On view April 23-May 8, 2015 at FLATSstudio No. 1050, Chicago

Work Werq is a group art exhibition featuring work by Matthew Avignone, Aram Han Sifuentes, Regin Igloria, Audra Jacot, Kiam Marcelo Junio, Hee Ran Lee with Kinnari Vora, Patricia Nguyen, Soo Shin, Leonard Suryajaya, and _jJ4XXX5YN_(collaboration between jonCates and 愛真 Janet Lin), curated by Jacqueline Chao and Aram Han Sifuentes. The exhibition will have an opening reception featuring music by Carla Starla, free refreshments provided by Koval Distillery, and live performances on Thursday, April 23, 2015 from 6-10 pm at FLATSstudio No. 1050, located at 1050 W. Wilson Ave, Chicago, IL.

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

Work (\ˈwərk\) noun, verb, adjective:  labor, process, art.

Werq (\ˈwərk\) verb: to wear (whether clothes or skin) with ferocity. 

Work Werq challenges preconceived notions of Asian (American) identity. The exhibition presents Chicago-based Asian American artists who explore a range of topics including: migration, globalization, gender, queer politics and identity.  Opening night will include visual arts of various media and live performances.

This exhibition is organized in partnership with the Association of Asian American Studies 2015 Annual Conference, to be held at the Hilton Orrington in Evanston, IL, from April 23-25, 2015.  

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Matthew Avignone is a Korean-American photographer born in 1987. In 2011, he obtained is B.A. in photography from Columbia College, Chicago. He has been nominated for the 2012 Baum Award for Emerging American Photographer (The Baum Foundation, San Francisco, CA). His work has been exhibited at the Aperture Foundation (2011) and in the Pingyao Photography Festival: Student Exhibition, Pingyao, China (2011). His book, An Unfinished Body, is now part of the collections of the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film (Rochester, New York) and the International Center for Photography (New York, NY). He is currently working and living in Chicago. Matthew Avignone

Aram Han Sifuentes is a social practice fiber artist and works closely with Chicago based non-profit organizations, community centers, and public schools to facilitate workshops for immigrant communities. She has exhibited her work at the LuXun Academy of Fine Art in Shenyang, China, and the Society for Contemporary Craft in Pittsburgh, PA. Her solo exhibitions include “A Mend” at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, “73,000 forms” at Chicago Artists Coalition in Chicago, IL, and “Immigrant Takeover” at the Center for Craft Creativity and Design in Ashville, NC. Han earned her BA in Art and Latin American Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008, her Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Fine Art from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2011, and her MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2013. Aram Han Sifuentes

Regin Igloria maintains a studio practice in Chicago, IL, which revolves around teaching and serving as an arts administrator. He has taught at Marwen, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Rhode Island School of Design, and many local institutions. In 2010, he founded North Branch Projects, a community bookbinding project based in Albany Park, Chicago. Currently he serves as the Director of Residencies & Fellowships at The Ragdale Foundation. His work has been exhibited and collected internationally, including the ANTI Contemporary Art Festival, Out of Site Performance Festival Chicago, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, The Franklin, Zg Gallery, and The Center for Book Arts NYC. He is a recipient of a 3Arts Teaching Artist Award, Propeller Grant, 96 Acres Project Grant, and an Americans for the Arts Fellowship. Residencies include Ucross, ACRE, and The Wormfarm Institute. He received his MFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design. Regin Igloria

Audra Jacot is a Filipino-American artist and curator based out of Chicago. Raised in the Mormon faith, Jacot's work celebrates the empowerment of sexuality through sculptural form. She recently received her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, through the Art and Technology program. Her work was recently featured in Bravo’s 100 Days of Summer. She is currently the Chief Curator for FLATSstudio in Chicago as well as the Tech Coordinator for the CPS Advanced Arts Program at Gallery 37. Audra Jacot

Kiam Marcelo Junio (preferred gender pronoun: "they/them") is a Chicago-based interdisciplinary artist creating work through various media, including but not limited to, photography, video, performance (blending butoh, drag and burlesque), sculpture and installation, and culinary arts.  Their research and art practice centers around queer identities, Philippine history and the Filipino diaspora, post/colonialist Asian American tropes and stereotypes, military power dynamics, the politics of personal agency, and social justice through collaborative practices and healing modalities. Kiam served seven years in the US Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. They were born in the Philippines, and have lived in the U.S., Japan, and Spain. Kiam Marcelo Junio

Hee Ran Lee is a performance artist whose body centered work explores private and public gestures of the Asian female body in the patriarchal power structure and investigates cultural marginalization. Her recent grants have included the ARKO Young Art Frontier from Arts Council Korea (2013), she was a Semi-finalist for the emerging artist prize from The Claire Rosen & Samuel Edes Foundation (2012) and The Anna Louise Raymond Fellowship (2012). Her work has been shown at Culture Station Seoul 284(Korea 2014), Grace Exhibition Space (New York 2013), The Watermill Center (New York 2012), Defibrillator Gallery (Chicago 2012), and Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai 2011). She holds an MFA specializing in performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently a fellow artist of LEIMAY 2014-2015 at CAVE in New York. Hee Ran Lee

Patricia Nguyen is a Chicago based performance artist, healer, and educator. She has over 10 years of experience in performance, arts education, community development and human rights, which has taken her work to the United States, Vietnam, Brazil, and the Philippines. Her current work explores the dialectic between modernity and dispossession as it relates to notions of freedom and home. She has performed at the Nha San Collective in Vietnam, the Mission Cultural Center in San Francisco, Oberlin College, Northwestern University, and University of Massachusetts Boston. In 2010, she received a Fulbright Fellowship to work in Vietnam. She has since co-founded cây, the first life skills and art therapy reintegration program with the Pacific Links Foundation for human trafficking survivors along the border regions of Vietnam. She is currently a Ph.D. student in Performance Studies at Northwestern University.  Patricia Nguyen

Soo Shin was born in Seoul, Korea and currently lives and works in Chicago. She holds an MFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago. She is interested in the duality of having faith in the unknown and the codependent nature between faith and struggle. Through sculpture, painting, and drawing she turns the psychological struggle into physical experience using the latency of body in her work. She is a recipient of the Vilcek Foundation Fellowship at Mac Dowell Colony Artists residency (Peterbrough, NH) Program and has recently shown her work at Peregrine Program (Chicago, IL), the Dominican University (River Forest, IL), the Rhodes College (Memphis, TN).  Soo Shin

Influenced by the cultural milieu of experiencing intra-ethnic relations in Indonesia, Leonard Suryajaya’s work explores identity, culture, gender, and sexuality. By utilizing photography, video, along with elements of performance and installation, his work challenges and deconstructs the perspective we use to scrutinize and observe our roles in a transnational global world. He is currently in his second year as a candidate for an MFA in photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  Leonard Suryajaya  

Kinnari Vora, a versatile dancer and choreographer, was born in India. She started learning Bharatnatyam, Classical dance form of South India at the age of 5 and continued her advanced training under Guru Sarmishtha Sarkar (India). She also learnt Kathak, a North Indian Classical dance form and various Indian folk dances with Setu folk dance group. Kinnari, has performed both Classical and Folk dances in several prestigious dance festivals in India, US, Greece, Poland, Italy, Israel. Currently based in Chicago, Kinnari found the right platform to suffice her creative thirst for classical, folk, contemporary and fusion Bollywood at Pranita Jain’s Mandala and Kalapriya Dance Company. Her recent performances include Redmoon Theater’s winter pageant, all night World music festival, Harris Theater, Chicago summer dance, Chicago humanities festival.

_jJ4XXX5YN_ is the Noise Country duet of jonCates && 愛真 Janet Lin, who got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout.  

SCHEDULE OF PERFORMANCES, APRIL 23, 2015

5:30 – 7:00 PM

At the End of the Day: A Traveling Performance

Regin Igloria

This interactive performance uses movement and travel, as experienced by attendees of the conference and others, to unveil various levels of personal toil and occupation.  Small satchels of sand—objects used symbolically and physically to describe a kind of labor—are incorporated throughout the work. These sandbags, like the ones used in construction areas and natural disasters, are reminders of the constant struggle and the deterring of further hardship brought upon by self-imposed ambitions. The landscape we choose to settle within, raise our families, and seek fulfillment is both joyous and heavy-hearted; an opposing scenario that is central to themes in Igloria’s work. By participating in the performance, viewers become co-conspirators in an ongoing, perpetual endeavor.

7:00 – 8:00 PM

Heeran Lee, with Kinnari Vora

I will create live actions focusing on enacting a laborious task of hand washing clothes by using wet fabrics. Two performative female bodies hanging by the windows in a bent position will be squeezing, flapping, and hanging the fabrics. In my body-centered work, I explore the private and public manifestations of the female Asian body where isolated actions transform into symbol, metaphor, metonym and formal structures within the larger context of socio-cultural power relations, particularly as they pertain to imbalance, inequality, and injustice in Korean and American society. I situate myself in relation to objects and architectural sites in order to release an unforeseen potentiality within these elements that might create conflicts and complex associations with and for the viewer.

8:00 – 8:30 PM

_jJ4XXX5YN_ (Noise Country duet of jonCates && 愛真 Janet Lin)

Whiskey barrels, basements and Texas ballrooms are the ideal locations to listen to our love songs crackle over old fashioned radio stations broadcast from the heartfelt heartland to true-love Taiwanese mountaintops. Folksong sing-alongs wandering across these countries may make our listeners wonder: How do these voices transform us?

9:00 – 10:00 PM

salt | water 

Patricia Nguyen

Meditating on the precarity of life and death over the ocean, salt | water conjures memory. Through collection, extraction, filtering, and dispersion I explore the physical excrements of inherited memory as a child of Vietnamese boat refugees. My body becomes a site where the audience bears witness to divergent performances of oversaturation and extraction and the space in between as a place of memory's haunting. How does the body manifest memory? How does memory's haunting linger in the body/how is it excreted? How does the violence of war and dispossession [re]membered?

CONTEMPORARY ASIAN AMERICAN ART AND THE ASIAN AMERICAN WERQER 

 By Jacqueline Chao

Historically, the imagined boundaries of “Asia” and categorizations of “Asian Art” have shifted tremendously over the centuries, and have always functioned in negotiation with prevailing power relations and with strong undercurrents of an existing Orientalist narrative. The terms “Asian American” and “Asian American art” are often contested, and while the terms serve to further complicate this existing narrative by defying narrow and general definitions of “Asian-ness”, one’s individuality continues to remain largely invisible. 

The title of this exhibition, WORK WERQ, is intended as both a call and a challenge for rethinking formations of Asian American identity. This exhibition features the work of eleven Chicago-based contemporary artists who have cultural connection to both an Asian and American culture and who currently live and work between cultures. Partly inspired by the “Chicago” as famously described by American poet Carl Sandburg as the blue-collared “city of big shoulders,” “stormy”, “husky”, and “brawling”, the term “work” is applied in connection with notions of labor, immigration, migration, the art object and the act of making. The term “werq” is an urban slang term that means to wear, whether it is clothes or skin, with ferocity; it is to own one’s individuality, to exude strength, confidence, power, self-love and acceptance.  One can “werq” an outfit, one’s body, an event, or a moment; one can “werq” against all odds and against the voices that tell you that you can’t or shouldn’t. The purpose of this exhibition is to highlight the aesthetic diversity and individual perspectives of these independent artists of Asian descent, encompassing not only the diasporic and U.S. born, but also those who have experienced life in the “Windy City” for a significant period of time, in recognition of both their “work” and “werq”. In a time when Asian American identities grow increasingly ambiguous, this exhibition highlights the complexities and challenges of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and the forces of labor and globalization, in the construction of Asian American identities today. 

On opening night, Filipino American multidisciplinary artist Regin Igloria will perform the physical act of migration in his traveling performance At the End of the Day. Known for his performances involving feats of outdoorsy athleticism and endurance, Igloria will personally lead exhibition attendees from the 2015 Annual Asian American Studies conference site in Evanston, Illinois, to the exhibition venue located in downtown Chicago, asking that they each carry a small satchel of sand with him on the journey.  In the exhibition space, he will contend with the parcels by physically lifting, assembling, arranging and transplanting them.  By literally passing and transporting sand and dirt, he explores the eternal struggle of trying to fulfill the demands of one’s self-imposed ambitions.

Adopted from South Korea by a Caucasian-American couple, Matthew Avignone’s Stranger Than Family photo book is a collection of photographs, documents and objects assembled and arranged by Avignone that record his experience growing up in Illinois. Avignone was raised along with four other adoptees from South Korea and India, three of whom struggled with Blindness, Spina-Bifida, and Neurofibromatosis.  This photo book is not only an intimate portrayal of his upbringing, but contributes to new conceptualizations of the classic American family.  The book is complemented with a new series of monochrome prints of aerial topographical photos originally taken from an airplane on a transatlantic flight from the U.S. to Europe, a literal and symbolic capturing of physically traveling between two places and between two cultures and of not belonging to just one or the other.

Aram Han Sifuentes’ U.S. Citizenship Test Samplers are the visual products of an ongoing series of classes and workshops conducted by the artist in Chicago, where communities of non-US citizen immigrants are invited to come together and learn the U.S. Citizenship test material through the act of sewing samplers of the test questions and answers. South Korean-born and immigrated to the U.S., the artist uses the samplers to engage with the historical, social and collective nature of the practice of needlework and embroidery, to not only visually display the value of the act and labor itself, but also as a method of engagement with these immigrant communities through the physical experience of gathering, connecting and sharing of personal immigrant and labor histories.

In this exhibition, the Asian female body is explored by several of the artists as a primary site of construction. Korean performance artist Hee Ran Lee, in collaboration with Indian classical dancer and choreographer Kinnari Vora, will perform the laborious task of hand washing clothes.  Bending, squeezing, and hanging the fabrics from two windows, they transform this mundane act, and in turn their bodies, from private to public objectification. Vietnamese American scholar and performance artist Patricia Nguyen uses her body as a physical site of memory in her performance salt | water.  Nguyen rubs salt and water repeatedly over her body, scarring, saturating, dispersing and excreting these elements physically and visually, in reflection of her upbringing as a child of Vietnamese boat refugees, and in exploration of the subjective framing and organization of the memories of one’s past. Through her sculptural creations, Chicago-based Korean artist Soo Shin creates minimalist abstract representations that are suggestive of physical and psychological struggle.  In contrast, Filipino American artist Audra Jacot’s Hello neon sculpture with its blinking cursor can be interpreted as a playful nod to anonymous cyber flirtations and a celebration of the self-empowerment of her female sexuality. 

Second generation Chinese Indonesian artist Leonard Suryajaya explores complex constructions of selfhood and sexuality through the mediums of photography, performance and installation.  In his video performance Rupa, Leonard engages in the process of creating intimacy by exploring, fetishizing and exoticizing the white male body in a staged pseudo-ritualistic setting. “Rupa” is a Buddhist and Hindu term for material or phenomenal objects or form, including the body and all external matter.  Juxtaposed to this video is a large photograph of Suryajaya’s mother, posed against a brilliantly patterned background, visually deified and posed to evoke a Buddhist bodhisattva and covered in personal items and jewelry deemed expensive and valuable.  Through theatrical staging, Suryajaya explores conflicting conceptions of his own identity and sexual preferences in contrast with those desired by his family and imposed by society, desire for belonging and feelings of displacement.

Filipino artist Kiam Marcelo Junio is a multidisciplinary artist whose research and practice centers on explorations of diasporic and queer identity, Philippine history, and military and social power dynamics.  For this exhibition, the artist’s Mimesis sculptural installations, from the ongoing series Camouflage as a Metaphor for Passing, investigates the meanings and methods of camouflage as a technique for blending in, or “passing” as something or someone else in a larger society.  Mimesis is one method of camouflage and used to describe the act of meaning to be seen, but in resemblance to something else. Junio’s Mimesis sculptural installations incorporate military aesthetics, such as a sheer fabric military duffle bag that hangs in mid-air, and a large marble acrylic sheet that is broken and cut to evoke the patterns of camouflage battle dress of a modern soldier. While largely inspired by the artist’s personal experience of having served seven years in the U.S. Navy, the common militaristic association of the camouflage aesthetic is subtly subverted in consideration of queer and Filipino visibility and invisibility.

Self-described as an experimental “country music noise band”, _jJ4XXX5YN_ is a musical collaboration between American artist jonCates and Taiwanese American multidisciplinary artist 愛真Janet Lin that is inspired by their shared background of having lived in the American South. Their one-time performance on opening night is an assertion of their created identities and a critical investigation of old and new medias.

This exhibition proposes a syncretic approach to the multi-linear processes of Asian American identity formations as both ideological construct and as individual lived experience.  We challenge and confront legacies of ethnic and cultural distortions, Asian American stereotyping, and self-imposed desires and projections, and encourage pluralist thinking, greater awareness and understanding, and pride and confidence in oneself.  

Header Image: Regin Igloria performing At the End of the Day, April 23, 2015. Photo by Joshua Laub.

Event and performance photography by Joshua Laub. Images are courtesy of the artists.