TUESDAY
JULY 14
1:30PM PDT

2:30PM MDT

Organized by stephanie mei huang
Co-presented by Contemporary Calgary

Duration: 2hrs
Via Zoom, free with registration

About the Discussion:

This panel is held in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and all those globally denouncing systems of oppression, racism and police brutality. We are vested in the global rebellion precipitated by George Floyd’s killing. As long as some groups are more vulnerable to violence and death than others, we will not be able to realize our full collective humanity or achieve racial justice.

In light of the pandemic, the pre-existing dysfunction within many systems and their leadership are magnified and racial, gender, and class inequalities exacerbated. The yellow woman’s body, historically rendered either invisible or as “object,” is now catapulted into hypervisibility amidst xenophobic questions of contagion, virility, and a history of scapegoatism. 

Asian women occupy a precarious racial embodiment within their art practices and Western contemporary art, regularly experiencing institutional racism and tokenism. Their presence within the art world often produces a racial wedge between whiteness and other people of colour.

In conversation with Pearl C Hsiung, Maia Ruth Lee, Astria Suparak, Stephanie Syjuco, Hồng-Ân Trương, and Christine Tien Wang, host stephanie mei huang invites all to hear from six Asian women artists on reckoning with a racialized and gendered spectrum of visibility, moving through their practices with and of yellow embodiment, and the possibility of racial (or transgressively, non-racial) alternatives. 

Panel Update:

Two weeks ago, the hyper(in)visiblity panel was rescheduled from June 30th to July 14th in order to run independently of VAG. It will now run as scheduled but independently of Contemporary Calgary.

The convened panel of artists was developed and led by stephanie mei huang as part of her Collider residency at Contemporary Calgary, featuring artists Pearl C. Hsiung, Maia Ruth Lee, Astria Suparak, Stephanie Syjuco, Hồng-Ân Trương, and Christine Tien Wang. She first proposed the panel to Contemporary Calgary on May 7th amidst the climate of COVID-19 and rise of anti-Asian xenophobia to discuss the yellow woman’s body, contagion, and virility from the perspective of Asian American artists. In the days and weeks that followed, the urgency to examine systemic racism in arts institutions decentered the original intentions of the panel. The panelists felt that a focus on the work that our institution needs to address in our own community was required, but also eclipsed the important discussions originally proposed. Contemporary Calgary supports the artists’ decision to postpone the panel and to run the event independently. 

Events of the last month have brought to the fore the urgent need for institutions like Contemporary Calgary to confront systemic racism and colonial systems and to engage in difficult but necessary conversations internally and externally, recognizing the importance of examining our past and present as a necessary part of creating long-lasting change as we move forward. Contemporary Calgary recognizes there is a lot of work we need to do and are committed to learning, taking actions, and continuing to find ways in which we can do better.

The panel will continue without CC as a partner. Registration for this panel is still open and will take place live on zoom

About the Host:

stephanie mei huang

stephanie mei huang is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist. Her work finds its roots in globalization and the role of displacement in changing perceptions of nationhood, loss, and identity. Through research and practice, she aims to erode the violent mythologies that perpetuate expansionist narratives, in the hopes of fabulating adjacent histories. She uses a diverse range of media and strategies including film/video, installation, sculpture, writing, and painting. She recently completed her MFA at the California Institute of the Arts (2020). She is the recipient of a Getty Foundation grant and has taught at non-profits such as the Marfa Studio of Arts and Venice Arts. She has participated in residency programs at Millay Colony of the Arts, Austerlitz and Artists’ Cooperative Residency and Exhibitions (ACRE), Steuben. Her work has recently been shown at the Official Marfa Film Festival, Marfa, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, Gimpo, and the University of California Los Angeles New Wight Gallery, Los Angeles. She will have solo exhibitions at 4th Ward Project Space in Chicago and Hauser and Wirth Book and Printed Matter Lab, Los Angeles in the coming year. 

About the Panelists:

Pearl C. Hsiung

Pearl C. Hsiung is a Los Angeles based artist, born in Taichung, Taiwan. Her painting, installation and video works question our real and perceived boundaries separating human and nature, de-centering culture as human-only endeavor in expanding our understanding of ecology. She has exhibited in solo shows in Los Angeles, London and Kunming, China as well as in group exhibits such as The Beyond; Georgia O’Keeffe and Contemporary Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art; Made in L.A. 2012 at the Hammer Museum, California Biennial 2006 at the Orange County Museum of Art; Busan Biennale 2006 at Museum of Modern Art in South Korea. She has been commissioned for a large-scale, tile mosaic mural for the Grand Av Arts/Bunker Hill Metro station opening in downtown Los Angeles in 2022.

Maia Ruth Lee

Maia Ruth Lee is a New York based artist and educator born in Busan, South Korea. Lee’s first solo exhibition in New York was at Eli Ping Frances Perkins in 2016, followed by her solo exhibition at Jack Hanley Gallery two years later. She has participated in numerous group exhibitions including at CANADA gallery (New York), Salon 94 (New York), Roberts & Tilton Gallery (Los Angeles), and Parisian Laundry Gallery (Montreal). Lee participated in the Whitney Biennial 2019 and was the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Grant in 2017. Lee is the director of the nonprofit after school art program Wide Rainbow.

Astria Suparak

Astria Suparak is an independent curator and artist based in Oakland, California. Her cross-disciplinary projects often address urgent political issues and have been widely acclaimed for their high level concepts made accessible through a popular culture lens. Suparak has curated exhibitions, screenings, performances, and live music events for art institutions and festivals across ten countries, including The Liverpool Biennial, Museo Rufino Tamayo, MoMA PS1, Eyebeam, The Kitchen, Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen, and Expo Chicago, as well as for unconventional spaces such as roller-skating rinks, ferry boats, sports bars, and rock clubs. Her current research interests include linguistics, food histories, diasporas, and sci-fi.

Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco is based in Oakland, California and works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of racialized, exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. For 2019/2020 she is a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC. She is the recipient of a 2014 Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a 2009 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award, and a 2020 Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work has been exhibited widely, including at MoMA/P.S.1, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The 12th Havana Bienal, among others. A long-time educator, she is an Associate Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley.

Hồng-Ân Trương

Hồng-An Trương is based in Durham, North Carolina where she is an activist and an Associate Professor of Art at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She uses photography, sound, video, and performance to examine histories of war and immigrant and refugee narratives through a decolonial framework. Her work has been shown at venues such as the International Center for Photography (NY), Art in General (NY), the Nasher Museum of Art (Durham, NC), The Kitchen (NY), Nhà Sàn (Hanoi), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (Dublin, Ireland), Leslie Tonkonow Gallery (NY), the Rubber Factory (NY), the Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MN). She has been awarded an Art Matters Foundation Grant, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts emergency grant, and is a 2019-2020 Guggenheim Foundation Fellow in Fine Art.

Christine Tien Wang

Christine Tien Wang is a San Francisco based artist, currently serving as Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at California College of Art. She lives and works in San Francisco. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA in painting from UCLA. Wang has had several solo exhibitions at Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Evergold [Projects] in San Francisco, and Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne and Berlin. She was shortlisted for the 2019 SFMOMA SECA award. Wang's work is in the public collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Wang is represented by Night Gallery in Los Angeles and Galerie Nagel Draxler in Cologne and Berlin.