OCDChinatown is a contemporary art space for sound, image, object, movement and thought located in a working Chinatown mall in Manhattan, New York. It was established in 2018 and is curated by Liutas MvH.
OCDChinatown features both emerging and established international artists, often prioritizing queer narratives. The mission of the project is rooted in the preservation of alternative histories while imagining new futures. Serving as one of the key launchpads for emerging Downtown artists’ careers, OCDChinatown is non-hierarchical in its curation.
In The New Yorker’s review of It’s Personal, writer Johanna Fateman described the space as having its own relational qualities, calling it "(...)a gallery that occupies a glass-walled booth in a Chinatown mall. The space's fishbowl quality suits the themes of gendered spectatorship(...)." Meanwhile, artist Nao Bustamante spoke to Cultured on the precipice of her exhibition Brown Disco, discussing the gallery’s intimate and experimental nature: "OCDChinatown is small, so there’s the opportunity to play with space in a way that may be more difficult in a large gallery or institution."; OCDChinatown's penchant for evocative curation was highlighted in artist and actress Hari Nef's Artforum review of Nash Glynn's exhibition Self Portrait with One Foot Forward and One Hand Reaching Out, where she wrote: “I enter the gallery, greeted by an image I hadn’t gone a day without thinking about since I first saw it…” OCDChinatown has played a key role in the development of the mall's previously, nearly empty, second floor. Transforming it into a vibrant, multifaceted marketplace, contributing to its reputation as a dynamic cultural and commercial hub in the neighborhood.
Eight exhibitions have been selected by Artforum critics as international "Must Sees," including Nash Glynn's Self-portrait With One Foot Forward And One Hand Reaching Out, Carlos Motta and Tiamat Legion Medusa's When I Leave This World, Camilo Godoy's Amigxs, Geo Wyex's Looking For Stars Out Of What Stinks, It's Personal (Nash Glynn, Sam Penn, Ser Serpas), Nao Bustamante's Brown Disco, Ethan James Green, Martine Gutierrez, and Sam Penn's Turn My Way, and E. Jane, Chelsea A. Flowers, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Shala Miller, Elle Pérez's I Am Standing Here Surrounded By So Much Beauty.
OCDChinatown has additionally been featured in Vogue, Interview Magazine, AnOther, The New York Times, Surface, The Brooklyn Rail, Hero, Screen Slate, ArtNet, Coeval, GAYLETTER, Airmail, Hyperallergic, and more.
Selected Projects In 2024, multidisciplinary artist K8 Hardy mounted her exhibition-turned-pop-up shop, Studio Dress, in which she transformed the typically sparsely curated space into a kitschy, maximalist auto body shop. The faux-shop featured an editioned house dress, created in part by former Miguel Andover designer Andrew Harmon, which served as the primary artwork and was accompanied by a weeklong performance of “shop-girldom.” The theatrical conceptualization of the space, led by set designer Andy Harmon and K8 Hardy, incorporated absurdist self-branding to anchor the artist's “studio dress” in both the fashion and fine arts spheres. The project's collaborations were furthered by a campaign shot by renowned fashion photographer Cass Bird, with muse-wife and former J.Crew creative director Jenna Lyons modeling, as well as a public relations campaign managed by New York upstart Gia Kuan. With Studio Dress, Hardy not only celebrated the playful and performative aspects of fashion, but also examined the ways in which art and commerce intertwine, inviting both critical reflection and a sense of joyful irreverence.
Earlier in 2024, New York-based photographer Sam Penn led Turn My Way, a show of five photographs that included Penn herself, actress and performance artist Martine Gutierrez, and fellow photographer Ethan James Green. The series explored themes of vulnerability, desire, and identity through self-portraiture, challenging traditional concepts of the gaze and representation. The exhibition text, written by Artforum's former editor-in-chief David Velasco, posed a question in relation to the bounds of self-portraiture with: “Can you imagine? Being both seducer and seduced.” The crux of the show lay in the intimate proximity the three artists shared, both personally and creatively, and their ability to blur the lines between public and private life. Their collaboration exemplified an exploration of selfhood and vulnerability, with each image offering a new perspective on identity and power. This piece of programming marked the second exhibition of Penn's work with OCDChinatown, furthering her investigation into the complexities of representation.
Curators Sara O’Keeffe, Emmet Pinsky, and OCDChinatown's Liutas MvH organized a multifaceted project with artist Pippa Garner in the fall of 2023. Garner's I'm With Me was presented at OCDChinatown in conjunction with her exhibition $ELL YOUR SELF at Art Omi in Ghent, New York. I'm With Me showcased work spanning over 30 years of Garner's prolific career, including enlarged satirical advertisements from Garner's various entries into San Francisco weeklies during the 1990s, a reimagining of the artist's early 2000s “t-shirt-a-day” slogan project, a sartorial fan-art made by fashion house Eckhaus Latta on their own archive and deadstock pieces, alongside a tattoo parlor. The former served as a repurposing project for the young designers, directly akin to Garner's tenets of her studio practice that reinfuse life into things that have been passed on, discarded, or are out of use. The latter opted for Garner's contemporary means of direct augmentation of the body and her apt precision in regards to performative works. The performance invited participants to receive a flash tattoo of the artist's selected works, applied by a range of invited tattoo, performance, and studio artists. Appointments were made available online, and the event encouraged voyeuristic engagement$. ELL YOUR SELF was accompanied by a monograph, co-published by Art Omi and Pioneer Works Press. Following these exhibitions, Garner's Act Like You Know Me was re-exhibited by White Columns, which was also accompanied by a publication of the same name.
Nao Bustamante's Brown Disco received its first iteration of the site-specific work at OCDChinatown, during her Rome Prize fellowship year. The installation featured a hanging 8-foot inflatable disco ball, a slowed-down Donna Summer soundtrack with an accompanying microphone that invited each visitor a moment for karaoke, and a singular spotlit painting. Paying "homage to the spatio-temporality that is the club," it distilled the atmosphere of nightclubs as spaces of both personal and collective expression. Brown Disco was equal parts a monument to lives lost in queer spaces of liberation and a place of pause for silent acts of reclamation. When referring to the work, writer Maggie Nelson—in conversation with Bustamante for Interview Magazine—noted her husband, artist Harry Dodge's remarks on some of the darker underpinnings of the piece: “And the shadows too, (...) Harry kept being like, ‘These are not glittering. These are architectural.’ And it almost felt like there was a panopticon, like honeycomb cells in a way that were not vibing freedom, per se.” Critics praised Bustamante's ability to enact participation through spatial activation and her use of cultural subversion to create a nostalgic environment, linking past cultural moments with contemporary concerns about identity, performance, and livelihood.
Earlier in 2023, Young Boy Dancing Group, and movement designer Sigrid Lauren, premiered a dynamic, two performances at The Firehouse, 87 Lafayette St., New York, NY. The performances unfolded across two distinct halls within the venue: the main firehouse and its adjacent garage. The first section took place within the fire trucks, where Lauren’s immersive sound design set the tone for the piece. After a brief interlude, the audience organically migrated into the garage space that used to house the firetrucks, where the second phase of the performance unfolded. Dancers from YBDG, including Dusty, Lili “Love” Marrero, Crackhead Barney, and the core crew consisting of Manuel Scheiwiller, Nica Roses and Maria Metsalu, were positioned strategically as the public entered to witness the 3-hour performance. The raw, industrial nature of the space was integral to the work's organic intensity and durationality. The performance responded directly to the materiality of the space, creating a visceral experience that blurred the lines between site-specific installation and live performance. The choreography engaged with the architecture, allowing the dancers to interact with the environment in a way that heightened the tension between movement, sound, and the space itself. Using the firehouse's historical design as a space to fill up the truck's, the performance included large amounts of water to add to its site-specificity.
In January 2023, It's Personal was presented as a collaborative exhibition by artists Ser Serpas, Sam Penn, and Nash Glynn. The show explored the complexities of intimacy and vulnerability. The press release, penned by hannah baer, encouraged each visitor to read it aloud and posed the critical questions of: “Who gets to look at women and girls? Who decides what happens to them? Who holds them in their gaze?” This interrogation of power dynamics and the act of looking was central to the exhibition, which blurred the lines between the personal and the public. Interview Magazine described the show as “sensual,” noting that it invited viewers to engage with complex portrayals of women, where desire, agency, and the politics of representation were at the forefront. The exhibition's opening was followed by a series of readings featuring prominent voices, including hannah baer, Kay Gabriel, Diamond Stingily, Sarah Nicole Prickett, and Gary Indiana. This dynamic programming extended the themes of It's Personal into a performative space, engaging with the exhibition's central question: "Who gets to look and who gets to be seen?" A review of the show in The New Yorker emphasized the exhibition's successful blending of personal and collective expression, where the artists’ works confronted notions of gaze, power, and identity.
Ryan McNamara presented Before I Forgot Myself in the summer season of 2022. The work invited visitors into an intimate, often absurdist world where performance, sculpture, and identity collided in playful and disorienting ways. The exhibition—a hybrid between a retrospective and a garage sale—offered an eclectic mix of McNamara's works from across 15 years, including never-before-seen props, photographs, and new pieces that carried his signature blend of self-mortification and wit. McNamara, who rose to prominence in 2010 with his project Make Ryan a Dancer, has long been known for transforming the mundane into something deeply performative, from costumed interventions to awkward, intentional failures that somehow made him a star. In this show, he revisited those boundary-pushing moments, providing a rare opportunity to directly engage with both the objects and the artist himself, as McNamara was present throughout to discuss each piece's origins and significance. An essay by Sarah Nicole Prickett, was shown alongside the exhibition, and reflected on McNamara's evolution as a performance artist and his exploration of the often uncomfortable space between vulnerability and spectacle. With Before I Forgot Myself, McNamara continued his investigation into the complexities of art and commerce.