Public Program
Artist/Curator Talk: Kyong Park – Imagining New Eurasia and Urban Fictions
29, Jun, 2016 (Wed) 18:00
Offsite Art Sonje
Artist/Curator Talk: Kyong Park – Imagining New Eurasia and Urban Fictions
Kyong Park investigates and visualizes economic, political and cultural landscapes through visual art, architecture, urban theory, and curatorial practice. During his talk at the Offsite Art Sonje, Park will present his current project Imagining New Eurasia, a three-year project (2015-2017) commissioned by and exhibited at the Asian Culture Center in Gwangju. Researching and visualizing the historical precedents and contemporary reconstructions of the continent as a union of Europe and Asia, the project imagines new relations between East and West, and a renewed identity of Eurasia. Through a narrative sequence of three distinctive chapters, each with different subjects, the Imaging New Eurasia project addresses the importance of cities, networks and territories. The project also aims to measure how places, territories, and movements have been contested, exchanged and established throughout our history, and how their past records, such as the Silk Road, may help us to consider future possibilities. Park will also introduce his urban fictions such as “MEXUSA” (the emergence of a multinational state between Mexico and the United States of America), “San Veriola” (Los Angeles without highways), and “The City of One Percenters” (a gated island for millionaires, billionaires and zillionaires off the coast of Myanmar).
About the Speaker
Kyong Park is a Professor of Public Culture at the University of California, San Diego (since 2007). He was the founding director of Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York (1982-1998), International Center for Urban Ecology in Detroit (1998-2001), and Centrala Foundation for Future Cities in Rotterdam (2005-2006). He was also a curator of the Gwangju Biennale (1997) and the artistic director and chief curator of the Anyang Public Art Project 2010 in Korea. He has exhibited in Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Castilla y León (Spain), Kunsthalle (Graz), Deichtorhallen (Hamburg), Kunst Werke (Berlin), and Nam June Paik Art Center (Korea), and has authored Urban Ecology: Detroit and Beyond (2005).
About the Offsite Art Sonje Program
The Art Sonje Center initiated the Offsite Art Sonje Program in January 2016 to continue the museum’s educational role and extend its program venue while the Center is temporarily closed for renovation. Located near the Center, the Offsite Art Sonje hosts talk events on the last Wednesday of each month until the Center reopens in the fall. Its large window wall permits passersby to peer inside the space, blurring the line between inside and outside. The Offsite Art Sonje Program hopes to offer unique and meaningful experiences of museum programs to both the participants and the onlookers. The speakers have so far included Jun Yang, Yeondoo Jung, Melvin Moti, mixrice (Jieun Cho), and Hans D. Christ.
* Due to the Art Sonje Center’s renovation, this program will be held in the Offsite Art Sonje.
* The speaker will speak in English. No translation provided.