Chieh (born 1992, Taiwan) is an artist working across installation, video, public intervention, and community-based projects. His work reflects concern with public space, collective memory, and contested histories, drawing on themes such as social resistance, vernacular tradition, and intergenerational tension. He has also worked closely with various groups and communities through participatory processes that bring out unofficial narratives and marginalized knowledge through acts of construction, ritual, and shared authorship.

His work has been featured in group exhibitions and festivals including the Yokohama Triennale (2024), Taiwan Biennial (2016), Taiwan International Documentary Festival (2018), Marseille International Film Festival (2017), Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival (2016). He has exhibited at institutions such as the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei; National Human Rights Museum; Green Island; Taiwan Contemporary Culture Lab; Honggah Museum; Kuandu Museum of Fine Arts; Open Contemporary Art Center; TheCube Project Space; Taipei Contemporary Art Center; Fotoaura Institute of Photography; Absolute Space for the Arts. He was a finalist for the 20th and the 15th Taishin Arts Award (2022, 2017), and received the Grand Prize at the 14th Taoyuan Contemporary Art Award (2016).

C Armstrong (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist based out of the Midwest. They received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2021. Their practice combines painting and sculpture to explore the system of language as it relates to objects. Their most recent group show was Meet the Painters with the OOO Collective in Cleveland, OH in 2024. They have been in multiple other shows across Cleveland such as SHABANG, DayGLO, and its ðə θɔːt ðæt kountz. C has taught at the Columbus College of Art and Design in addition to giving several demonstrations and talks at MOCA Cleveland. They acted as a committee chair for the 75th Student Independent Exhibition. They have received awards including the Student Independent Exhibition Board Prize, CIA Gund Family Scholarship, and the Max May Memorial Scholarship.

Personal Statement: My artistic practice is rooted in my understanding of the Global South—where the Gulf South of Houston is geopolitically connected to the Horn of Africa by sedimentary rock. Ever responsive to the social and political conditions faced by Global Southerners, my work is an ongoing attempt to imagine possibilities for liberation. Through sculpture and performance, I create worlds of circumstance that explore themes of coloniality, borderlessness, Afrofuturism, Black female subjectivity, personhood, and the politics of rebellion, informed by a story that I instigate. In performance, my voice and body act as a host site for captivity and release, making sounds and shapes about power, love, and a guttural, thrashing rage. I incorporate tools and invite audience participation. In sculpture, I subvert the rigid forms of steel, making compositions out of space and forcing the hard material into precarity. I use ceramics to explore the dispossession of self occurring to African Diasporic people, as well as the subsequent gendered implications.