In modern, spare and elegant portraiture, artist Cindy Hwang (CYJO) highlights the diversity, identity, and immigration of the global "kyopo," those of Korean descent that reside outside of the Korean Peninsula. CYJO decontextualizes her subjects to emphasize a sense of forced unity, allowing their spectrum of experience to contradict the apparent sameness of identity. Juxtaposed are the graduate student, the novelist, the activist, the architect. Through photographs and profiles, "KYOPO" challenges the idea of a monolithic, "authentic" Korean identity while stimulating exploration and a renewed perception of what it means to be both Korean and a citizen of the world.
About the Author: CYJO, born 1974 in Seoul, is a Korean American who immigrated to the US in 1976. Her most recent work, "Substructure," is a photographic, textual, and video portrait series documenting fifty Chinese immigrants in Beijing. CYJO's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C., T. Art Center, Beijing and The Korea Society, New York. Her work has been featured in numerous publications and broadcasts including "A+A Magazine, ELLE Korea, Eloquence Magazine, Global Times, La Lettre De La Photographie, The New York Times, Vision Magazine," CBS News and PBS Sunday Arts News. She has lectured at The KACC, The 3rd Asian American Conference, The Korea Society, Miami University, The New York Life Company, NYU APA, Overseas Korean Foundation and The Rubin Museum of Art.
MARIE MYUNG-OK LEE teaches at the Center for the Study of Race & Ethnicity in America at Brown University. Founder and former board president of the Asian American Writers' Workshop, she is the author of the novel "Somebody's Daughter." Her fiction has appeared in "The Kenyon Review," "Witness," "The American Voice," "TriQuarterly," "Guernica," and she has won fellowships from the MacColl Johnson Foundation, the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and a honorable mention in the O. Henry Awards. Essays and reporting have appeared in "The New York Times," "The New York Times Magazine," "Newsweek," "The Washington Post," "The Los Angeles Times," "The Atlantic," and "Slate."
JULIAN STALLABRASS is a writer, curator, photographer and professor in Art
History at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Author of "Art Incorporated, Internet Art, Paris Pictured," and "Gargantua," Stallabrass writes regularly for publications including "Tate, Art Monthly" and the "New Statesman." Board member of "Art History, New Left Review" and "Third Text," he curated the 2008 Brighton Photo Biennial, "Memory of Fire: Images of War and the War of Images."
