Installation view of Hong Chun Zhang’s Offerings (diptych) (2025), mixed mediums with two Chinese scrolls of ink on Italian Alcantara fabric and two foam/plywood fabricated rice bowls filled with real bullet shells, incense sticks and uncooked white rice, 130 x 60 x 30″ each (photo by E.G. Schempf)
At the Kemper, celebrating the World Cup with an exhibit of Kansas City artists from global background
The World Cup has come to Kansas City, with citizens from countries all over the world working their way through our airport to our hotels, short-term rentals, restaurants, landmarks, galleries and museums.
For many the sole focus has been to present Kansas City as a location, as a destination to witness six fútbol matches in what was once a football stadium, eat barbecue and discover where jazz was not born, but definitely raised. To see how the Midwest is and will continue to be a viable destination for future travels.
Inspired by conversations around the 2026 global soccer tournament, Jessica Hong, chief curator at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, offers an exhibition: “The World in Kansas City,” of works by 16 Kansas City artists with global backgrounds.
“The core themes of the exhibition are interconnectedness and exchange,” Hong said recently. “While celebrating the local, ‘The World in Kansas City’ foregrounds the ways in which this region has, is, and always will be entwined and engaged with the world around us. Through these artists’ inventive and insightful practices, they remind us of our shared responsibility to nurture and strengthen our collective social fabric.”
While conversing with Hong about the process of putting this exhibition together, we discussed her initial research into the history of Kansas City’s various immigrant populations. Hong found ways to weave together the past and the present by connecting what she’d learned with what she saw while visiting the studios of the artists whose work she would present as part of this exhibition.
right: Kiki Serna’s Gringolandia (2024) (artworks: © Kathy Liao courtesy of the artist and © Kiki Serna, courtesy of
Major Dwwight Oran Smith (US Army Ret.) of the Smith Family Collection, Kansas City, Missouri. photo by E.G. Schempf)
Hong found a diversity of emotions, ideas and experiences. A multiplicity of mediums, concepts, expressions and interpretations of home, family and belonging. It is that diversity and multiplicity that really gives this exhibition its shine.
Some of its pieces request interpretation, while others give their purpose willingly. Juan Diego Gaucin, who hails from Villa Insurgentes, Zacatecas, Mexico, in a nod to Norman Rockwell’s “Spirit of Kansas City,” shows not the spirit but the blood pumping through this city’s veins, hidden in its kitchens, hotels, building and road repairs in the form of three migrant workers. It is their substance that gives us our warmth, without which we’d be nothing more than a cold blue skyline.
Sitting before A Motionless Movie by Heehyun Choi, between subtle movements of film and fabric, I found myself meditating on the various forms of communication. Though technology has changed our ability to express ourselves, we still find ways to carry the past, whether through ancient art forms held and transported geographically, or the skills we’ve acquired to create, now shared and carried through time on film, and on hard drives.
The works in this exhibition display an intermingling of culture, individuality, the way that tradition is stretched, re-formed, rejected, and at times longed for.
The artists each fill their unique space with tension. Visitors will see themselves reflected in Kansas City through visualizations of a shared violence, a shared peace. A shared history carried through time. The history of one family, a journey, is explored in A Passage by Hung Liu. We are given a glimpse, then a chance to interpret the story. An offer for us to be willing to be incorrect about our own prejudices.
The world will see its own reflection in Cesar Lopez’s Structural Form: Globe (expanded), a suspended structure conjuring the routes and destinations of his personal trajectory. Viewers will see bright, nearly audible movement, just out of reach, in Paul Anthony Smith’s Untitled. They will find familiarity in two individuals sharing gossip or a secret in a language we don’t understand, in Akio Takamori’s ceramic piece, Conversation.
In other works, maybe they will find new perceptions of what a home is and isn’t. Fatimah Tuggar’s Home’s Horizon presents a vessel created for transport, beautiful in its simplicity, that feels as though it belongs in water.
In Kathy Liao’s work, viewers will find themselves in the prismatic presence of a grandmother’s balcony and remember the refracted light of multiple airport windows and the shadows of people rushing to somewhere to wait. They will discover letters, ghosts of moments long past In the work of Kiki Serna. The dying art of cursive communications supplanted by technology. The result of someone’s moving hand spelling out frustrations, care, hope, love and longing. Letters between people you knew then, and know now. Will they find connection in mysterious shapes that seem otherworldly, disturbingly familiar, like the spirit of some primordial organism?
The exhibit also includes works by Alexander Archipenko, Hùng Lê, SunYoung Park, Sumire Skye Taniai, Anna Tsouhlarakis, Mikey Yates, Hugo Zelada-Romero and Hong Chun Zhang.
The world is coming here for a specific reason, fútbol, and whether people know it or not, they are coming to find a reflection of themselves in us. Kansas City, go see “The World in Kansas City” at the Kemper. The roads are getting better.
“The World in Kansas City” continues at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, 4420 Warwick Blvd., through Aug. 9. Hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday, Friday and Saturday and 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday. For more information 816.753.5784 or www.kemperart.org.
