- Title: There Is No Sincerity Without Irony
- Date: May 11 – June 8, 2024
- Opening: Saturday, May 11, 4-6 pm (Performance by Kyoung eun Kang at 4:30 pm)
- Address: AHL Foundation Gallery, 2605 Frederick Douglass Blvd, New York, NY 10030
- Curator: Joyce Chung
- Participating Artists: Sara Jimenez, Kyoung eun Kang, Kakyoung Lee, Jiwon Rhie, Hyeree Ro, Kristina Wong, and Kim Ye
[Exhibiton Opening Photos]
Curatorial Statement by Joyce Chung
“Not every woman has the means of rejecting the ironies, ignorance, and prescriptions by which they are surrounded. But any woman can raise questions about their bodies by taking the object of their respect for their own.”
—Simone de Beauvoir
There Is No Sincerity Without Irony explores how sex is inherently intersectional, necessarily seen through race and feminism. The exhibition features seven Asian and Asian American female artists including Sara Jimenez, Kyoung eun Kang, Kakyoung Lee, Jiwon Rhie, Hyeree Ro, Kristina Wong, and Kim Ye, whose works address specific female body parts and corporeal experiences. The works reflect how women’s engagement with their bodies shape and develop their perception of sex and sexual attitude.
The oppression of Asian women’s sexuality is similarly intertwined with culture specific norms such as parental influences, immigration, media play, and identity politics. What are the ways Asian women have claimed their sexual choices and demands, against exoticization, hypersexualization and hierarchy? What compromises have been made surrounding the fetishized Asian female body in relation to male heterosexuality? While dismantling the conventional notions of the Asian female body, the artists featured here transgress the boundaries set for them by utilizing body knowledge, law, and the methodology of post-colonialism.
There Is No Sincerity Without Irony reveals that the absurdities associated with Asian women’s bodies cannot be explained as a simple combination of elements such as misogyny and racism; however, it can be used as a reminder and a tool to produce sincerity—an acknowledgement of the exploitations and a desire to provoke moral certainty and political action to banish the persistent irony. Attuning to vernacular sexuality and feminisms, the exhibition strives to facilitate critical contemplation on how women’s bodies can in turn become a site for building and exercising self-determination and agency.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a screening and panel discussion about prostitution law in collaboration with Red Canary Song, a collective of Asian & migrant sex workers and allies in New York. The program maps different stakeholders and temporalities as an exercise in liberating notions of what women’s bodies can do.
About the Curator
Joyce Chung is the Curator at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia. Her curatorial projects focus on Asian Diaspora art, new media art, performance, and intersections between feminism and visual arts. Chung is interested in exploring the complexity of identity and representation through the lens of the politics of place. Her most recent curatorial works include Dream House: Inside Music + Video, Eiko Otake: I Invited Myself vol.III, and The Body You Want, a group of Asian and Asian American artists exploring queer identity. She has also worked at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, Gwangju Biennale in Gwangju, Kukje Gallery in Seoul, Hyundai Card in Seoul, and Performa in New York. Chung studied art history at Wesleyan University and the University of Chicago.
Artist Bios
1) Sara Jimenez
Sara Jimenez (she/her) explores the material embodiment of deep transcultural memories. She is interested in materializing existing global narratives around concepts of origins and home, loss and absence, through installation, mixed media sculpture, collage and performance. Her projects are visual metaphors that allude to mythical environments and reimagined artifacts, many of which are inspired by her ancestry in the Philippines. Jimenez received her BA from the University of Toronto and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. Selected exhibitions include Rachel Uffner Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, Morgan Lehman Gallery, BRIC Gallery, The Brooklyn Museum, The Bronx Museum, and Smack Mellon, among others. She has performed at numerous venues including The Dedalus Foundation, The Noguchi Museum, Jack, The Glasshouse, and Dixon Place. Selected artist residencies include Brooklyn Art Space, Wave Hill’s Winter Workspace, the Bronx Museum’s AIM program, Yaddo, BRICworkspace, Art Omi, Project for Empty Space, LMCC’s Workspace and Bemis. Her work is part of the permanent collection of the Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice. Selected awards and grants include NYFA’s Canadian Women’s Artist Award, Canada Council for the Arts’ Explore and Create and Travel Grants, and BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize.
2) Kyoung eun Kang
Kyoung eun Kang is a New York-based artist born in South Korea. Kang works in a wide range of media, including performance, video, painting, photography, installation, text, and sound pieces. Kang’s work has been exhibited internationally and across the United States in galleries and museums, including: A.I.R. Gallery; Collar Works; NURTUREart; BRIC Project Room; and the ISCP project space in New York; the Korean Cultural Center in Washington, D.C.; the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery in Australia; and the National Museum of Modern Art in Korea. Kang has received residencies and fellowships at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency, BRIC Media Arts, the NARS Foundation, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the LES Studio Program, ISCP, the New York Foundation for the Arts, among others. She received a BFA and MFA in painting from Hong-ik University in Seoul, South Korea and an MFA from Parsons School of Design, New York. Currently Kang is a 2023-24 studio artist at Smack Mellon.
3) Kakyoung Lee
Kakyoung Lee (she/her) is a Korean-born, Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist. Her practice spans printmaking, animation, and installation. Interdisciplinary engagement with print and time-based work is central to her research and studio practice. Lee holds her BFA and MFA in printmaking from Hong-Ik University, as well as an MFA from SUNY-Purchase College, NY. Lee has exhibited in numerous exhibitions both locally and internationally including the Drawing Center and Mass MoCA, and held in public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Asia Society Museum in New York, and National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. Lee has participated in numerous artist residency programs including the Marie Walsh Sharpe, Yaddo, McDowell Colony, Omi, ISCP, Jamaica Center of Arts and Learning, and Brandywine Workshop and Archives (BWA) where she was able to focus on experimenting with time-intensive print/animation projects. Lee received grants and awards including the American Academy of Arts and Letter Purchase Award, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, NYFA Fellowship, and AHL Foundation Award. Lee’s works have been featured in the Library of Congress blog, Art in Paper, Hyperallergic, and Printeresting.com.
4) Jiwon Rhie
Jiwon Rhie is a Korean multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Her work deals with diverse subject matter across installations, sculptures, and video, exploring ideas of boundaries, human relationships, cultural identities, and communication. She holds an MFA from Pratt Institute and a BFA from Hannam University and Hongik University. She has exhibited extensively, notably at Bombay Beach Biennale, Mana Contemporary, Transmitter Gallery, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Hannam University Museum, Home Gallery, Daejeon Museum of Art, and Spring Break Art Show among many others. She is a recipient of The Bronx Museum of Arts AIM Fellowship, AHL – T&W Foundation Contemporary Visual Art Award, Monira Foundations Artist in Residence, Queens Art Fund Award by The Queens Council on the Arts, and NARS Foundation fellowship. Her forthcoming solo exhibitions include P.A.D. in 2023 and La MaMa Galleria in 2024.
5) Hyeree Ro
Hyeree Ro was born in Seoul, South Korea and was raised in Santa Rosa, California and Seoul, Korea. She attended Korea National University of Arts (BFA, 2017) and Yale School of Art (MFA in Sculpture, 2021). She has exhibited at MMCA National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Cheongju, Korea), SVA CP Project Space (New York, NY), Keepsake Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Leeum Museum of Art (Seoul, Korea), and Akiyoshidai International Art Village (Mine, Japan) amongst others. Recent projects include: “Lunares” (2023, Together Together), “Falls” (2022, Leeum Museum of Art). She received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant (2023), The Jenni Crain Foundation Grant (2024), and Susan H. Whedon Award (2021).
6)Kristina Wong
Kristina Wong is a performance artist, comedian and writer who has been presented internationally across North America, UK, Hong Kong and Africa. Her most notable solo works include “Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “The Wong Street Journal,” and “Kristina Wong for Public Office.” “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” premiered at New York Theater Workshop and won the Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle and Lucille Lortel Awards for Outstanding Solo Performance and is a Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Drama. She’s a Doris Duke Award Award Winner and Guggenheim Fellow who has been supported by among others, Creative Capital, The MAP Fund, ASU Gammage Artist Residency, Joan D. Firestone Commissioning Fund from En Garde Arts, Art Matters and the Kennedy Center Social Practice Residency.
7)Kim Ye
Kim Ye is a Chinese American artist, writer, and organizer whose research-based practice engages gendered constructions of power, and the entanglement between public space and private desire. Working professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, Ye has been on the board of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles since 2019. She is currently a Mellon Arts Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow at Community Partners, and visiting faculty in the Photography & Media program at CalArts. Her work has been funded by the California Arts Council (USA), The National Endowment for the Arts (USA), The Foundation for Contemporary Art (USA), The Mellon Foundation (USA), and The Australia Council for the Arts (Australia). Ye received their MFA from UCLA, and BA from Pomona College in Claremont, California.
