BFA Fine Arts presents Mindful Joint 2018, a two-day symposium which brings together artists, writers and curators from South Korea and the U.S. The symposium does not attempt to define what contemporary Korean art is, nor does present a unified history. Instead, the symposium assimilates practices of Korean artists to the conversations that are taking place around the world by matching professionals in the U.S. whose practices share similar interests.

Mindful Joint 2018 offers a meeting point where similar yet different ideas gather together and open new ideas. Contemporary Korean art has been marginalized as an outsider of the hegemonic discourses of art. This symposium aims to break the generalized perception of the nation to understand the complexities of practices and cultural backgrounds. Unexpected connections will add new lines of narratives into the fabric of global conversations.

This two-day symposium will take place in two locations.

Thursday, April 5, 6:30 – 8:30pm
Screenings and a lecture by Sung Hwan Kim, moderated by Yongwoo Lee
RSVP here
NYU East Asian Studies, 19 University Place, Room 102

Friday, April 6
1:00pm: Opening reception

1:30pm: Suzanne Anker, Jaewook Lee, Jaeyong Park, Goeun Song

2:00pm: Onejoon Che, Xiaoyu Weng (Moderator: Jaewook Lee)

3:00pm: Kim Heecheon, Isla Hansen (Moderator: Jaeyong Park)

4:00pm: Min Oh, Andrew V. Uroskie (Moderator: Goeun Song)

5:00pm: Group Conversation (Moderator: Boyong Chang)
RSVP here
SVA BFA Fine Arts Department, 335 West 16th street, first floor

Mindful Joint Team of Organizers:
Suzanne Anker (chair of SVA BFA Fine Arts)
Boyong Chang (art historian)
Jaewook Lee (director of the Mindful Joint)
Yongwoo Lee (assistant professor and faculty fellow, New York University)
Jaeyong Park (curator, writer for Frieze)
Goeun Song (curator of Artspace Boan1942)

Participants:
Onejoon Che (filmmaker and artist, recently participated in the New Museum Triennial)
Isla Hansen (assistant professor of Media Art at UCLA)
Kim Heecheon (artist, recently participated in the 2017 Istanbul Biennial)
Sung Hwan Kim (artist, recently participated in the 2017 Venice Biennale)
Min Oh (artist, winner of major prizes in Korea)
Xiaoyu Weng (associate curator at the Guggenheim Museum)
Andrew V. Uroskie (associate professor of Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University)

Biographies:

Onejoon Che, a visual artist and filmmaker, started his career as a photographer. For "Texas Project" (2004 – 2008), Che photographed the declining red-light district in Miari, Seoul, South Korea, after the government initiated the anti-prostitution law in 2004. He also made short films and archives that capture the trauma of modern Korean history by documenting the bunkers during the post-Korean War period and the abandoned U.S. Army camps in South Korea after the Iraq War. In recent years, Che produced a documentary project Mansudai Master Class, which is about the monuments and statues made by North Korean artists in Africa. Starting with this project, he is currently creating a documentary theater production, a film and an installation about North Korean propaganda culture and identity. Che has participated in the Taipei Biennial, the Palais de Tokyo modules, SeMA Biennale Mediacity Seoul, the Venice Architecture Biennale Korean Pavilion and the New Museum Triennial. He is currently a fellow artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

Boyoung Chang is a PhD candidate in Art History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey. Her dissertation focuses on contemporary Korean photography since the 1990s, which involves societal changes and construction of national identity. It discusses issues of Korean identity, deconstruction of masculinized history and the reinvention of documentary tradition. With these topics, she presented her research papers, "Resisting Ideal Men: Performative Bodies in Contemporary Korean Photography at the College Art Association" (105th Annual Conference, New York, 2017); "Manhood Subverted: Representation of Masculinity in Contemporary Korean Photography at the Annual Conference, Association for Asian Studies" (Toronto, Canada, 2017), among others. Her research interests also include modern Korean photography and interactions of contemporary photographic practices among Asian countries.

Isla Hansen is an artist working to reinterpret and complicate the relationship between the human body and technological progress. Her work reenacts forms of popular media and systems of production. She recreates ways in which bodies connect to technologies in the world around us. Her solo and collaborative installations, systems and performances have been exhibited at the Columbus Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, the Hammer Museum, the Parrish Art Museum, Miller Gallery and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Isla received her BA from Columbia University and her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University, and is currently an Assistant Professor in Design Media Arts at UCLA.

Kim Heecheon was born in 1989 in Gwangju, Korea. He graduated from the Korea National University of Arts with a degree in Architecture and has since worked in Seoul. His latest solo exhibition, "HOME," at the Doosan Gallery in Seoul was held in 2017. He also took part in Istanbul Biennial: A good neighbour, Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, 2017, SeMA Biennale: Media City Seoul 2016, and also in group exhibitions such as "O philoi, oudeis philos," Atelier Hermes, Seoul, 2017; "Void," MMCA, Seoul, 2016; "iwillmedievalfutureyou5," Kunsthal Aarhus, 2016.

Sung Hwan Kim is currently based in New York. He was a fellow at the Rijksakademie. His work has been exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the 2004 and 2016 Gwangju Biennale, the 2008 Berlin Biennale, Manifesta 8 and Media City Seoul 2010, among others. Prizes include the Hermes Korea Missulsang (Hermes Korea Prize for Contemporary Art), the second prize of the Prix de Rome from the Netherlands and the Karl Sczuka prize for a radio play produced with Intermedium Records titled "Sung Hwan Kim/dogr: One from in the room: dog I knew."

Jaewook Lee is an artist, writer, amateur scientist, semi-philosopher and sometime curator. Lee is the founder and director of Mindful Joint, an annual symposium that focuses on non-hierarchical knowledge sharing in contemporary art. Lee is the recipient of awards such as the fourth SINAP (Sindoh Artist Support Program) and the SeMA Emerging Artists and Curators Supporting Program by the Seoul Museum of Art. Lee has participated in exhibitions, talks, performances and screenings at such venues as Art Sonje Center in Seoul (2017), the Guggenheim Museum in New York (2017), the Asia Culture Center in Gwangju (2016), the Seoul Museum of Art (2015), NURTUREart in Brooklyn (2014), the Museo Juan Manuel Blanes in Montevideo (2014), MANIFESTA 9 parallel event in Hasselt (2012), the Chelsea Art Museum in New York (2011), and the Coreana Museum in Seoul (2006), among others. His work has been featured in Sculpture, TK-21, and Artforum.com, among others. Lee received his BFA from Korea National University of Arts in Seoul and MFAs in Art Practice at the School of Visual Arts and the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon University.

Yongwoo Lee is a media historian and cultural studies scholar based in New York and Seoul. He teaches media and cultural studies of modern Korea, film theory and popular culture in East Asia, intellectual history of wartime Japan and postwar Korea, Korean contemporary art and post/colonial historiography in the Department of East Asian Studies at New York University.

Min Oh is a visual artist based in Amsterdam and Seoul. Oh investigates the sense of tension in her work. She focuses on performance as a medium through which to observe techniques of estimating, planning, training and organizing, which human beings have developed to cope with insecurities, as well as accompanying aspects of logic, structure, concentration, process, control and tension. She received bachelor’s degrees in Piano Performance (1998) and Graphic Design (2000) at Seoul National University, Seoul, and her MFA (2008) at Yale University, New Haven. Her work has been exhibited at Daegu Art Museum (Daegu, 2017), Doosan Gallery (New York, 2017, and Seoul, 2016), Arko Art Center (Seoul, 2016), Kukje Gallery (Seoul, 2016), Nam June Paik Art Center (Yongin, 2015), National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (Gwacheon, 2014), Nederlandsche Bank Gallery (Amsterdam, 2012) and Kunsthalle Erfurt (2011). Oh held a residency at Cité Internationale des Arts, which was funded by the Samsung Foundation (2014–15), Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten (2011–12) and won Hermès Misulsang (2017), Sindoh Artist Support Program (2016) and the 6th Doosan Artist Award (2015).

Jaeyong Park is a curator, writer, translator and research scholar. Previously, Park served as a curator at large at Ilmin Museum of Art and a curator of 5th APAP (Anyang Public Art Project) and organized a curatorial initiative Work on Work and a temporary educational program Curating School Seoul. He also produced exhibitions and projects such as Time is Out of Joint at Sharjah Art Foundation, ACC in Gwangju, South Korea and United Paradox at Portikus, Germany.

Goeun Song studied Painting at Sejong University in Korea and received her MA in Art and Space from Kingston University, London. Recently, Song has contributed in organizing and writing for exhibitions such as "2017 SEOUL BIENNALE OF ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM CITIES EXHIBITION : COMMONING CITIES_ SEONGBUK ART COMMONS" (2017), "Hesitation Form: Gone with the Beginning" (2015) and "The Smell of the Moon: Swiss New Media Art" (2015), among others. Song’s interest in various methodologies of knowledge production in art has led to other projects and workshops including Mindful Joint: Non-hierarchical Knowledge Sharing in Contemporary Art (2016), Sensible Residence (2016), and Right Then, Wrong Now: Curators’ Conversation (2015).

Xiaoyu Weng is the Robert H.N. Ho Family Foundation Associate Curator of Chinese Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She served as the founding director of the Kadist Art Foundation’s Asia Programs, Paris and San Francisco. There, she launched the Kadist Curatorial Collaboration, which organizes exhibitions that stimulate cultural exchange and she also oversaw artist residencies and the building of the contemporary Asian art collection. Her essay, "Working with Archive," won the Artforum Critical Writing Award in 2011. Her writing also appears in prominent art periodicals, books and exhibition catalogues, including those published for the 2012 Gwangju Biennial, 2012 Shenzhen Sculpture Biennial and 2013 Auckland Triennial.

Andrew V. Uroskie specializes in late modern and contemporary art. His work is broadly informed by psychoanalysis, phenomenology and post-structuralist philosophy, and focuses on how durational media have helped to reframe our understanding of aesthetic production, exhibition, spectatorship and objecthood in the contemporary era. Uroskie’s essays have been published in the journals Grey Room (MIT), Animation (Sage), Organized Sound (Cambridge), Sequencias (Universidad de Madrid), Forum Italicum (SUNY), the Journal of Visual Culture (Sage), and October (MIT), as well as within the edited collections, The Moving Image (Whitechapel/MIT), The Exhibition of a Film (Les Presses du Réel), This is Contemporary Art Today (Noosphere), Screen/Space: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art (Manchester), Art and the Moving Image: A Critical Reader (Tate and Afterall), Pierre Coulibeuf: Dédale (Ibère Camargo), and Crowds (Stanford). His writing has so far been translated into Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean and Basque. Uroskie’s monographic study, Between the Black and the White Cube: Expanded Cinema in Postwar Art, was published in 2014 by the University of Chicago Press, and has been reviewed in the journals Leonardo, Visual Studies and Afterimage, as well as by the Art Libraries Society of North America and the College Art Association.

Special Event

Mindful Joint 2018: Contemporary Korean Art in Conversations