Another Beautiful Country: Chinese American Artists in Cross-Cultural Conversation
Date: Wednesday, April 3, 2024 at 6 p.m.
Location: USC Pacific Asia Museum
Admission is free. Reservations required.
Join Beijing and San Francisco–based artist and art space/cafe/bookshop organizer Rania Ho and UC Irvine professor and artist Simon Leung for an illuminating discussion on Chinese American art, intersectional identities, and intimate stories of transnational migration moderated by Jenny Lin, USC Roski professor and curator of Another Beautiful Country at the USC Pacific Asia Museum. Preceding the conversation, audience members will be able to view the exhibition during extended gallery hours.
This event and a workshop on Digitally Exhibiting Art and Archival Materials for USC students led by Rania Ho and Simon Leung are presented in conjunction with Another Beautiful Country, exploring Chinese American and Asian American art and cross-cultural histories in Los Angeles and beyond, on view at the USC Pacific Asia Museum through April 2024.
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Rania Ho is a Beijing- and San Francisco–based installation and performance artist whose works employ a wry, unexpected approach to everyday objects and situations as a means of interrogating broader social or cultural concerns. The internationally shown artist is also a co-founder of Arrow Factory, one of the longest-standing independently run alternative art spaces in Beijing, which operated in a small storefront from 2008 to 2019, and a co-founder of Wujin, a tiny café, bookshop, and creative platform in Beijing that has been running since 2013.
Simon Leung is a multimedia artist and UC Irvine professor whose projects include a rethinking of AIDS and otherness using the figures of the pinprick and the glory hole, meditations on “the residual space of the American/Vietnam War,” a video essay on the site/non-site dialectic instigated by Robert Smithson’s reception of Edgar Allan Poe, and “squatting projects” in Berlin, New York, Chicago, Vienna, Guangzhou, and Hong Kong. Leung has participated in the Venice Biennale, the Whitney Biennial, the Luleå Summer Biennial, and the Guangzhou Triennial.
Jenny Lin directs the MA program in curatorial practices and the public sphere and is an associate professor of critical studies at the USC Roski School of Art and Design. As a scholar, writer, and curator, Lin explores relations between twentieth- and twenty-first-century art and design and social phenomena such as urbanization, globalization, and decolonization. She is writing a new book, Another Beautiful Country: Moving Images by Chinese American Artists, and curating the related exhibition at the USC Pacific Asia Museum.