Issue 15, Past Issues
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Contributors / Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia

Issue 15: Spectacle East Asia (Fall 2010)

Sohl Lee is a Ph.D. student in the Graduate Program in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester, U.S.A. She is currently working on her dissertation, which investigates works by contemporary artists who practice sociopolitical interventions into national identity, urban development, ethics, and contemporaneity in South Korea. Her research interests include contemporary visual cultures in East Asia, discourses of modernities, institutional critique, and curatorial practices. Her work has appeared in such publications as Yishu: Journal for Contemporary Chinese Art. In Spring 2010, she was a visiting scholar at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, where she taught courses on modern and contemporary Asian visual art.

Godfre Leung is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual and Cultural Studies at the University of Rochester. He has taught art history at the University of Rochester, Eastman School of Music, and the Ontario College of Art and Design. Currently, he is working on a dissertation entitled “The White Wall in Postwar Art: From the Death to Rebirth of Painting.”

Caitlin Bruce is a third year student in the Rhetoric and Public Culture Ph.D. program in Communication Studies at Northwestern University. Her research interests include public art, urban space, affect, urban subjectivity, ephemeral collective formations, graffiti, mural art, and digital mapping.

Okwui Enwezor is a globally renowned curator and has served as the artistic director of the Second Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa, Documenta 11 in Kassel, Germany, the 2nd Biennial of Seville in Spain, and most recently, the 2008 Gwangju Biennale in South Korea. Among his books are Reading the Contemporary: African Art, from Theory to the Marketplace (MIT Press, Cambridge and INIVA, London) and Mega Exhibitions: Antinomies of a Transnational Global Form (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich). He is a recipient of awards and grants from Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, International Art Critics Association, and Peter Norton Curatorial Award. He was until recently the Dean of Academic Affairs and Senior Vice President at San Francisco Art Institute.

Rika Iezumi Hiro is a Ph.D. student in the Art History and the Visual Studies Graduate Certificate program at the University of Southern California. Her primary interest is in post-WWII art and visual culture in Japan, especially the Anti-Art movement of the 1960s and its global interactions. She is a regular contributor to the Japanese contemporary art magazine Bijutsu Techō/BT; co-curated “Art, Anti-Art, Non-Art: Experimentations in the Public Sphere in Postwar Japan 1950-1970” and “Radical Communication: Japanese Video Art 1968-1988,” both at the Getty Research Institute; and co-founded the non-profit art space Art2102 in Los Angeles.

Barbara London is Associate Curator in the Department of Media at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and founder of the institution’s video program and collection. Since the 1970s she has tracked media art and has organized more than 120 related exhibitions at MoMA, including one-person shows of early mavericks such as Laurie Anderson, Joan Jonas, Nam June Paik, and Bill Viola. She recently presented at the museum the group exhibition and film series “Looking at Music.” Her essays and criticism have appeared in Artforum, Modern Painters, Art Asia Pacific, Leonardo, and elsewhere. Her research and curatorial engagement with East Asia has continued since the 1970s.

Hyejong Yoo is a Ph.D. candidate in Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University. She is writing a dissertation on Minjung Misul (“the People’s art”) in 1980s South Korea entitled “Minjung, Dialogue, Community: Reimagining Art into Minjung Misul.”

Chen Chieh-jen (陳界仁) works in installation, performance, photography, and video to examine the history of Taiwan within the larger context of globalization. His work addresses the effects of consumerism, migration, and the power of the dissemination of images. Chen’s works have been exhibited internationally at the 48th Venice Biennale, the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris, and the 6th Taipei Biennial, among others. He was awarded the Special Prize in 2000 at the 3rd Gwangju Biennial in Korea.

Gao Shiqiang (高世强) has recently been dubbed as one of the “scholarly” artists in the field of Chinese contemporary art. Gao’s work reflects the bodily experience of everyday life as seen through his photographs, installations and experimental films. He incorporates personal narratives into his work as means of rendering new ways to interpret Chinese culture and history as national memory. Gao teaches in the Experimental Art Department in the China Academy of Art, Hangzhou.

Sangdon Kim (김상돈) addresses socio-political and ecological issues through research-based art projects staged in several sites in military border zones in Korea, such as Pyeong-taek, Yangju, and Dongducheon. Blurring the boundaries between art and activism, his projects foster community involvement through local residents’ participation, and are often displayed in the form of documentation composed of texts, diagrams, photographs and videos. In addition to exhibiting his art in galleries in Seoul, Mexico City, and Berlin, among others, he has shown his audiovisual works in experimental film festivals and has published multiple artist books.

Kwak Duck-jun (郭德俊) was born in Kyoto in 1937 to Korean parents. He lost his Japanese nationality in 1952 together with all Korean and Taiwanese ethnics in Japan as the San Francisco Treaty came into effect. He is the founder of Kyoto International Art Center (Kyoto kokusai geijutsu senta) and his works have been featured in exhibitions around the world since 1966. Kwak began in 1974 the “President and Kwak” series in which he matches half his face reflected on a mirror with the inaugural portrait of the American presidents on the cover of Time magazine. Self-portrait 78 is part of his body of work that investigates performativity in relation to the medium of video.

Minouk Lim (임민욱) is interested in the notions of mobility, displacement, and contingency, among many others. All of her works, practiced in various mediums such as installation, performance, photography, video, publication, and event programming, share multiple, internal cross-references. Since Lim’s projects put emphasis on the process, they reflect, vividly and profoundly, the sense of segmented time and space in South Korea. In a speculative if not melancholic way, Lim explores potential means of restoring connectedness and contingency among individuals who are unavoidably affected by a strong sense of discontinuity and displacement. Her other works can be seen at: http://www.minouklim.com

Mixrice (믹스라이스) is a project team that explores and promotes alternative model in which to practice artistic activity and cultural action. Although the two consistent members include Cho Jieun and Yang Chulmo, the collective collaborates with migrant workers, activists, and other artists. For one of the collective’s first projects, it held media education classes for migrant workers so that they can film, edit, and present their stories. More recent projects involve the city of Maseok as a physical site, where a concentrated number of migrant workers build a community and where Mixrice suggests a way to imagine a more equal and just society in South Korea. More works can be seen at: http://mixterminal.net

Bo Zheng (郑波) grew up in Beijing and has lived in the U.S. and Hong Kong. In his art projects, he uses video, sound and text to discuss issues of freedom and equality from the perspective of sexual and ethnic minorities. His ongoing project “Karibu Islands” was featured in the 2008 Guangzhou Triennial and the 2010 Auckland Triennial. Currently he is also pursuing a Ph.D. in Visual and Cultural Studies at University of Rochester, with focus on art and the public sphere. His art works can be seen at: http://www.tigerchicken.com/art

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