The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has announced 16 finalists for its closely watched SECA Art Award for 2019. The awards are the region’s most prestigious recognition for emerging artists. The finalists, all of whom work and live in the Bay Area, are Sadie Barnette, Craig Calderwood, Sofia Cordova, Brett Goodroad, Nicki Green, Kunlin He, Porpentine Charity Heartscape, Kenyatta AC Hinkle, Sahar Khoury, Dionne Lee, Marlon Mullen, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Clare Rojas, Davina Semo, Christine Wang and Karla Wozniak.

Going Outside is at its most compelling when the Chinese philosophical and aesthetic concepts are discreetly embedded within contemporary images and technologies, challenging expectations of witnessing cultural otherness and intimating instead the possibility of a more dynamic realization of digital technology’s putative claims to cultural universalism. In doing so, both artists anticipate a future that seems more likely than most: one in which humanity exists as a variegated crossroads of other histories and ways of being, in discordance and in concert.