INK – In Neuem Kontext
Hanayo, Helen Cho, Yoon Lee, Yudi Noor, Yuka Oyama, Yukihiro Taguchi

Curated by Tereza de Arruda, Carson Chan and Shaheen Merali

Project Coordinator: Paige Johnston

St. Johannes-Evangelist-Kirche, Auguststrasse 90
September 9-23, 2007
opening hours: Tues-Fri 12:00-19:00, Sat 12:00-22:00, Sun 12:00-18:00






As a counterpart to the New York based Asian artists featured in the House of World Culture’s Shangri-La performance/screening series during the Asia-Pacific week 2007, In Neuem Kontext provides a cross-section of work from emerging Berlin artists of Asian descent. Rather than ghettoizing Asian artists as a discrete group, this exhibition attests partly to the growing diversity and internationalism of the Berlin art scene.

Featuring the work some  of the city’s most promising Asian artists during two weeks in September, visitors will find St. Johannes church transformed into the site of constant transfiguration: installations that the artists change continuously throughout the period will be supplemented by performances. The church also poses unusual challenges to the artists and their work. In a secular society like Berlin, the church represents a place of shifting identities. Constructed at the end of the 19th century, this neo-Romantic church served as Humboldt University’s library annex from 1978 to 2002, and has, since 2003, been used for various cultural events as well as for prayer.

There remains a theoretical void after Kakuzo Okakura’s seminal ‘Book of Tea’ (1964) – an apologia on Asian identity that became the precursor for contemporary Orientalist thought. In Neuem Kontext, at once submitting to the myth of a unified Asian culture, in fact provides evidence for the contrary. Common ethnicity and heritage no longer function as viable identifiers within a globalized system of art practices. Artists today often live like nomads; Residencies, biennials, and art fairs combine their international influences to relocate practices that have traditionally been stationed within the studio’s confines. Taking her practice into the urban realm, Yuka Oyama will conduct workshops in the church, the House of World Cultures and at Hansaviertel, producing a site-specific installation with the community that surrounds each of the locations.
 
Identity is found within context – whether artistic, geographic, historic, political or otherwise. Already working through hyphenated identities (eg. Korean-American), these artists have come to Berlin, not to appropriate a new title, but rather to construct their own profile alongside Berlin’s own growing reputation as a center of contemporary art. The New Berlin, like these artists, is a character of hybrid personalities – it is a place that allows for activity outside of the mainstream that simultaneously avoids being categorized as alternative.


about the artists:

Hanayo (b. 1970) & Wooden Veil
Hanayo (www.hanayo.com) is an artist and musician currently living and working in Berlin. Her site-specific installations and music-based performances, manifested here as her band, Wooden Veil, play in the realm of the ritual and the ceremonial. Her works often bridge between poles – childhood/maturity, dark/light, myth/reality. Her young daughter, Tenko, often appears in her work as a double of sorts. Hanayo has been continuously repositioning and redefining her practice as an artist and musician by drawing on her rich cultural and personal history. For INK, Hanayo and her group, Wooden Veil (Dominik Noé, Marcel Turkowsky, †), have installed a decaying forest next to the church’s pulpit where bowers of bare branches form a natural Baldachin. Faint sounds from an 8mm film echo through the twigs, making the installation seem both freshly deserted and readily inhabitable.


Helen Cho (b. 1969)
Helen Cho received a Masters of Fine Arts from Goldsmiths College, London in 2005 and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work is structured around an investigation of the theory of evolution and its resonances in gender politics and competitive societies. These ideas are physically manifested in her objects. Black karate belts, a white belt blackened by years of blood and sweat, embody a fully lived passing of time. These belts, upon which the visitors must walk to enter, form a threshold into the church and mark a transition between the experience outside and inside the exhibition space. Cho also cluster soap sculptures around the building’s periphery. Their soft shapes, materiality and sweet smell seem to counter the intensity of the karate belts.


Yuka Oyama (b. 1974)
Yuka Oyama (www.dearyuka.com) received her diploma from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, München in 2004 and currently lives and works in Berlin. Her recent work, involving interactive workshops with the local community around the exhibition space, refashions discarded material and recyclables into objects of desire. Transplanted from the trash bin to the gallery, Oyama shows us that when set in a new social and aesthetic context, the relationship between use and value is a fluid and malleable one.


Yoon Lee (b. 1974)
Korean-born artist Yoon Lee (www.yoonlee.org) received a Masters of Architecture from Harvard University in 2004, and has since relocated to Berlin. Her work finds the connections between construction and destruction, between gender and cultural stereotypes, and functions to assist with the realization of her own identity within and beyond these frames. Her past works have  often exposed Asian female sexuality as an aggressively complex set of rules, visuals and expectations. Her piece for INK, a hanging structure made of more than 10,000 ping-pong balls, suggest a lurid connection between the abject and the sublime. 


Yukihiro Taguchi (b. 1980)
Yukihiro Taguchi (http://spazieren.exblog.jp/i4) received his degree from the painting department of the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 2004 and has since relocated his practice to Berlin. With his performance, Gift (in which the artist, vacuum sealed inside a plastic bag, continues to breath only when visitors blow into the bag), Taguchi provides a critique of interpersonal relationships, dramatically exposing the interdependence of the artists and patrons. In his “field work: Pumpen” installations, which use inflatable plastic forms, Taguchi literally fills in the empty spaces of the world around him, humorously toying with the sterile, hermetic nature of everyday life.


Yudi Noor (b. 1971)
Yudi Noor (www.birgitostermeier.com/artists.php) was born in West-Java, Indonesia and currently resides in Berlin. His performative sculptures uses a reduced language as a means for exploring collective memory and ethereality. His work often evoke a spiritual context in aesthetics – either in religiously symbolic use of materials in his sculpture or in performances where he quite literally channels the spirits in the exhibition space. For INK, Noor constructs a shrine within the church – a monument of brick, glass and limestone that appear to buttress the church walls while deconstructing our notions of the sacred and the profane.  



Special Thanks to:
Sabine Schmidt, Doris Hegner, Galerie DNA, Alexander Menke, Fotini Lazaridou-Hatzigoga, Sonja Oehler, Chuljay Lee, Tatsumi Orimoto, Isabel Schubert, Nana, Mario, Mat, Sarah, Tenko, Bram, Elizabeth, Aude, Chris, Felix Strittmatter, Claudia Eipeldauer, Isabella de Arruda Ilg, COMA Gallery and everyone that made this exhibition possible.


Web Resources:

Asian Pacific Weeks 2007: www.berlin.de/apforum/werkzeug/kalender/index.php?event=317
Haus der Kulturen der Welt: www.hkw.de
Evangelische Kirchgemeinde Sophien: www.sophien.de

Tereza de Arruda: www.p-arte.com
Carson Chan: www.programonline.de
Paige Johnston: www.valkenberghermitage.org



The Asia-Pacific Weeks are supported by the Deutsche Klassenlotterie Berlin (DKLB)