The Summer Institute at the Department of Visual Art and Art History & the York Centre for Asian Research present the following three public talks by Korea-/Hong Kong-based artists.
Hacking Territory, presented by Park Chankook with Toronto’s art collective, ConverSalon
Tuesday, 8 May 2018 | 6:30pm for reception, 7:00 to 8:30pm | CineCycle (129 Spadina Avenue, Toronto)
Park Chankook is a community artist and paradise planner living in South Korea. He has engaged with a number of collaborative projects that explore artistic intervention in urban environment such as Dongdaemun Rooftop Paradise (2013- ), Non Art But Art (2011-12), Urban Guerilla Art Project (2013), Collaborative Squat Project in Han’gang Nodeul Island (2013), Public Art Project in Kwangju (2014) and Milmeori Art School (2002-11).
Geometry, (Affect)ion, and the City, presented by Pak Sheung Chuen
Friday, 11 May 2018 | 6:30pm for reception, 7:00 to 8:30pm | YYZ Gallery (140-401 Richmond St. W. Toronto)
Pak Sheung Chuen is a conceptual and performance artist based in Hong Kong. His practice reflects upon the contradicting absurdness and ordinariness of everyday life in a poetic and humorous nature. Pak authored ODD ONE IN: Hong Kong Diary and ODD ONE IN II: Invisible Travel. Pak has participated in numerous international exhibitions. He represented in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009, received the Best Artist Award in the Chinese Contemporary Art Awards (CCAA), and the Best Artist Award in Hong Kong Arts Development Awards (HKADA) in 2012.
Trauma and Visual Art, presented by Suh Yongsun and Jeff Thomas
Friday, 18 May 2018 | 6:30pm for reception, 7:00 to 8:30pm | YYZ Gallery (140-401 Richmond St. W. Toronto)
Suh Yongsun is a prominent South Korean artist who has engaged with subjects of history, war, myth, tragedy and urban scenery. He produced numerous paintings that explore the relationships between history and memory, between the collective and the individual, and between aesthetics and social ethics. His paintings deal with tragic disasters such as the Korean War (1950-53) and the Sewol ferry disaster (2014) convey stories of socially victimized individuals and express affective feelings of agony, pain and despair in his distinctive pictorial languages. Suh won the Artist of the Year 2009 at the National Museum of contemporary Art, Korea, and had numerous solo exhibitions in Seoul, New York, Berlin, Hong Kong, Osaka and Melbourne.
Jeff Thomas is an independent curator and photographer. He deals with issues of aboriginality that have arisen at the intersections of Native and non-Native cultures in what is now Ontario and northern New York state. He has been involved in major projects at prominent cultural institutions in Canada. As demonstrated in his curatorial projects, publications, and exhibitions, he is committed to work on issues of race, aboriginality and gender in both archival and contemporary photography dealing with Aboriginal peoples.