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Merry Christmas From Hyperallergic

From Christo's billowing flags to forgotten oral histories, this year reminded me why art matters: it gives voice, refuses erasure, and makes something beautiful from the wreckage.

Lisa Yin Zhang

December 25, 2025 — 4 min read

Film still of Patty Chang, "Melons (at a loss)" (1998), on view in Monstrous Beauty (2025) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (image courtesy the artist)

This Christmas, I’m grateful — it’s a sentimental time of year, OK? I’m about to hit my two-year mark as an associate editor here at Hyperallergic, where my bread and butter is New York City: a weekly newsletter (my baby), and exhibition reviews — dispatches from the center of the art world (I may be biased). And it’s certainly been an eventful year, from museum reopenings to blockbuster exhibitions to a brand-new mayor, who brought a groundswell of hope and a bounty of memes. To me, though, it's been a year of deepening my relationship to the city — not getting caught up in that never-ending tide that is New York, but finding the stillness beneath the current.

“Anchoring” to me means grounding myself in the true, the felt, the tangible. The art world prizes in-person communion — the irreplaceable experience of seeing a work in person — yet increasingly trades in digital surrogates: press releases, Instagram posts, installation views. Coupled with the rise of AI, we’re in danger of losing touch with what's embodied, what's real. The city’s the exact kind of place that interrupts that — you're scrolling peacefully on your phone on the train platform, for instance, and then someone's elbow is in your ribs.

The real — if buried and bygone — New York surfaced more pleasantly for me when I got to work with Lower East Side stalwart Arthur Nersesian, whose book The Fuck-Up (1997), a hilarious jaunt through the degenerate ’90s, was one of my favorites of the year. His review of an oral history of the Pyramid Club, now known as Nightclub 101, is steeped in memory and drawn from a deep wellspring of lived history. Meanwhile, I never thought I'd get my heart broken at The Shed, but the Christo show there undid me for similar reasons — I was suddenly seven years old again, looking upon the billowing neon-orange flags reflected in the snow in Central Park.

But as far as deepening my relationship with our community goes, meeting so many of you at our Halloween party at Francis Kite Club — particularly in costume — was a highlight of the year. So was our coverage of MFA thesis shows — which most art publications completely ignore, even though students are integral to our community, and its future. But just as important as looking forward is remembering: It is my deepest honor to write the weekly In Memoriam column, in which we memorialize those we lost.

Working with our writers is by far the best part of a great gig. I look forward to corresponding with Taliesin Thomas for the Upstate guide every month — both her presence and her emails are just as ebullient as her writing, and it’s infectious enough to melt even my cynical heart. Working with the colossus that is John Yau has sharpened the way that I look at painting and abstraction, and editing the brilliant, broad-minded, and astonishingly erudite Ed Simon on the radical egalitarianism of nativity scenes, the visual history of No Kings, the tackiness and historical backing of Trump’s aesthetic, and so much else has informed my own writing.

Our writers enrich my understanding of the world even from afar: Claudia Ross on the way history reverberates surprisingly, painfully, and generatively into the present in her review of the Monuments exhibition in Los Angeles. Noah Angell on the artist who’s been giving voice to the musical instruments languishing in museum storage, dying to be heard. Cristiana Grigore’s deeply personal and moving piece on the Roma artists all of us should know. Anne Anlin Cheng on a show spanning half a millennium of chinoiserie that transforms objectification into something stranger, more insurgent, almost human. And Jad Salfiti on the little Berlin institute that dares to speak up in a country where Palestinian solidarity is nearly verboten.

This is what art can do: give voice, refuse erasure, make something beautiful from the wreckage. That’s our work here, too. Thank you for reading, for subscribing, for being part of our community. If you’re not already, please consider supporting our work as a paying Hyperallergic Member — it’d make a great very-last-minute gift, if you’re a procrastinator like me. Happy holidays — and here’s to another year!

—Lisa Yin Zhang, associate editor

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