Memory and Place
Jing Yuan Huang, Hye-Seung Jung, Marissa Largo
A Space Main Gallery
January 9 – February 6, 2009
Essay by: Dina Georgis
Memory and Place does not offer consolation or imaginary safety for diasporia’s losses. The subjectivities that are symbolized by the artists are looking here and there, backward and forward, inward and outward, but none of the migrations of time, place or memory are linear, easily mapped, or complete. Not only do the works of Jing Yuan Huang, Hye-Seung Jung, and Marissa Largo not invoke tradition or recoup ‘ethnic identity’ – which might fill the gaps of diasporic emptiness – the images refuse the stability of identity. And what they communicate are openings and new beginnings: not answers or cemented memories, but subjectivities in motion.
Biographies
Jing Yuan Huang completed her BFA at Concordia University, Montreal, in 2005. In 2008, she received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work has been presented in artist-run centers in 7 provinces across Canada. The media and the processes she chooses to work with, well serve her subject matter, that being subjective identity in Diaspora and how one can understand memory of a place, or a state as a shifting creature with a fairly specific history and a gender.
Hye-Seung Jung earned her BFA and exhibited her works in number of shows in South Korea before immigrating to Canada. She finished an MFA at The University of Calgary in 2004. Her recent shows include A Haphazard History at Trianon Gallery, Lethbridge (2008), Chebudong Project at Kunst Doc Gallery, Korea (2007), Dwelling Along at Truck gallery, Calgary (2007), City of Strangers: Art festival TULCA, Ireland (2007). Her web-based project is currently on-line for viewing at the website of Public Art Seoul, www.artpublicart.org, a group project about the city of Seoul.
Marissa Largo is an Assistant Professor of Creative Technologies at York University. Her research and creation focus on the intersections of community engagement, race, gender and Asian diasporic cultural production. Her forthcoming book, Unsettling Imaginaries: Filipinx Contemporary Artists in Canada (University of Washington Press) examines the work and oral histories of artists who imagine Filipinx subjectivity beyond colonial logics.
Dina Georgis is an Assistant Professor at University of Toronto, Ontario. She writes on postcolonial, diasporic and queer cultures. Her work draws on theories of trauma, memory and mourning to think through how ‘expelled’ cultures are made from loss. She is particularly interested in how narrative and art articulate the affective reality of experience and provide the conditions for ‘working through’ the past and for re-imagining political futures.