Whitebox Portable Turns Times Square Commuters Into Art Viewers

More than 200,000 people pass through the Times Square subway complex each day. Inside a former bakery tucked between the platforms, Whitebox Portable is betting that some of them will stop for art.

On a recent afternoon, Taiwanese artist Chin-Chih Yang adjusted a colorful woven sculpture made from cut aluminum cans while Ecuadorian Chinese artist Cecile Chong arranged wall-mounted forms covered with botanical elements in shades of blue and yellow.

The two artists are featured in Whitebox Portable’s latest exhibition, 23 Pollution Solution and Chicken Little – Líneas de Falla / Fault Lines, on view from June 18 through Aug. 1. The exhibition is curated by transcultural feminist artist Yohanna Magdalene Roa.

The gallery’s two floor-to-ceiling windows have been divided into three conceptual rooms: a red gift-shop space, a black room featuring Yang’s work and a white room occupied by Chong’s installation.

This is the third exhibition presented in the space and part of Whitebox Portable’s larger effort to challenge what Roa calls the “white cube”—the neutral gallery model that has dominated contemporary art for decades.

“When Western culture developed the idea of the white cube, they were thinking in a neutral space,” Roa said. “Then I started to work in the opposite direction, thinking that everything that we produce in art is not neutral.”

Rather than isolating art from daily life, the project aims to “contaminate” the white cube by placing contemporary art in the middle of one of the city’s busiest transit hubs.

Whitebox founder Juan Puntes spent decades operating alternative art spaces in Chelsea and the Lower East Side before moving into the transit hub. The goal, he said, was to bring contemporary art to audiences who might never enter a traditional gallery.

“They don’t feel comfortable getting inside of that absolutely clean white space,” Puntes said. “But they feel comfortable coming here.”

Suspended from the wall, Yang’s woven forms spill strands of cut aluminum across the black gallery space, transforming discarded soda cans into fabric-like sculptures.

In the 1990s, the Taiwanese artist visited recycling plants and witnessed the toxic byproducts generated by industrial waste management. The experience sparked his interest in exploring discarded materials through art. Since then, he has spent years collecting aluminum cans from New York streets. More than 30,000 now occupy his studio.

”30,000 aluminum cans has a meaning,” Yang said. “If people from birth live for 80 years old and use one can every day, that’s about 30,000 cans.”

After collecting the cans, Yang cleans and cuts them into strips by hand, a process that frequently left him bleeding when he first began. “I always get some cuts on my hand,” he said. “But it’s okay. I already used to it.”

Nearby sits another of his works: a jacket made from cans and recycled packaging materials collected during a one-month residency in Finland. Viewed from behind, the jacket’s layered strips resemble the energetic brushstrokes of an Abstract Expressionist painting.

Collecting trash for art is not always safe. Sometimes the materials are contaminated. Sometimes they are located on highways or in other dangerous places. “Material is very important,” Yang said. “I always need some specific material. Then I have to find it and use it.”

”It’s not the same thing if you go to an art store and buy a white canvas,” Roa said of Yang’s process. “For him it’s relevant to have materials that already have a story.”

Chong approaches environmental questions through very different materials. Her installation fills the gallery with fractured forms, botanical elements and ceramic sculptures inspired by the guagua, the Kichwa word for baby or child.

The white room is dominated by dozens of blue, cloudlike panels scattered across the wall. Yellow flowers bloom from their surfaces, giving the impression of a landscape breaking apart and growing back together at the same time.

Chicken Little began in 2017 as an installation exploring fear and how it spreads through communities. Over time, the project evolved through multiple iterations in response to different sites and contexts.

Standing inside the station, Chong said she was reminded of home. Growing up in Quito, Ecuador, along the Avenida de los Volcanes, she lived among volcanoes. “Some are active, some dormant, but they are always present in the landscape and in our collective consciousness,” she said.

The vibrations of trains moving beneath the station became linked in her imagination with Ecuador’s volcanic landscape. “In both places, there is a sense that movement and pressure exist below the surface,” Chong said. “The subway and the volcanoes became metaphors for unseen forces that shape our lives, reminding us that what appears stable is often in motion.”

”At a time when ecological instability increasingly shapes everyday life, both artists remind us that the ground beneath us is neither fixed nor neutral,” Whitebox wrote in an exhibition statement.

The gallery’s windows stay lit day and night, allowing passersby to engage with the exhibitions whether the space is open or closed.

Securing the site was no easy task. Puntes said the approval process took more than three months. “Even a nail, a screw, you have to give where it was fabricated, where you’re buying it, the fire-retardant rating,” he said.

But for the artists and curators, the effort has paid off. Roa recalled a mother visiting with two children when the younger child turned and asked, “Mom, can I come to do my homework here every day?”