Yong Soon Min, Composite video stills from On the Road: Northern Exposure, March 27 - April 30, 2009, Single Channel Video, TRT: 19:03 minutes, English with Korean and Spanish translation. Courtesy of the artist.
SCA BFA Project 2016
Dear Leader, What I Love . . .
March 24 - April 2, 2016
Audain Gallery, Vancouver
Simon Fraser University's School for the Contemporary Arts (SCA) is pleased to welcome Yong Soon Min as the SCA’s 2016 spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence. In the Audain Gallery, Yong Soon Min’s video work focusing on North Korea, Bungabsubnida and On the Road: Northern Exposure, will be exhibited alongside collaboratively produced projects and performances by the second and third year undergraduates in the Visual Art Program.
As a variation of our annual third year undergraduate exhibition, the Audain Gallery will function as a hybrid pedagogical space to explore the formal, conceptual and political aspects of monuments, counter-monuments and the notion of alternative archives. Public events and informal discussions on questions concerning war, ideology, colonialism, multiculturalism and transnationalism – which Yong Soon Min has addressed over her long career - are also an integral part of this project.
The second and third year students will construct and install a (counter) monument loosely based on the Robo-Lenin from Magnitorsk (1931), which was destroyed in 1932, yet remains documented in a photograph for Life Magazine by Margaret Bourke-White. A large pedestal base related to the reclining horizontal monument will serve as a platform for readings and performances by the students. In addition, the students will make sculptural spheres inspired by Yong Soon Min’s work. Framed by discussions concerning the hierarchies by which materials get preserved and monumentalized, students will work with texts and images that have inspired and transformed their habitual sense of the world and place these into the work as personal archives. Other misshapen forms will be covered with visual and textual information referring to the current conditions of our late capitalist society. What can we learn from the extremes of failed utopian visions as a way forward, without cynicism? This central question anchors the disparate elements.
Yong Soon Min is an artist based in Los Angeles. She was born near Seoul in 1953, the year the Korean War ended in Armistice. Min immigrated with her mother and brother to the U.S. in 1960 to join their father and grew up in Monterey, CA. She received her MFA degree from UC Berkeley in 1979 and a postdoc at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1981. After three years as a visiting faculty at Ohio University, she lived in New York City for nine years before relocating to Los Angeles where she has been teaching at UC Irvine for over twenty years and is now Professor Emeritus.
Min's art practice, inclusive of curatorial projects, engages interdisciplinary sources and processes in the examination of issues of representation and cultural identities and the intersection of history and memory. Among her numerous grants and awards, Min received a Fulbright Senior Research Grant, COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, Korea Foundation Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and NEA Visual Artist Award in New Genre. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has curated numerous exhibitions.
Presented by the School for the Contemporary Arts and the Audain Visual Artist in Residence Program.
Events
Opening Reception
Wednesday, March 23, 7 - 9pm
Audain Gallery
SCA Student Performances and Readings
Thursday, March 24, 1:30 - 4pm
Audain Gallery
Yong Soon Min Artist Talk
Thursday, March 24, 7pm
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, 2nd floor
Art and the Pacific Rim: Legacies of War
Saturday, March 26, 1pm
Audain Gallery
Round table discussion with Yong Soon Min, David Khang, Cindy Mochizuki, and Ho Tam. Moderated by Jin-me Yoon. The artists will discuss how the legacies of war in the Pacific Rim have influenced their practice directly or indirectly.
Yong Soon Min is an artist based in Los Angeles. She was born near Seoul in 1953, the year the Korean War was ended in Armistice. Min immigrated with her mother and brother to the U.S. in 1960 to join their father and grew up in Monterey, CA. She received MFA degree from UC Berkeley in 1979 and a postdoc at the Whitney Museum's Independent Study Program in 1981. After three years as a visiting faculty at Ohio University, she lived in New York City for nine years before relocating in Los Angeles where she is now Professor at UC Irvine.
Min's art practice, inclusive of curatorial projects, engages interdisciplinary sources and processes in the examination of issues of representation and cultural identities and the intersection of history and memory. Among her numerous grants and awards, she received Fulbright Senior Research Grant, COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department, Korea Foundation Grant, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and NEA Visual Artist Award in New Genre. She has exhibited nationally and internationally and has curated numerous exhibitions.
David Khang is a visual, performance, and biological artist whose practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, and law. Khang selectively imbeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose an interdisciplinary language that materializes in visual, textual, and spoken forms. In performing, Khang often embodies these languages to interrogate social constructions - of asymmetric gender, race, and interspecies relations - that are present within dominant historic narratives and in contemporary culture. By strategically employing nonnative languages and code switching, Khang produces divergent, dissonant, and often humorous and hyperbolic readings that re-imagine the poetic and the political. Khang received his BSc (Psychology) and DDS (Dentistry) from the University of Toronto, BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, and MFA with Emphasis in CriticalTheory from the University of California, Irvine, where he was the recipient of the University of California Chancellor's Fellowship. While at UC Irvine, he had opportunities to study with Jacques Derrida, Etienne Balibar, Fred Moten, and Yong Soon Min; collectively, their singular most important lesson was not to teach knowledge of art or theory, but to embody kindness, generosity, and courage.
Originally from Toronto, Ho Tam is a Vancouver-based artist who has been working in a diverse range of mediums from drawing and painting to photography and video since the 1990s. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at galleries and various film festivals. His recent solo exhibitions took place at Paul Petro Contemporary Art (Toronto, 2015), Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles, 2014) and Centre 3 for Print and Media (Hamilton ON, 2016). This November he will also be exhibiting at Platform Centre for Photographic and Digital Arts (Winnipeg). In the last five years, Tam has been focusing on his publishing projects. Hotam and Poser are his latest artist's book/magazine series.
Cindy Mochizuki creates multi-media installation, performance, animation, drawings and interdisciplinary collaborations that integrate historic ephemera and stories present within public and private archives. Interested in the methodologies of memory work and experimental narratives, her projects intersect fiction and documentary. Family, displacement, migration and remembrance of traumatic historical memory have been departure points within a body of work that re-visits the memory and history of the Japanese Canadian internment and its effects on family members both within Canada and Japan. She has screened her films in Canada, the US, Europe, and Asia. Her mostrecent projects have been exhibited at Access Gallery, Contemporary Art Gallery, grunt gallery and part of the residencies *AIR 475*, Yonago, Japan and *Fictive Communities Asia*, Koganecho Bazaar, Koganecho, Japan. Cindy has received her MFA in 2006, in Interdisciplinary Studies from the School For Contemporary Arts at Simon Fraser University.
Exhibition tour with SCA Students
Saturday, March 26, 3pm
Audain Gallery
Discussion with Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers
Wednesday March 30, 2:30-4:30pm
Rm 4955, 4th Floor
Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers, a member of the Kainai Nation (Blood Reserve, Blackfoot Confederacy) and Sámi from Norway, graduated from UBC with a Bachelor's Degree in First Nations Studies. Her award-winning works - often rooted in social justice - explore innovative means of telling stories. She is a recipient of the Vancouver Mayor's Arts Award and a Kodak Image Award for her work as an emerging filmmaker, and was also included in the CBC list "Indigenous Youth Leaders: 5 Under 30 to Watch in 2015." Her most recent short, Bihttos, was included in the TIFF Top Ten Canadian Shorts and has been nominated for a 2016 Canadian Screen Award.
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