March 24–April 2, 2016
Opening: Wednesday, March 23, 7–9pm
Simon Fraser University
Audain Gallery
149 West Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada
Hours: Tuesday–Saturday noon–5pm
www.sfu.ca
www.sfugalleries.ca
SCA students, performances and readings
Audain Gallery,Thursday, March 24, 1:30–4pm
Young Soon Min artist talk
Djavad Mowafaghian World Art Centre, Thursday, March 24, 7pm
Art and the Pacific Rim Legacies of War:
Round table discussion with Yong Soon Min, David Khang, Cindy Mochizuki, Ho Tam. Moderated by Jin-me Yoon.
Audain Gallery, Saturday, March 26, 1pm
Exhibition tour with SCA students
Audain Gallery,Saturday, March 26, 3pm
Discussion with Elle-Máijá Tailfeathers
4th floor, Rm 4955, Wednesday, March 30, 2:30–4:30pm
Simon Fraser University’s School for the Contemporary Arts is pleased to welcome Yong Soon Min as the 2016 spring Audain Visual Artist in Residence. In the Audain Gallery, Yong Soon Min’s video work focusing on North Korea, Bungabsubnida and On the Road: Northern Exposure, will be exhibited alongside collaboratively produced projects and performances by the second and third year undergraduates in the Visual Art Program.
As a variation of our annual third year undergraduate exhibition, the Audain Gallery will function as a hybrid pedagogical space to explore the formal, conceptual and political aspects of monuments, counter-monuments and the notion of alternative archives. Public events and informal discussions on questions concerning war, ideology, colonialism, multiculturalism and transnationalism—which Yong Soon Min has addressed over her long career—are also an integral part of this project.
The second and third year students will construct and install a (counter) monument loosely based on the Robo-Lenin from Magnitorsk (1931), which was destroyed in 1932, yet remains documented in a photograph for Life Magazine by Margaret Bourke-White. A large pedestal base related to the reclining horizontal monument will serve as a platform for readings and performances by the students. In addition, the students will make sculptural spheres inspired by Yong Soon Min’s work. Framed by discussions concerning the hierarchies by which materials get preserved and monumentalized, students will work with texts and images that have inspired and transformed their habitual sense of the world and place these into the work as personal archives. What can we learn from the extremes of failed utopian visions as a way forward, without cynicism? This central question anchors the disparate elements.
Yong Soon Min was born near Seoul in 1953, the year the Korean War ended in Armistice. Min immigrated with her mother and brother to the US in 1960 to join their father and grew up in Monterey, CA. She received her MFA degree from UC Berkeley in 1979 and a postdoc at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program in 1981. She lives in Los Angeles and is Professor Emeritus at UC Irvine.
Min’s art practice, including national and international exhibitions and curatorial projects, engages interdisciplinary sources in the examination of issues of representation and cultural identities and the intersection of history and memory. Min has received numerous grants and awards, including recently a Fulbright Senior Research Grant, COLA Individual Artist Fellowship from the City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Department and Korea Foundation Grant.
Audain Visual Artist in Residence
This program brings artists and practitioners to Vancouver who have contributed significantly to the field of contemporary art and whose work resonates with local and international visual art discourses. The visiting artists interact with the students and faculty of the School for the Contemporary Arts as well as the broader visual arts and cultural communities and the community at large. In keeping with the experimental nature of the School for the Contemporary Arts, the terms of engagement are open and change from artist to artist. The program is generously funded by the Audain Foundation Endowment Fund.
