Artists

Chen Chieh-Jen – born in 1960 in Taoyuan, Taiwan – lives and works currently in Taipei, Taiwan. He organized extra-institutional underground exhibitions and guerrilla-style art actions to challenge Taiwan‘s dominant political mechanisms during a period marked by the Cold War, anti-communist propaganda and martial law. After the martial law 1987 ended, he ceased art activity for eight years. Returning to art in 1996, Chen started collaborating with local residents, unemployed laborers, day workers, migrant workers, foreign spouses, unemployed youth and social activists. They occupied factories owned by capitalists, slipped into areas cordoned off by the law and utilized discarded materials to build sets for his video productions. In order to visualize contemporary reality and a people’s history that was obscured by neo-liberalism, he embarked on a series of video projects in which he used strategies he calls “re-imagining, re-narrating, re-writing and re-connecting.” His work has been shown in solo exhibitions in Taiwan but also in many international places such as Paris, Luxembourg, Hong Kong, Beijing, Los Angeles, Madrid, New York. He has also has participated in various international biennales and group shows.

Chen Ching-Yao – born in 1976 in Taipei, Taiwan – graduated at the National Institute of the Arts (now the Taipei National University of the Arts) in 2000 and received his master’s degree from the Department of Fine Arts in 2006. Costume play, appropriation, misplacement, and collage are recurring themes in his artistic practice. Through his extremely superficial placement as shown in his continuous impersonation of others, how one looks at “the others” and how one identifies oneself become contradictory and complicated. It encourages the viewers to come up with a more profound question to interpret the defenseless appearance. In 2000, he won the first prize of New Perspective Art in Taiwan Dimensional Creation Series. In 2001, Chen won the Taipei Prize with his work „Bubble Task Force“, which marked the beginning of his long-term exploration of subculture, the politics of image, and other related issues. Since 2002, he has also been a member of Hantoo Art Group, a major artist group in Taiwan. In 2008, he was sponsored by Asian Culture Council to stay in New York as a resident artist at Location One. Since 2009 he has held solo exhibitions in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the USA – New York, and many other places.

Hong Sung-dam – born in 1955 on the island of Hauido, raised in Gwangju and educated in the Chosun University Gwangju – is a South Korean artist who took part in the 1980 uprising against Chun Doo-hwan‘s military dictatorship. After the uprising he became politically active, and in July 1989, he was arrested for allegedly breaking the National Security Act (he had sent slides of a mural he had created, along with around 200 other South Korean artists to North Korea). Amnesty International adopted him as a prisoner of conscience and he was released from prison in the early 1990s. He is an acclaimed member of the Minjung art movement, and in 1996, was commissioned by the Government of South Korea to create a 42 metre mural for Chonnam National University. His work has been shown in different places such as Gana Art Cente Seoul; Queens Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of Contemporary Art, Sri Lanka; the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; the National Museum of Prints, Spain, the Busan Biennale, the 1st and 3rd Gwangju Biennale, the International Peace Centre, Osaka and – on the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights – at Amnesty International in the U.K. He lives and works currently in Ansan, South Korea.

Nakagaki Katsuhisa – born in 1944 in Gifu, Japan – studied sculpture at the Tokyo University of the Arts. He was known for his bronze sculptures which reflected a traditional understanding of art for many years.
In 1968, he reached the M.A at the Tokyo University of the Arts. In 1986, he won the Grand Prize of Rodin at Hakone Open-Air Museum and 1988 the special Open Air Sculpture Prize, Nagoya. His current work represents a radical break with his previous art and provoked the hostility of radical nationalists and even scorn from the Japanese art world (in 2013 he was expelled from the Shinseisaku Association). His installation “Portrait of the Period – Endangered Species Idiot JAPONICA – Round Burial Mound,” for instance, launched an intense debate over the freedom of opinion and was not allowed to be shown in its entirety at the Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo. The piece was first able to be shown uncensored abroad in 2014 at the gallery Murata & Friends in Berlin. Currently Nakagaki works as emeritus director of HIDA Municipal Museum and Katsuhisa Nakagaki Museum.

Sunmu – born in 1972 in North Korea, he was trained by the North Korean Army as a propaganda artist; later he studied in an art college. During a severe famine in the 1990s he fled to China and later via Thailand and Laos to South Korea. Since then he has lived and worked as a painter in Seoul. In Seoul he also took up a second course of study in visual arts. In 2007 (together with photographer Suntag Noh) he took part in the exhibition “We are Happy” in the Gallery Curiosity, Seoul. In 2008, he had his first solo exhibition under the same title in the Alternative Space Chunggeong gak, Seoul. Out of concern for the family he left behind in North Korea he uses the pseudonym »Sunmu« instead of his real name and does not allow photos of his face.

Tomiyama Taeko – born in Kobe, Japan in 1921; grew up in the 1930s in Dalian and Harbin in former Manchuria – Studied from 1938 to 1945 – with interruptions due to the War – at the Joshibi Woman’s Academy of Art and Design. Her multimedia works are concerned with the complex moral and emotional problems of Japanese society arising out of the contradictory twofold experience of having been both warlike aggressor and victim of barbaric modern warfare in the Second World War – and with more recent caesuras in world history such as 9/11, social tensions in Afghanistan or the Fukushima disaster four years ago. Since 1950, her works have been shown in numerous exhibitions in Germany, France, Italy, Japan, South Korea and the USA, at the 1st and 3rd Gwangju Biennales and in the Summer of 2009 at the Niigata Tsumari Trienniale.

Curators

Choi Kiwan – born in Seoul, South Korea in 1985 – did military service as a soldier on the border to North Korea 2006 to 2008. In South Korea, conscientious objection is not permitted. After a sixth-month period abroad in Australia in 2010, he has since 2013 been studying painting at the Kunsthochschule Weißenssee in Berlin. In Korea, his artistic work was concerned with the themes of memory and – in the context of the South Korean past – with his own identity. Since he has been studying in Germany, however, topics such as absurdity and helplessness have come to the fore.

Ku Youlee – born in South Korea in 1988 – graduated in Fine Arts from the Sung Kyun Kwan University in Seoul in 2011. Subsequently she came to Germany to pursue further her interest in art. Since 2014, she has been studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (AdBK) in Munich. Ku loves new things, travelling widely to come to know countries, new places, and people of different nationalities. As an artist she tries above all to discover how one can live in this world. She currently lives and works in Munich.

Han Nataly Jung-Hwa – born in Seoul, South Korea in 1962; has been living in Germany since 1978 – studied Korean Studies, Japanology and History of Art (with specialisms in Gender and Postcolonial Theory) in Tübingen and at the FU and HU in Berlin. She works in Berlin as a specialist in Korean Studies, an interpreter and project manager. Since 2008, she has been head of the Korea Communications and Research Centre of the Korea-Verband e.V. and has organised numerous readings and events featuring artists and activists from Korea. She is the initiator of the EPRIE exchange programme (Exchange Programme for Regional Integration in East-Asia and Europe) and founder of the working group on the “Comfort Women” (women who were forced into prostitution, abducted and abused by the Japanese Military during the Asian Pacific War). She currently works as editor-in-chief of the magazine “Korea Forum”, is convenor of the Working Group on “Comfort Women”, Chair of the Board of the Korea-Verband e.V. and a member of the nGbK (neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst).

Yajima Tsukasa – born in Takasaki, Japan in 1971 – studied History at Waseda University and Photography at the Nippon Institute of Photography in Tokyo. He worked as freelance photographer for the left-wing Asahi-Shinbun daily in Tokyo, for the Asahi weekly, for Asahi Graph, Saias, AERA, Ronza etc. From 2003 to 2006, Yajima worked in South Korea on the photographic project “Comfort Women – Sex Slaves to the Japanese Army in the Second World War” in an old people’s home for Korean women who had survived this ordeal. In 2004, he won the DAYS JAPAN International Photojournalism Award and in 2010 the Photography Prize of the EVZ Foundation (EVZ = Erinnerung, Verantwortung und Zukunft / Memory, Responsibility and the Future). He lives and works as a photographer and journalist in Berlin. His photographic works have been shown in Germany – Berlin, Japan, Korea and Taiwan. In 2011 and 2012 he was on the Board of the Korea-Verband e.V. and is a member of the nGbK.

Yoo Jae-Hyun – born in Gyeongju, South Korea in 1974 – studied Fine Arts and Philosophy at the Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul and the University of New South Wales, Sydney and Media Arts (as master student) at the UdK, Berlin. His work is concerned with the topic of borders and border-crossing in the sense of an “open identity”. In 2005, he was the initiator of the international Global Alien artists’ group and in 2007 a co-founder and Board member of the Korientation e.V. – a migrant self-organisation of German Koreans. In 2006, he was awarded the Prize of the Kurt Eisner Kulturstiftung, Munich. In the same year, Global Alien initiated the “Freedom of Speech” Exhibition in Seoul and in 2008 the “Congress of Culture” in the Kunstraum Kreuzberg. In 2009, he organized “Shared.Divided.United” in the nGbK, Berlin. In 2012, he was in addition head of the art-in-public-space project “East People Power” at the KunstDoc Leipzig. His first solo exhibition was held in 2014 in the okk/raum29 in Berlin. Yoo is a member of the Korea-Verband e.V. and of the nGbK. He lives and works in Berlin and Seoul.

Authors

Arai Hiroyuki – born in 1965 – is a Japanese critic of art. In his criticisms he explores (sub)culture and social issues. He works as the director of the N.P.O. Art Farm.

Rebecca Jennison – born in the USA – teaches at the Faculty of Humanities, Division of Culture and Arts at Kyôto Seika University. She is an associate of The Asia-Pacific Journal Japan Focus. Her publications include translations of works by Japanese women writers (Shimizu Shikin) and artists (Tomiyama Taeko). Her recent work includes numerous essays about contemporary art and transnational feminism. She has curated three exhibitions of work by women artists at Seika‘s Gallery Fleur, including Women en Large/Familiar Men. Together with Laura Hein she edited the volume “Imagination Without Borders: Feminist Artist Tomiyama Taeko and Social Responsibility” (Center for Japan Studies, Michigan University Press, Ann Arbor, 2009).

Kim Jong-gil – born in 1968 in South Korea – is a curator, art critic, art theoretician, art researcher and planner. Since 2000 he has been working as curator for the Art Museum in Moran and since 2003 on the Advisory Board of the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation. Between 2006 and 2012 he was Head of the Cultural Education Department of Gyeonggi Province and worked as a freelance curator. Currently he is also Head of Strategical Development in the Gyeonggi Cultural Foundation. He has received several rewards for his work in art theory and for projects he has curated.

Suh Sung – born in 1945 in Kyoto as a son of Korean immigrants – graduated at the Tokyo University of Education and the Seoul National University. In 1971, he was arrested by the South Korean Military Intelligence on suspicion of being a North Korean spy and only released after 19 years. Today he is a professor for law and works at the Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto, Japan. Since back in Japan, he has been engaged in research and activities on human rights and peace in East Asia. He was honored by the Human Rights Awards in 1994 and 2009.

Vladimir Tikhonov alias Pak Noja – born in Leningrad, in the former USSR in 1973 – is a naturalized Korean journalist and historian. He completed his doctorate at the Lomonossow University in Moscow in 1992 on the subject of the Gaya Confederacy. He is Professor of East Asian and Korean Studies at the University of Oslo and teaches also at Kyunghee University in Seoul, his research areas being Modernism and Korean Intellectual History, with an emphasis on more recent Buddhism.

Hong Sung-dam

Sunmu

Tomiyama Taeko

Nakagaki Katsuhisa

In his younger years, Nakagaki was not a politically active artist. He found it impossible, however, to endure the offensive historical revisionism of the Shinzo Abe government in silence and created, among other works, the Round Barrow piece, to which many small pieces of paper are attached bearing political statements. Before an exhibition in the Metropolitan Art Museum in Tokyo, the curator had one of the statements removed. Thanks to the support of the Galerie Murata & Friends, Berlin, the uncensored work can be shown in the current exhibition.

Chen Ching-Yao

In his recent work, Chen Ching Yao has returned to painting. Here are two examples from the »Series of Great Leaders«. By portraying himself as Mao or Chiang-Kai-Shek, he is making fun of the dictators and at the same time demonstrating that each of us could be one of these great leaders.