In less than a decade, young gallerist Emilia Yin and her gallery Make Room have earned a reputation as sharp talent scouts with a diverse international program that alternates a range of aesthetics and global perspectives while tackling issues that resonate with her generation. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Yin moved to Los Angeles to pursue her studies and quickly carved out a space for herself in the city’s competitive art scene, founding Make Room in 2018 in Chinatown. Less than five years later, with the gallery primed for growth, she relocated to a 4,500-square-foot space in West Hollywood—nearly tripling its size. The new space boasts multiple exhibition rooms, an outdoor courtyard and a garden where Yin periodically hosts opening celebrations and community events. During one such opening, staged during Frieze Week, Observer caught up with the gallerist to learn more about her journey, business model and vision.
For Yin, one of the driving forces behind opening a gallery was to provide a platform for underrepresented voices—particularly women artists and artists from the Asian diaspora. Looking at the art world, she recognized how the most visible segment was dominated by established artists and mega-galleries, leaving emerging talent struggling to break in. The rise of market speculators made it even harder for new artists to secure long-term, stable engagement. “There weren’t enough opportunities or spaces for emerging artists to build their careers and eventually establish themselves in the art world,” she told Observer. This issue was especially pronounced for artists who, despite consistently producing extraordinary work, often lacked the necessary networks to gain visibility and recognition. “That realization drove me to launch my first space—not because I had everything figured out, but because waiting for someone else to do it wasn’t an option,” she said.
Yin’s educational foundation in studio arts and business, followed by a shift into art history, gave her both creative intuition and a strategic mindset. Her involvement in a business fraternity at the University of Southern California further exposed her to entrepreneurial thinking, helping her understand how to build structure and scale something meaningful. “These influences shaped how I run Make Room today: a balance of curatorial depth and strategic expansion,” she said. “At the end of the day, the most exciting part of this journey is helping artists realize ambitious visions and watching them grow into the voices that define our time.”
Since founding the gallery, Yin has made it her mission to champion and showcase some of the most interesting emerging voices, adopting a global perspective while giving particular attention to young Asian and Asian diaspora talents. She prefers to describe her gallery as “an incubator” for artists who disrupt, challenge and expand the boundaries of contemporary art, and her vision and depth of inquiry are central to her selection process. “The artists I work with are not just responding to trends—they have a distinctive perspective that feels necessary,” she clarified. “That’s why they have the potential to create trends. I look for artists engaged in a sustained conversation with their materials, histories and ideas.”
Her choice of artists, however, is also driven by intuition. From the very first encounter, she needs to feel that the artist’s work demands to be showcased. “When I encounter an artist’s work, I ask myself, ‘Does this feel inevitable? Does it demand to exist?’” she said. “The best artists create work that feels like it could only come from them yet resonates on a universal level.”
A fundamental pillar of the gallery’s mission is to serve as a cultural platform for ideas and exchange that extends beyond exhibitions, transactions and sales. “The true potential of Make Room lies in how it connects different groups of people, ideas and perspectives, shaping cultural conversations in real time,” Yin said. “We cultivate artists whose work doesn’t just ride the hype wave but stands the test of time. We don’t just work with artists for one or two shows—we hope to invest in their long-term evolution. As a gallery, we also continue to evolve with the people we work with.”
Since its founding, the gallery has faced multiple challenges, first the pandemic in its early years, then the general readjustment in the ultra-contemporary art market and, most recently, Los Angeles’ devastating wildfires. However, Yin’s rigorous curatorial ethic and hands-on approach to building artists’ careers have proven to be a successful formula for the gallery, which continues to thrive and produce ambitious exhibitions in the space and at fairs around the world. “The ultra-contemporary market is in a frenzy, with trends burning out as quickly as they ignite,” Yin reflected. “But I don’t chase trends—I build legacies. Too many galleries scramble to align with market forces instead of defining them.”
Sun Woo. The artwork depicts a forest scene with an ironing board covered in black fabric, surrounded by steaming irons and ethereal smoke, blending domestic imagery with dreamlike natural elements. The wooden ceiling and polished concrete floor add to the minimalist, contemporary setting.” width=”970″ height=”647″ data-caption=’An installation view of “Sun Woo: Swamp and Ashes” in 2023. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Courtesy of Make Room, Los Angeles</span>’>
Yin’s willingness to invest in the long-term evolution of artists (plus her keen talent-spotting ability) has been instrumental in boosting the career trajectories of artists like Guimi You, Jacopo Pagin, Sun Woo and Xin Liu, who had their debut shows with the gallery. Just a few years later, these artists have solid CVs and sustainably growing markets, both with collectors and institutions, and have avoided being swept up in fleeting speculation. “I don’t engage in the art-as-stock-market mentality. We focus on curatorial integrity and long-term artist development, ensuring that our artists’ works are placed in serious collections, not treated as quick-flip commodities,” Yin said. “This approach naturally steers us away from those in it for short-term gains—we attract collectors and institutions that understand the real value of artistic vision and cultural significance.”
For Yin, the most valuable art is not the kind that sells the fastest, but the kind that continues to challenge, inspire and remain relevant decades from now. Her strategy, therefore, is to invest in relationships—with both artists and collectors—ensuring that she’s not just reacting to the market but helping to shape it.
While Make Room’s program has a strong emphasis on Asian and Asian diasporic artists, it is driven first and foremost by vision and experimentation. “What excites me is fostering artists at pivotal moments in their careers, giving them the space and support to take risks and push their practices forward.” A testament to the level of ambition and experimentation on which the gallery operates was its recent booth at Frieze Los Angeles, featuring a series of multimedia installations by visionary artist Xin Liu. Operating at the intersection of art, science and new technologies with her laboratory-inspired aesthetic, Liu investigates the boundaries between human and non-human bodies, testing the possibilities for symbiotic integration and new dimensions of the human condition.
Additionally, this year Make Room is launching “In Situ,” an off-site exhibition series that stages shows outside the conventional white cube. Inspired by Daniel Buren’s radical exploration of art’s relationship to space, architecture and lived experience, the first exhibition in this series will take place in a former apartment unit in Downtown Los Angeles, featuring emerging artist Alice Ningci Jiang. “We are also cooking up exhibitions in Aspen, the Hamptons and Shanghai,” Yin revealed.
Given her Hong Kong upbringing, Emilia Yin works extensively with Asian artists and clients, regularly participating in several Asian fairs. Her gallery in Los Angeles has become an essential platform for cultural exchange, bridging the U.S. and Asia by connecting with the city’s large Asian community and introducing young talents from the region and its diaspora to the L.A. art scene.
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When asked to compare the two regions, Yin pointedly noted that Asia and the U.S. operate on different rhythms in the art market. “The Asian market tends to be highly dynamic and transactional, with a younger generation of collectors who are digitally savvy and comfortable making bold acquisitions,” she said. “In contrast, the U.S. market, especially on the institutional side, moves at a more deliberate pace, often taking years to fully integrate new voices into the historical canon.”
Yin is, however, interested in working at the convergence of these two systems and said the two worlds are beginning to converge. “Asian artists are gaining more recognition in Western institutions, and American collectors are becoming more attuned to art from Asia and the Asian diaspora. Make Room exists at this intersection, facilitating that exchange.”
On the topic of Trump’s tariffs, Yin remains rational and pragmatic, focusing on the bigger picture and historical precedents. “Tariffs and trade policies are cyclical, and while they may create temporary logistical and financial challenges, they won’t stop cultural exchange. The demand for cross-border dialogue in the arts is too strong for political barriers to halt it completely,” Yin said. The gallery is already taking action—looking for alternatives and exploring production strategies to minimize costs. She’s also focused on strengthening Make Room’s network of collectors, institutions and collaborators across multiple regions to ensure their artists continue to have opportunities regardless of policy shifts. For example, this year at Frieze Seoul, the gallery will present a booth in collaboration with Italian gallery Apalazzo. “I just see these challenges as a reason to double down on our mission—in times of division, fostering cultural dialogue becomes even more crucial.”
At the same time, the gallerist has recently extended her geographical research field, concentrating mainly on the long-overlooked talent emerging in the Global South, between South America and Southeast Asia. “There’s a growing shift where artists from historically overlooked regions are no longer waiting for validation from the West; instead, they are asserting their narratives, dictating their terms and radically expanding the global art dialogue. That’s where my focus is.”
For years, the Western art market has tokenized artists from the Global South, treating them as seasonal trends rather than acknowledging the deep, sustained artistic ecosystems they come from. However, the script is finally changing, according to Yin, and recent biennials have largely contributed to this. “From Latin America to Africa to Southeast Asia, we’re seeing artists who are not only gaining institutional and market traction but are challenging the Eurocentric frameworks that have historically dominated contemporary art.”
Exemplifying this shift is Pía Ortuño, a Costa Rican artist based in London whose work dismantles the Western gaze on Latin American identity. Fluctuating between painting, sculpture and installation, her practice draws on her Costa Rican heritage while completely rejecting any romanticized, exoticized expectations. “Her work isn’t about fitting into the Western canon—it’s about bending it to fit her own terms,” said Yin, adding that the gallery will host her U.S. debut solo exhibition this fall.
The art world is much more decentralized today, and Yin maintains that for talent, there’s no single geographic epicenter. “Great work is being produced everywhere—from Seoul to Mexico City, from Jakarta to Berlin,” she said. “What matters now is not just location but connectivity: how artists engage with global dialogues while staying true to their own cultural contexts.”
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For instance, the gallery debuted at the Dallas Art Fair today (April 10) with a curated selection of work by its roster of artists, including a Dallas-based young talent Yin met through her network of global connections and friends.
As our conversation took place just a few weeks after the tragic events in Los Angeles, we felt it was important to ask the gallerist for her thoughts on the city’s changing art scene and the impact of the recent fires. “Los Angeles is a city of contradictions and possibilities. It doesn’t have the rigid structure of New York or the historical weight of European art capitals, and that’s exactly why it’s exciting,” Yin said. “Unlike cities with deeply entrenched art world hierarchies, L.A. allows for more fluidity—it’s a place where artists can take risks and where the traditional power structures of the art world don’t feel as rigid.”
Yin firmly believes the city is evolving into a fertile international art hub with a stronger institutional presence and a growing collector base, but don’t take that to mean it’s becoming another New York. “What’s special about L.A. is its openness,” she concluded. “There’s still a sense that anything is possible.”
