Transpacific Dialogues–Asian/American Art of Collaboration

The two-day public symposium, Transpacific Dialogues: Asian/American Art of Collaboration, will explore the transformative potential of aesthetic inquiry on how we make collaborative art. It will feature invited artists, scholars, and curators actively involved in creating, researching, and curating collaborative projects across Asia and the United States. Participants are dedicated to transcending national and identity-based boundaries that often constrain collective action in socially engaged art. Additionally, the symposium will address museum practices, with curators from regional institutions discussing their collaborative approaches to curating and collecting Asian/American art amidst diverse interests and perspectives.
Through this multidisciplinary gathering of artists, scholars, and curators, the symposium reimagines collaborative art making as a form of reparative worldmaking. Participants and audiences will explore how transpacific collaboration embodies the praxis of repair. Conceived during the Covid-19 outbreak and resonating profoundly in the face of escalating anti-Asian racism since the pandemic’s onset, the symposium examines how Asian and Asian American artists, navigating between Asia and North America, have organized and cultivated artistic spaces. These spaces foster new kinships and strengthen alliances, often independent of institutional support, aiming to mend racialized disconnections within and between North America and Asia.

Free. Registration for this in-person program is requested.

SCHEDULE DAY 2 - Friday, October 25, 2024, 1-4:45 pm

1:00-2:10 pm - Session 2 Curators on Collaboration
Jheanelle Brown, Faculty, CalArts / Curator, Film at REDCAT
“Writing, Curating, and Teaching Along the Transpacific, with the Transatlantic”
Haely Chang, Jane and Raphael Bernstein Associate Curator of East Asian Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College
“From Expertise to Inclusion: Collaborative Acquisition of Asian American Art at the Hood Museum of Art”
Moderated by Wai Yee Chiong, Curator of Asian Art, RISD Museum

2:15-3:15 pm - Session 3 Performance and Embodied Memories
Jarod Lew, Artist, New Haven
Hieyoon Kim, Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, Brown University
“A Leaf in the Forest: Embodying Aliveness of the Gwangju Uprising”
Moderated by Jung Joon Lee, Associate Professor, THAD, RISD

3:30-4:45 pm - Roundtable with participants

This event is sponsored by the Robert Turner Theatrical and Performance Design Fund, the Mr. and Mrs. Cho Fund, and Humanities Fund. We extend our gratitude to Katryn Livingston, Tina Egnoski, and Deborah Clemons.

REGISTER FOR FRIDAY ONLY

Session descriptions and speakers’ biographies below.

Friday, October 25, 2024, 1-4:45 pm

1:00-1:10 Welcome remarks

1:10-2:10 Session 2 Curators on Collaboration

Jheanelle Brown is a film curator/programmer, educator, and writer based in Los Angeles whose curatorial practice creates frameworks to explore the boundlessness of Black life in experimental and non-fiction film and video. She is interested in the space between fugitivity and futurity and elevating an ethic of care, with special interest in the sonic in film, political film and media, and Caribbean film/video. Jheanelle is a programmer for Los Angeles Filmforum. Her exhibitions and programs have been presented at Art + Practice, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the National Museum for African American History and Culture, REDCAT, 18th Street Arts Center, Project Row Houses, amongst others. Jheanelle recently contributed an essay to “Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader” about Blackness and hip hop in the context of Youtube reactions and Black K-pop fans.

“Writing, Curating, and Teaching Along the Transpacific, with the Transatlantic”

How does one navigate the multilayered resonances and tensions of Blackness’ spectral presence in Asian diasporic frameworks in the West, particularly, the United States? How does this operate in our current climate, one that is anti-Black, anti-indigenous, anti-Palestinian? This presentation considers the parallel practices of teaching, writing, and curating in the context of Transpacific and Transatlantic engagement. Pedagogy, writing, and curatorial frameworks become a jumping off point for generative approaches to history, music, cultural production, media studies, art exhibition/film presentation. This presentation’s case studies are situated in Los Angeles, Afro-Caribbean and Korean diasporas, and the African American communities.

Haely Chang is a Jane and Raphael Bernstein Associate Curator of Asian Art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. Prior to her role at the Hood, Dr. Chang held fellowships at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art, Detroit Institute of Art, and Philadelphia Museum of Art. As a scholar of Korean and Japanese modern art, Haely received her Ph.D. in the History of Art at the University of Michigan, where her dissertation examined how the expansion of photography in early twentieth-century Korea catalyzed new approaches to traditional concepts of painting. Her research has been published in “Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Arts,” “Ocula,” “Trans Asia Photography,” and “Third Text.” Dr. Chang’s current project investigates how Japanese settler artists in colonial Korea engaged with the country’s newly shaping matrix of materiality and visuality.

“From Expertise to Inclusion: Collaborative Acquisition of Asian American Art at the Hood Museum of Art”

This presentation examines the collaborative process of acquiring Asian American art at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, through case studies of recent acquisitions. The Hood Museum acquires Asian American art through multilateral discussions between curators specializing in Asian, American, and Native American art. The conversation begins with an exchange of knowledge, drawing on each curator’s specialized background to evaluate the provenance, authenticity, and significance of the artwork. However, relying solely on such knowledge-based discussions entails the ironic risk of perpetuating the violence of racial classification in Asian American art, particularly when each curator’s expertise is employed to verify the degree of "Asian-ness" or "American-ness" expressed within the artwork. To address this, the curators at the Hood Museum use the Collection Development Plan (CDP) as a guiding framework for all acquisitions including Asian American Art. The CDP enables curators to assess the value of an acquisition in alignment with the museum’s educational mission and commitment to diversity, thus broadening the scope of the discussion beyond knowledge exchange. By providing clear strategic goals for acquisitions, the CDP also creates opportunities for various stakeholders, including students and fellows, to become active proposers and participants in the acquisition of Asian American Art.

Moderated by Wai Yee Chiong
Wai Yee Chiong is the Curator of Asian art at the RISD Museum. She has held curatorial, research, and teaching positions at the Harvard Art Museums, Princeton University (where she received her M.A. and Ph.D. in Art History), Gakushūin University in Tokyo, and the Percival David Foundation of Chinese Art in London. At RISD, she has organized and collaborated on a variety of exhibitions including “Being and Believing in the Natural World” (2022), “Take Care!” (2022), and the “Art from the 1900s to the present.” Additionally, she has developed and grown the Asian collection by bringing in important acquisitions of under-represented works such as Japanese erotica and collaborating with the RISD Art Circle to purchase works. Most recently, she published an essay on the history of RISD Museum’s Japanese collection, focusing on the institution’s commitment to pedagogy throughout the years.

2:15-3:15 Session 3 Performance and Embodied Memories

Jarod Lew is an artist who draws on photography to explore intergenerational encounters with diasporic loss, displacement, and postmemory. Through this exploration, my work contends with the performativity of race and its instability as a locus of meaning. His project, "Please Take Off Your Shoes" was shortlisted for the Aperture Portfolio Prize in 2021, and was exhibited in a group exhibition at SFMOMA titled "Kinship: Photography and Connection in 2023." His other project, "In Between You and Your Shadow," examines his relationship with his mother, who was the fiancé of Vincent Chin--the subject of a hate-crime that brought national attention to matters of Asian American civil rights. His works are held in public and private collections including the Cantor Art Center, Detroit Institute of Arts, Kadist, San Francisco, Harvard Art Museum, University of Michigan Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Lew’s work has been written about in Aperture, Artforum, Elephant Magazine, and Aesthetica Magazine. Lew graduated with an MFA in photography at the Yale School of Art.

Hieyoon Kim is Assistant Professor of East Asian Studies, Brown University and a scholar of dissident culture and media with a focus on Korea. Her first book, ”Celluloid Democracy: Cinema and Politics in Cold War South Korea” (UC Press, 2023), examines how Korean filmmakers, distributors, and exhibitors reshaped cinema in radically empowering ways amid political turbulence from liberation through the decades of military rule (1945–1987). Her articles have appeared in the ”Journal of Asian Studies,’ ”Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television,” ”Journal of Cinema and Media Studies,” “Feminist Media Histories, and Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory.” She is currently working on her second book titled “Hereness in Twenty-First Century Audiovisual Media: The 1980 Gwangju Uprising Made Present.”

“A Leaf in the Forest: Embodying Aliveness of the Gwangju Uprising”

Is it possible to represent state violence without instrumentalizing the suffering of those who died, survived, and witnessed terror? Can art create new ways of engaging with the past that might transform us? These questions are of interest to scholars interrogating the practices and politics of representation. Questions of how to confront past state violence are also important for our current moment, as we witness the revival of authoritarian and military power in many countries. My work’s focus on the Gwangju Uprising in South Korea and contemporary young Asian and Latin American artists’ response to it is relevant to other instances of state violence as they reverberate in the present.

This presentation focuses specifically on one such response from two South Korean women artists: the multimedia artist Park Hwayeon and the dancer Kim Yŏnu. Combining video, dance, and in-depth interviews, their collaborative project titled A Leaf in the Forest (2021) produces a space of intimacy and solidarity that yields a non-familial and non-linear transmission of complex memories of Gwangju. Through a close reading of their work, I reveal how they think-with and move-with affects to attune to the bodily expression of feelings and create more complex forms of community that are not reducible to the national.

Moderated by Jung Joon Lee
Jung Joon Lee is an Associate Professor of art history at Rhode Island School of Design. Lee’s research explores the intersections of art and politics, transoceanic intimacies, decoloniality, and gender and sexuality. Lee’s new book, “Shooting for Change: Korean Photography after the War” (Duke University Press, 2024) treats Korea’s transnational militarism as a lens through which to examine how photography makes meaning and shapes history. Lee was a 2022-23 Society for the Humanities Fellow at Cornell University and visiting scholar at Yonsei University’s Graduate School of Communication and Arts in 2022. Lee is currently working on a monograph project exploring photography and art exhibitions as spaces of transoceanic collaboration, kinship making, and repair.

3:30-4:30 Roundtable with participants

4:30-4:45 Closing remarks