OUR GREAT LEADER WILL NUKE YOU

First up is Son Kit’s room, OUR GREAT LEADER WILL NUKE YOU. We don’t usually do this but since you’re here, we figured we’d share part of the Kit’s curatorial statement. This is what it feels like to be an insider.

Kit writes, “The Risk of Nuclear War with North Korea,” cautions The New Yorker. “How to Deal With North Korea,” advises The Atlantic. “North Korean despot Kim Jong-un is ‘plotting to nuke Yellowstone super volcano’ and spark eruption that will split US in half,” cries The Sun. The reputability of these individual publications aside, the majority of reporting on the DPRK—whether the close tracking of missile tests or hasty screenshots of Trump’s newest Twitter feud with Kim—constructs an English-language narrative whose plot can only climax in nuclear holocaust.

Expert opinion on the actual possibility of war fluctuates with each new development, but sensationalism profits through steady escalation. Aided in no small part by the impossible personalities of both the U.S. and North Korean leaders, American headlines keep an otherwise footnoted peninsula on the front page for a terrified public.

OUR GREAT LEADER WILL NUKE YOU is an exhibition of works by diasporic Koreans currently residing in the U.S. Displaced (whether directly or generationally) by a war into a country that does not remember it, the hyphenated Korean experiences estrangement in visibility and invisibility: though they are seen as perpetually foreign yellow bodies, their status as American residents implicates them in American fears. If one Great Leader nukes the U.S., they will die with the U.S. If the other Great Leader retaliates with “fire and fury,” who dies then? Who dies first? Who do they fear for? Where do allegiances originate—from land, from blood, from whoever will spare them in the aftermath?

Kit frames the exhibition as a speculation into a post-North Korean nuclear apocalypse. OUR GREAT LEADER WILL NUKE YOU asks specifically after the real and imagined survival of Korean bodies who are subject to the war games and thought exercises of their Western surroundings, and features work by Kira Nam Greene, Son Kit, Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin, and Taehee Whang.

About the Artists

TIFFANY JAEYEON SHIN
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin (b. 1993) is a Korean-Canadian-American artist, curator, educator, and community organizer. Shin explores the interconnections between sexuality, gender, and transgression; history, memory, and cultural myths; and social hierarchy in relationship to coloniality. Shin uses Taoist indigenous knowledge to explore the porousness of bodily boundaries and the ceaseless movement of living processes, like fermentation, echoing the history of colonialism. Shin is interested in entangling the history of conquest and the literal digestion of material - herbs, medicine, and food - into a new system of relations that emerge from a complicated history of entanglement. Shin lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Shin has collaborated with and/or exhibited at Trestle Gallery, Local Project, Abrons Arts Center, Miranda Kuo Gallery, and many others. Shin has exhibted her firtst solo show at the AC Institute. Shin is the recipient of the NARS Emerging Curator 2017 award. Shin works and lives in Brooklyn, NY.

KIRA NAM GREENE
Kira Nam Greene’s work explores female sexuality, desire and control through lush still-life paintings of food, surrounded by complex patterns and abstract designs. Imbuing the feminist legacies of Pattern and Decoration Movement with transnational/multicultural patterns, Greene creates colorful paintings that are unique combinations of realism and abstraction, employing diverse media such as oil, acrylic, gouache, watercolor and colored pencil. More recently, Greene’s interest in food has expanded into examining ethical aspects of modern food consumption and the proliferation of advertising imagery on our visual culture in a series of paintings of mass produced and brand name food products. In this latest series, Greene combines typical Pop Art tropes with global motifs, subverting the marketing slogans out of context among highly crafted patterns rooted in older cultural traditions. Born in Seoul, Korea, Greene lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her MFA from School of Visual Arts, BFA from San Francisco Art Institute, Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford University and BA in International Relations from Seoul National University. Greene has shown her work widely at venues such as Accola Griefen Gallery, Jane Lombard Gallery, Kiechel Fine Art, A.I.R. Gallery, Brown University, Salisbury University, Wave Hill, Bronx Museum of Art, Noyes Museum and Sheldon Museum of Art.

TAEHEE WHANG
Taehee Whang is a Korean American interdisciplinary artist and educator who works in video, printmaking, and sculpture. They completed their BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2016. They collaborated and worked with various institutions such as Eyebeam, Asian Art Archive, Children’s Museum of the Arts (CMANY), Studio REV-, BUFU, RISD Museum, and New York Arts Practicum (NYAP).

SON KIT
First spawned in Los Angeles, CA, Son Kit scored their degrees in Visual Art and Literary Arts at Brown University in Providence, RI. Kit employs climate change fantasy as allegory for displacement and diaspora and utilizes video, illustration, installation, and text to explore non-binary second-gen yellow narratives in pursuit of a New Canon of Korean-American Speculative Fiction Authored Entirely By Them. Kit has most recently exhibited with the New Museum, SPRING/BREAK Art Show, SOHO20, The Naughton Gallery, OUTLET, and Associated Gallery. They are a Co-founder and Chief Curator at Codify Art, a multidisciplinary collective of, and platform for, QTPOC artists.

SPRING BREAK IS JUST AROUND THE CORNER.

Y’all, it’s been a week! On Monday we started load-in for SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018 (as you may have seen on our Instagram story), on Thursday we closed Hair Paintings and Other Stories… and today we’re putting the final touches on our rooms at SPRING/BREAK Art Show. You read that right, room$$$. Plural. We’ve got two entire rooms this year and we’re so excited to share the work with you this week. We can’t wait to introduce you to our featured artists.

First, we thought we’d start by talking about SPRING/BREAK Art Show. What is it? Who is it? What’s the deal? SPRING/BREAK Art Show was first produced in 2012 by curators, Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly who together make up The They Co. Over the last seven years SPRING/BREAK Art Show has become an internationally recognized exhibition platform using underused, atypical and historic New York City exhibition spaces to activate and challenge the traditional cultural landscape of the art market, during Armory Arts Week. In exchange for no-cost exhibition space, visionary perspectives both established and unknown are charged with engaging these areas under a unifying theme and pushed to extend the boundaries of typical market week practices, low overhead and shifting curatorial themes their assets to this end.

This year’s theme is “Stranger Comes to Town.” In their call for submissions, Gori and Kelly proposed, “Even in a land looming with a copper Goddess, one practically begging for the whole world’s Strangers, America’s symbolic territories have consistently mobilized against the Outsider—even, as if obeying vampiric protocol, after inviting them straight in the front door. Yet more than any other country, we are an entire nation of Strangers. This Stranger-ness compounds in its particular foreign associations, but also evaporates under a fairly quick makeover by naturalization, from each territories’ particular Laws of the Land. What is this transformation process—and once you become ‘one of Them’ is there a full moon that can ever turn you back? What the hell alchemy makes us ‘Us’ anyway? And just what kind of Tod Browning-style freak-show of assimilation have we put together here among the accepted and desirable of every part of our world?... A Cultural Trend is also a stranger, new in town. As is Youth, forever evicting the Young before them from the relevancy of trends prior. What becomes Timeless, how does our shit turn gold and when do Golden Years make it gold-er? And what other aspects of everyday life construe the dichotomy of Local/Out-Of-Towner? … SPRING/BREAK Art Show 2018 seeks works about foreignness, migration, assimilation, and the alchemy of two or more dissolving into each other—or story, as the adage suggests—its limitations, arcs, and disassembling in the realm of formal art practice as a further articulation of Them and Us, narrator and audience; two strangers to one another, caught in an exchange.” For a full synopsis of the curatorial statement, visit SPRING/BREAK Art Show’s website!

In response, we got to work on the two proposals that were selected, OUR GREAT LEADER WILL NUKE YOU and UNTILL. Come back tomorrow for more information on each of our rooms and to find out more about the artists that will be featured this year!

Towards an Authentic, Diverse Theater

There is a fundamental disconnect between the future of the theater field and the way it is being discussed currently. The industry has only recently taken up arms to address problems of exclusion as it pertains to women and people of color on stage (it would be naïve to not attribute some of this awareness to the extreme financial and artistic success of Hamilton, a show that is unapologetically not white). Efforts such as The List by The Kilroys are a step forward in the inclusion of women. Audiences are demanding accountability for theaters producing exclusively white works. The battle cries of the silenced are now difficult to ignore. Still, we are approaching the issue in fragments, and because of this we are still operating under a white hegemony.

Due to current industry structure, we as people of color require recognition, programming, and support by producers and organizations that are overwhelmingly white. This discrepancy has undeniable repercussions on our art. We are asked to make art in a market that is rooted in a Eurocentric history that does not allow for expressions outside of its conventions. As such, our narratives are still being filtered through the storytelling conventions of whiteness. In trying to be seen, are we compromising our own histories and rituals?

This issue is further fueled by the dearth of critics of color. In the rare instances where we are able to produce without compromising ourselves, we are critiqued by those who are still deeply imbedded in white societal norms. We are judged by those who have very little understanding of our narrative practices. When the ritual of a piece is built on, say,  an Afrocentric tradition, it runs the risk of getting a bad review. In the system under which we work, we are yet again looking for the approval of a white majority to validate (read: bolster our financial and artistic success) us.

In order to allow the full breadth of humanity onto the stage, we need to do more than simply present and feature the work of artists of color. We must give voices of color a platform from which to tell their own stories, in their own voices. We have to allow for criticism of work by an array of opinions to allow for all approaches to exist in homology. To further Audre Lorde’s claim, not only do we need to recognize that “the master’s house [will] not be dismantled by the master’s tools,” but we must also stop looking to gain boarding in the house entirely and instead build a new one—one whose door is equally open to everyone and whose foundation is made stronger by the diversity of material.