• Exhibition Catalog (Download)
  • Exhibition Dates: May 28 – June 11, 2022
  • Venue: AHL Foundation, Inc.
  • 2605 Frederick Douglass Blvd., New York, NY 10030
  • Opening Reception: Saturday, May 28, 3-6 pm
  • Curated by Stéphanie Jeanjean, Ph.D.
  • Participating Artists: Heehyun Choi, Gyun Hur, Dohee Lee, and Yozmit

 

 

 

When Attitudes Become Positions

2021 AHL Artist Fellowship Exhibition, AHL Foundation Harlem, New York, NY

 

AHL Foundation, started by Sook Nyu Lee Kim in 2003 to promote and celebrate visual artists of Korean heritage, provides invaluable resources to support their work and career—by offering grants and awards, organizing mentorship programs and networking opportunities, as well as exhibiting their work to New York audiences. In the aftermath of a global pandemic, the continued generous support of the AHL Foundation to Korean contemporary artists, living in diaspora in the United States, is now more crucial than ever. This is exemplar in the AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship, which recognizes the exceptional work of Korean American artists. This Fellowship was established in 2019 and made possible by a generous contribution from the Dow Kim Family Foundation, a non-profit organization engaged in philanthropic activities in education, social services, and arts & culture, with a primary focus to help better and empower the lives of underserved and under-resourced Korean Americans.

 

For the 2021 Award, AHL Foundation received 67 applications responding to the call for applications. As head juror, I was impressed by the level of engagement that the artists clearly communicated through well-articulated compilations of work samples and artists’ personal statements, which made our selection as a jury, at times, difficult. I could also take account of the intensity, gravity and urgency that were common to most of the proposals we reviewed. Several recent events resonated across many of the artists’ communications: their experience with the COVID-19 pandemic, its effects in social isolation and in anti-Asian feelings or even hate crimes, along with reactions to George Floyd’s murder, the anti-racist protests and the advocacy that resulted, including the situation of social unrests experienced in the United States and worldwide. In addition, many artists adopted a more direct line of action to question and critique traditional gender norms and roles, which produced many feminist works. There were as well several applicants identifying as non-binary with works based on their gender identity.

 

For the 2021 AHL Artist Fellowship, four artists were selected by a jury—composed of Sara Raza (award winning contemporary art curator and writer based in New York City), Lumi Tan (curator at the The Kitchen in New York City), and myself (Stéphanie Jeanjean, Ph.D., art historian, translator, and curator active in New York City). The four artists awardees follows:

 

Dohee Lee (Oakland, CA) presents an impressive and mature multi-media practice that develops in installation, music, dance, and performance and ties traditional customs found in Muism or Mu shamanism (which is traced back to at least 1,000 BCE) to today’s concerns and realities. Her artistic performances often function as healing practices that address traumas found in the recent past and in the wounds that humanity has inflicted onto the world. For example, in Shamanic Ritual Upon Desecrated Land (2019), she is pointing out the US military exploitation and environmental impact on Jeju Island in South Korea, or in Ritual for Theresa Cha (2019)—her New York’ street performance and homage to artist and writer Theresa Hak Kyung Cha—Dohee Lee acts on the location of Cha’s brutal rape and murder in 1982. In addition, Dohee Lee has worked on community-based projects to propose shared experiences amongst groups of participants, who develop gestures and behaviors of care, memory, and restoration collectively.

 

Gyun Hur (Brooklyn, NY) is an installation and performance-based artist communicating about her diasporic experience. She proposes solid soothing but energetic horizontal floor structures using combinations of formal motives (color, shapes, materials, and textures or effects), which are inspired by her traditional Korean heritage along with childhood memories of mourning rituals, often associating river water with beneficial outcomes involving rejoicing, negotiating loss, and dealing with personal trauma. She creates private and introspective spaces made public and often uses them to perform and connect with herself, her audience, and others, using her body, her gestures, her physical touch, and the sound of her voice to capture attention and fight isolation. Gyun Hur’s titles then function as sentences providing the subtexts that communicate her intentions and her expectations: “So we can be near” (2021), “I wouldn’t know any other way” and “To hold gently” (2020).

 

Heehyun Choi (Stevenson Ranch, CA) is a promising artist proposing a type of screen tests in the form of structural and conceptual short video works that reappropriate, document, and reflect on the technological and visual developments of the history of video and film. At the time of AI (Artificial Intelligence), VR (Virtual Reality), AR (Augmented Reality), as well as of social media, Heeyun Choi focuses on revealing how real, special, and virtual effects have been constructed over time and are being embedded in our daily life—in real, digital, and virtual experiences. Using a variety of film and video formats—16mm, analog videotapes, digital video, projections, and computer screen recordings, etc.—that visually refer to other styles or ages of images, she constitutes a visual archive of nostalgic references, while peeling off the processes of construction and illusion commonly used in the moving image. Finally, Heeyun Choi adds layers of criticism in her work that did not exist in her references originally.

 

Yozmit (Carson, CA) is a multi-talented trans-identified visual artist, designer, singer, songwriter, and performer whose work focuses on overcoming the strict restrictions associated with gender identity, role, and appearance, and finding liberation in self-expression. In 2015, Yozmit launched the art campaign *DoYou* to affirm the power of transformation and promote self-expression by curating her own music, fashion, and performance. As Yozmit states: “DoYou is my artistic mantra to shift power from external conformity to internal realization.” Yozmit commonly performs under her chosen name and alter ego Yozmit The DogStar, meaning “myth about one’s self”, and proposes elaborate forms of futuristic spectacles such as singing performances, music videos, or fashion photography, also displaying the artist’s wearable art. In order to overcome transphobia and other forms of gender discrimination, Yozmit The DogStar embodies plural identities that not only explore non-binary forms of existences, but also attempts to neutralize or restore a balance between feminine and masculine forms. This is most exemplar in Yozmit’s genderless impersonations of bodhisattvas of compassion.

 

Works by the four artist fellows are presented in the current exhibition, When Attitudes Become Positions. When Attitudes Become Positions is inspired by the 1969 canonical exhibition by Harald Szeemann—When Attitudes Become Forms: Live in Your Head—at Kunsthalle Bern in Germany, which first crystalized a selection of artistic practices that formed Conceptual Art. When Attitudes Become Positions similarly starts from the understanding that materializations of art as objects have grown into becoming attitudes. Furthermore, When Attitudes Become Positions proposes that these attitudes not only materialize as formal visualizations of themselves, but also present a position: individual, social, and political.

 

May 2022

 

Stéphanie Jeanjean (Ph.D.)

Independent Curator & AHL Head Juror (2021)