Laura Hyunjhee Kim for Neon Was Never Brighter: A Glimpse Into the Future
Laura Hyunjhee Kim for Neon Was Never Brighter: A Glimpse Into the Future For the first outdoor contemporary art festival in Chinatown, San Francisco, Neon Was Never Brighter: A Glimpse Into the Future , in collaboration with Chinatown Media & Arts Collaborative (CMAC) and curator Candace Huey, KADIST San Francisco co-presents a new performance, Cosmocrane (2022) by Laura Hyunjhee Kim. Laura Hyunjhee Kim’s Cosmocrane (2022) is a site-specific performance that pulsates with the past and present memories embedded within San Francisco’s oldest alleyway, Ross Alley. A narrow pathway tucked in the heart of Chinatown, Ross Alley wore many faces and was worn by many phases. It has been given many names and its notorious fame precedes its reputation as a destination. To this day, the hyper-local portal is enriched by its history and culture that ebbs and flows with the vibrancy of its people throughout the day. Ross Alley will be activated as a site that poetically quilts fleeting history-making experiences, chance encounters, and temporal moments of noticing. Languaging through birds as graceful messengers of wisdom and speaking through the mystical symbolism of cranes, the real-time experience gestures to a being-togetherness through healing, harmonizing, and balancing in-between nuanced architectures of intimacy or in-to-me-see . Kim attempts to blur the continuum of everyday art, life, and storytelling into an (a)synchronous dialogue between her life-as-lived body and those of residents/bypassers that coexist in a shared time and space. The performance will occur twice, each that responds to the (in)visibility afforded by the amount of natural light. Laura Hyunjhee Kim is a multimedia artist who reimagines on/offline (non)human interactions and feelosophical experiences of the body. Thinking-through-making, she creates performances and performs moments of incomprehension: when language loses its coherence, necessitates absurd leaps in logic, and reroutes into intuitive and improvisational sense-making forms of expression. As an avid cross-disciplinary pollinator, collaborator, and storyteller, her ongoing projects thematically focus on blobology, feelolosophy , pigeonology , and digital technologies. In 2020, Kim received the Judson-Morrissey Excellence in New Media Award and the Black Cube Video Art Award. She is the author of Entering the Blobosphere: A Musing on Blobs (The Accomplices/Civil Coping Mechanisms) and coauthor of Remixing Persona (Open Humanities Press). She received her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and PhD in Intermedia Art, Writing and Performance (IAWP) from the University of Colorado Boulder. Kim is an Assistant Professor of Visual and Performing Arts in Global Performance Studies at The University of Texas at Dallas and lives in the company of neighboring squirrels, birds, and wild rabbits. Neon Was Never Brighter: A Glimpse Into the Future is the first contemporary art festival in San Francisco’s Chinatown organized by Chinatown Media & Arts Collaborative (CMAC), and curated by Candace Huey. CMAC’s founding members include Chinese for Affirmative Action, the Center for Asian American Media, the Chinese Culture Center & Foundation of San Francisco, the Chinatown Community Development Center, Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, and the Chinese Historical Society of America. To kick off Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, this free, multi-sensorial outdoor experience will showcase art activations created from diverse media such as performance, sculpture, interactive sound, site-specific installation, film, music, fashion, virtual reality, scent, and dance.