Art fairs can leave you feeling hollow. Amid the excess, spectacle, and relentless consumerism — even in a slower market — there’s a kind of dehumanizing churn. Especially when surrounded by art, the transactional pace of NADA — four long days of booths, banter, and business — can make you wonder if there’s any inspiration or humanity left in the art world.
That’s why people like Darla Migan and Andy Wei feel essential. Their collaboration at DARLA doesn’t just stand out — it offers an antidote. In a space that rewards speed and surface, they practice slowness, depth, and care. In a world where the bare minimum often seems to be eye contact or a handshake, you might leave Darla’s booth with an embrace — and a flicker of hope that this fair, this world, is still worth wading through.
Their presence felt quietly radical. Real conversation. A shared moment. A painting that took three years to make — not three days. DARLA’s booth, fully dedicated to Andy Wei’s work, was a surreal experience. Not just because the paintings lean dreamlike or cosmic, but because even talking about something as human as lineage, grief, or the pandemic feels off-script at a fair. And yet, there it was: space for real feelings.
Fairs are, of course, where art is sold and deals are made. Many galleries rely on these four days to fund their year. But Migan’s approach is different. She doesn’t have a brick-and-mortar gallery. What she does have is presence. She shows up — physically and emotionally — in a way that feels disarmingly rare. That intentional availability is part of the work. It’s also a concerted effort to dismantle the status quo and the limiting constructs in which the art world functions.
Let’s face it. The recipe is outdated. Not just because rents are high, but because artists are allotted an opening, then a month-long show. Then what? Migan is demonstrating that dealing is a commitment. Even when your show is down and the moment has passed, I’m working for and with you. She believes in the work to such a degree that a white box can almost feel limiting — something we’ve all accepted that can, at times, be an obstacle to selling art in this economy.
It takes two particular people to pull something like this off. Dr. Darla Migan — philosopher, writer, curator, and now founder of DARLA — brings a deeply personal lens to her practice. Born to Panamanian and African immigrants and raised in the South, her academic path winds from a BA in politics, law, and society to a PhD in philosophy focused on aesthetics and race. She began writing about art from that perspective, publishing in outlets like Artforum, before transitioning into the gallery world.
Her connection with Andy Wei makes perfect sense. Both are children of immigrants, shaped by the quiet ache of otherness in American childhood. For Darla, growing up in Atlanta in the ’90s, hip hop was frowned upon at home — a rejection of a certain segment of Black culture. For Andy, whose father was often absent chasing the American dream, emotional distance became the norm. When white families have similar dynamics, it’s framed as ambition. For immigrant families, it’s often judged or pathologized. Darla and Andy have turned those experiences into something generative. Darla offers her time and presence; Andy, his texture and tenderness in paint.
Walking up to one of Andy Wei’s paintings feels like rubbing your eyes — are you seeing this right? His work demands you pause, reflect, recalibrate. He’s Mathew Wong, he’s Basquiat, he’s staring into Van Gogh’s severed ear, the way René Ricard once described. His paintings are grippy, fuzzy, haptic events that thrum with human emotion. He understands painting as a transference of the human condition — and his canvases hold that charge.
This newest body of work was shaped by distance. In early 2020, Andy traveled to Qingdao, China — his family’s homeland — and found himself stranded there for nearly two years due to the pandemic. That time, both isolating and grounding, shifted his work. The gestural impasto of his pre-pandemic paintings gave way to something more atmospheric, dreamlike, emotionally layered. He describes experiencing intimacy through distance — romantic, familial, cultural. “Even in China,” he says, “I was referred to by my original name, which felt like another kind of othering.”
There’s a sense that all of his paintings are portraits. In Curtains A Fly, a fly hovers in the upper left-hand corner, while a face — or spirit — looms on the right. The curtains act like a spider web, trapping the viewer inside, much like a quarantine. But through the window, we see a lone figure venturing into a Peter Doig–esque landscape. It reads like a reflection on the pandemic — but also a metaphor for painting. You set out on your own. If you’re lucky, you never know quite where you’ll end up.
In Breath, Blizzard Track, another uneasy figure sets out into the unknown, this time within a nausea-inducing Seurat-like atmosphere. Making the energy of paint feel uncomfortable is part of the point. The subject is drawn from long COVID-era walks Andy took with his father, where not much was said. The energy of distance hangs in the air, taking on its own weight. We watch molecules vibrate, engaging with all that remains unsaid.
Cracked Cup is a beautiful, ponderous poem. A cup sits on a windowsill beneath two moons. In the cup’s liquid — rendered in warm and cool tones — two eyes barely surface. Again, the energy is unsteady. There’s gentle turbulence, and an undercurrent of something ominous. The moons’ reflection forms a halo on the glass’s rim. The palette — deep midnight blues beside built-up cadmium reds and oranges — feels like a tiny, personal Rothko moment.
That sense of dislocation runs through the work — sometimes metaphorically, sometimes literally, through process. The colors are Bonnard; the atmospheres, Monet; the sense of alternate worlds, Ensor. Many faces and emotions seem to flicker just below the surface. But these aren’t melancholic paintings. They’re a parallel reality — one ruled by unsaid intuitions, gut feelings, and ancestral memory. The kind of reality many of us are too busy, too performative, or too distracted to notice.
