For Chen, ‘sanctuary’ evokes ecclesiastic traditions of housing that displaced civilians. Taking Sanctuary as the title of his first institutional exhibition in New York, Chen aimed to engage with people from different cultural backgrounds and test the idea of whether art can provide familiar space for the unlikeliest of encounters. However, in the rapidly escalating COVID-19 pandemic, a more prophetic meaning of the exhibition began to emerge: a community can only be recognized against a context from which it differentiates itself and that ground would be post-COVID-19 New York.