- Exhibition Dates: October 29, 2022 – November 17, 2022
- Curator: Stéphanie Jeanjean
- Participating Artists: Suhyun Choi, Jae Hwan Lim, Ken Gun Min, Kayla Tange
- Venue: AHL Foundation, Inc. (2605 Frederick Douglass Blvd., New York, NY 10030)
- Opening Reception: Saturday, October 29, 3-6pm
Foreword to the Exhibition
Sook Nyu Lee Kim created AHL Foundation, in 2003, as a non-profit organization which mission was to support and promote the activities of visual artists of Korean heritage working in the United States. Throughout the years, AHL Foundation has become identified by artists and art professionals as a rare resource for them providing support and guidance with grants, awards, classes, workshops, mentorship programs, networking, and exhibition opportunities, to mention only a few.
For the 2022 AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship Award, AHL Foundation received 88 applications, coming from almost 25 different states in the United States of America, which is a significant increase in the number and origin of applications submitted in previous years. The diversity and quality of the applications was impressive, as well as the strength and clarity of the respective positions and engagement they articulated.
For the 2022 AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship, four artists were selected by a jury—composed of Habiba Hopson (Curatorial Assistant, Collections, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York), and myself, Stéphanie Jeanjean (Ph.D., art historian/curator, Cooper Union and Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York).
The four awardees are: Suhyun Choi, Jae Hwan Lim, Ken Gun Min, and Kayla Tange. Each artist presents strong individual works that connect with today’s polarized ideological climate and/or contribute to advance complex social and/or political discussions. Their artistic path so far has been difficult and/or exemplar and we, as juries, foresee many promises in their works to come.
My Juror Evaluation of the four fellowship recipients follows:
Suhyun Choi (Brooklyn, NY) is a non-binary multi-media artist and social organizer. Since 2015, Suhyun Choi has been active as a co-founder and member of BUFU (By Us For Us)—a collective of femmes and non-binary Black and East-Asian artists and organizers. BUFU proposes free programs (led by BIPOC, queer, and trans people) that engage with experimental learning and organizing, using creative decentralized and decolonized educational programs intending to empower and bridge together underrepresented and communities that are discriminated against. Similarly, in their visual artworks, Suhyun Choi uses visuals, texts, and various forms of printmaking and agitprop, to explore themes such as: the pressure of Korean beauty standards on women (reviewing the history of double eyelid surgery in Korea, started by an American plastic surgeon Ralph D. Millard), or the effects of U.S. imperialism and Japanese colonialism through their North Korean great grandmother’s experience in the Korean war. Suhyun Choi’s practice also introduces the notion of reindigenization, which they explain as: “learning the different effects colonialism has had on my body, to re-learn the indigenous practices of my ancestors, and be in deep understanding and relationship to myself and others to vision the future”
Jae Hwan Lim’s (San Diego, CA) work develops in painting, installation, and video, as well as in socially engaged art involving viewer’s participation. Since 2016, Jae Hwan Lim’s main focuses has been the rarely articulated theme of North and South Korean relationships, following the division of the peninsula in 1945. The artist interest in this topic stems from a journey to North Korea ancestral muse Mount Kumgang—the Diamond Mountain of Korea—, that he took as a child, but which is now inaccessible to non-North Korean.
Engaging with social and political histories,—using archival material, as well as written correspondences between the artist and North Korean defectors, or the collection of their testimonies as refugees in the Netherlands—, Jae Hwan Lim presents a larger diversity of views, which includes that of the land and that of the people, compared to limited political and militaristic discourses on North Korean dictatorship that have stalled the discussions.
Beyond his visual work, Jae Hwan Lim is also active within the organization he created: Humans of North Korea (HNK), which informs and supports the resettlement of North Korean to South Korea or to the United States. The artist’s intention is to share a message for peace and promote social unity in Korea today.
Ken Gun Min (Los Angeles, CA) creates large scale paintings as well as mixed-media, objects and image-based installations that intend to challenge first-world-oriented perspectives, especially those found in Euro-and US-centrisms. Formally, whether there are two- or three-dimensional, Ken Gun Min’s works are slightly asymmetrical, consequently challenging one of Western aesthetics’ major pillars since Antiquity, balance. Additionally, the artist generally works on raw canvases where he combines western-style oil paints with Asian pigments. Similarly, in his works arrays of colorful beads and vintage crystals are often included in association with Korean threaded fabrics and Kimono. Mixing traditions and periods, cultures and histories, the artist collides time and space, high and low, and gives visibility to his own Korean origins, updating and expanding the canon.
Proposing endless combinations of visual references—found in his own photography, as well as in commercial illustrations, online collections, vintage animation clips, screen captures, or random twitter feeds—, Ken Gun Yeop Min composes a data of visual sources presenting a more integrated vision of culture, in a pluricultural rather than multicultural approach of the world.
Kayla Tange (Los Angeles, CA) presents a rich, colorful, and flamboyant multimedia work—including sculpture, installation, dance, performance, body art, and video—, in which she explores complex traumatic constructions of memory and desire in association. Central to her practice is her straightforward video piece Dear Mother (2017), a visual letter to her birth mother who refuses to meet her. In this work and in others, Kayla Tange uses a direct, honest, and uncompromising approach that she phrases as: “living my truth,” which allows her here to negotiate and accept herself, as a Korean adoptee into a Japanese-American family, and to continue coping and moving on.
Other works by Kayla Tange develop as burlesque spectacles associating aspects of exotic dancing to Asian stereotypes, fetishes, functions, and characters. Here, by provoking and attracting the viewer’s gaze onto herself, and forcefully erasing the limits between public and private, Kayla Tange manages in these works for the pressure of exposure to be placed back onto the viewer and/or voyeur of the work. This way, she intends to create a space of sincerity, vulnerability, and mutual exchange with the spectator, at the intersection between personal stories and constructions of desires.
Works by the four awardees are presented in the current exhibition, titled Finding Oneself in Others. It presents artworks that explore the artists’ identities and emphasizes their positions as mediators or intercessors facilitating difficult or impossible (but important) conversations: between an adopted daughter and her estranged biological mother, between an immigrant and the culture he enters, between queer people and a society traditionally straight, or attempting to re-engage a deserted dialogue between North and South Korea.
October 2022
Stéphanie Jeanjean (Ph.D.)
Art Historian, Curator & AHL Head Juror (2022)
