There is a familiar image of the curator as gatekeeper: the person who determines which artists enter the room, which histories become legible, and which forms of practice receive institutional attention.
Amy Xiaofan Jiang is interested in something else.
Over the past four years, Amy Xiaofan Jiang, the founder and director of
Underground Art And Design (UAAD), has curated and produced more than 25 exhibitions, performances, talks, and experimental projects across art, design, technology, and culture. Collectively, these programs have reached more than 8,000 attendees and participants, while bringing Jiang into collaboration with institutions, cultural platforms, and independent practitioners including FLORA, NEW INC, Parsons School of Design, Metalabel, The Blanc, Index NYC, and independent curators like Danielle Patterson. The numbers point to the scale of her activity. More importantly, they reveal the network that has formed around it.
Jiang’s practice is built on a refusal to wait for institutional permission. UAAD operates independently, allowing her to develop exhibitions and programs around questions she considers urgent rather than around the categories that established institutions have already made legible. Her projects move between virtual exhibitions, physical installations, multimedia performances, artist-led projects, talks, and experimental gatherings. What holds these different formats together is not a medium, but a way of thinking.
At the center of that thinking is a particular understanding of value. Jiang is less interested in who an artist is than in what happens when their work enters into relation with another work. This is particularly significant for artists who are still outside the museum and gallery system: practitioners whose work may be conceptually ambitious or technologically experimental but has not yet acquired institutional visibility. In this sense, her exhibitions do more than present artists. They create contexts in which practices can become legible, enter new conversations, and begin building the foundation for future institutional opportunities.
Her exhibitions are also characterized by a consistent proposition: the systems surrounding us are not inevitable.
Ties That Cannot Be Unbound considered the entanglement of spirituality, physicality, bodies, and environments, asking what kinds of relationships might be impossible to sever. Alt-Alterity imagined the dissolution of alterity itself, using speculative realities, rebellious technologies, and fluid identities to consider what forms of affinity might emerge when inherited distinctions begin to loosen.
Jiang's engagement with cutting-edge technology follows the same logic, in response to the contemporary anxiety of how tech is changing our life and relationships to one another. TechnoMirage examines how artists might use technologies such as artificial intelligence without accepting the increasingly familiar narrative that technological development inevitably leads to human replacement. Instead, the series positions technology as a site of agency and ethical inquiry, asking how artists and audiences might participate in determining the futures being built around them.
In Neuromantics, this inquiry became experiential. Drawing on the networked logic of William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Jiang transformed a Soho loft into a playable environment of artist-made games, XR works, live interfaces, and moving images. Works could shift, open, or change state through human interaction. The viewer was no longer simply observing an artwork but becoming part of the system through which it became legible.
Attention // Distraction extended the inquiry to the conditions of spectatorship itself. Bringing together interactive installations, net art, XR, artist-made games, live performance, and talks, the exhibition examined how attention is engineered and mediated, and how distraction might function not as a failure of concentration but as a strategy for redirecting perception.
That proposition is partly informed by her own trajectory. Before becoming a curator, Jiang worked across product, UI/UX, and brand design. She brings from design an attention to systems, interfaces, participation, and experience, but applies those tools to a different kind of problem. Rather than designing better ways to navigate an existing system, her curatorial practice asks why that system is organized as it is, who benefits from its organization, and what might happen if its assumptions were rearranged.
Yet Jiang’s significance does not lie simply in working across disciplines. Interdisciplinarity is increasingly common as a cultural vocabulary. What distinguishes her practice is how she uses these intersections to construct relationships that would not necessarily exist within conventional institutional structures.
Culture advances when unlikely combinations get a chance to happen: when an AI platform, a fashion label, an academic incubator, and a group of emerging artists actually end up in the same room, working on the same question, at the same time. Most institutions are not built to make that happen; each one is optimized to do its own thing well, not to go looking for partners in adjacent fields. That is precisely the gap independent curatorial infrastructure like Jiang's fills. By actively assembling combinations no single institution would think to assemble, her practice increases the total number of new ideas, collaborations, and artistic directions that American culture gets to try. It is, in effect, a way of manufacturing more chances for culture to surprise itself.
