Event Description
Chat About: Magicfeifei and Kiana Shahnia is an exhibition in conjunction with the Chat About event To Be Seen Looking: A Crisis at Play, May 21, 2025. To Be Seen Looking: A Crisis at Play is a collaborative event featuring works by artists Magicfeifei and Kiana Shahnia in conversation with Humanities graduate students Aashna Singh, Ahmet Kraja, and Miles Brautigam. Exploring themes of performativity, visibility, and mutual recognition, the evening playfully unravels from critical discourse to reveal a reflexive visual environment and an intersubjective social game.
Special note: Magicfeifei’s work is installed in the Logan Center for the Arts on Wednesday, May 21 only. Kiana Shahnia’s work is installed in CWAC 257 May 21–29, 2025.
Artist
Magicfeifei creates photographs and sculptures that weaponize cuteness through magic, crushing the seriousness of social norms by subverting and restaging reality. Her work stems from my childhood experiences at toxic business banquets with older men, where she performed as the “good child” in front of an unsettling masculine gaze. She builds narratives using cuteness as a seductive trap, twisting the normal into strange, thriving on sarcasm and irony to confront indifference and reveal uncomfortable truths. Unapologetically direct, her work aims to evoke embarrassment—both her own and that of others.
Kiana Shahnia is a first-year MFA candidate at DoVA. Working with oil on panel installation paintings, her practice interrogates the politics of looking, the complexities of desire, and the structures of spectatorship embedded in art historical narratives. Kiana constructs spaces and experiences that simultaneously mirror and other, where the act of looking is turned on the looker and the distance between an artwork and its spectator collapses.
Related Programming
- To Be Seen Looking: A Crisis at Play, Logan Center, 2nd floor South Lounge, Wednesday, May 21, 2025
- Collective Memory, curated by Miles Brautigam, Logan Center, 2nd floor South Cantilever Lounge Gallery Hallway, May 15–June 8, 2025
Support
This exhibition is part of the 2025 Chat About x CWAC Exhibitions series. Chat About is a student-run open-critique supported by the Department of Visual Arts and the Department of Art History. Special thank you to Maya D’Acosta and Christian Bumala, Co-Curators of Chat About, and Feifei Wang, Chat About organizer. Installation support and preparation provided by Kiana Shahnia and Magicfeifei.
Accessibility
CWAC Exhibitions is committed to accessibility for all our exhibitions. However, the second floor of the Cochrane-Woods Art Center is accessible only by stairs. To request an accommodation or alternative format, please email visualresources@uchicago.edu.
