Once More Encore: The First Year of Benny's Video Remixed

The first thing you might hear: the heart-cracking chords of Sinéad O'Connor's "Nothing Compares 2 U," slowed until only its emotional architecture remains. Wistful, like a memory surfacing from somewhere deep, somewhere locked away. It's the soundtrack to Glen Fogel's video Why Don't I…Pretend To Be Your Dad (2015), and it sets the tempo for everything here.

That sense of memory and return runs through Once More Encore, which compresses a year of curatorial effort into a single room. Artist Craig Jun Li ran Benny's Video, a nomadic curatorial project comprising nine exhibitions, out of a 130-square-foot studio sublet in Bushwick from May 2025 to April 2026. All nine are folded into this remix of 51 artists.

The exhibition is hung so that moving through it feels like a traditional Chinese handscroll unfurling. Rather than feeling like discrete encounters, the ideas drift into one another, and a story slowly unfolds.

Color does much of the work of stitching the exhibition together. Dusty blues, weathered creams, smoky greys, warm earth tones. Then a sudden flash of luminous green makes every work around it hum a little louder.

The lines share a rhythm and deepen those connections. Delicate and calligraphic, whether traced in pencil, carved into paint, or preserved as plant roots in poured resin, they weave the disparate works into conversations that pick up from one piece to the next.

The artworks echo, ricochet, and answer one another with uncanny synchronicity, like a quiet game of whispers. Each work nudges your eye to the next. Before long, you're inside it, making up your own stories about how it all connects.

Craig Jun Li (b. Zhengzhou, China, 1998) is an artist, curator, and arts worker based in New York. Li has exhibited internationally and works closely with artists' estates. In 2025, he founded Benny's Video, a nomadic curatorial project he affectionately describes as "for freaks and lovers." Over the course of a year, he presented nine intimate exhibitions in his tiny artist sublet in Bushwick.