Strange Bedfellows: How Found objects, Mineralogy and Ancient Viewing Stones Deliver a Relevant Message, Friday November 13th @ 5pm

During “Interpreting the Natural: Contemporary Visions of Scholars' Rocks,” the curator, Donna Dodson will host a series of conversations with renowned experts, scholars and curators in the field of scholars’ rocks and viewing stones in dialogue with the award winning artists who are featured in this show. Due to COVID-19, these events will be recorded live on zoom. Each dialogue will be approximately one hour. Watch a live recording of this event on Youtube.

 

L to R: Furen Dai, “How to Move a Scholar’s Rock from A to B,” Woomin Kim, “Minerals in Use”

"Strange Bedfellows: How Found objects, Mineralogy and Ancient Viewing Stones Deliver a Relevant Message"

Friday Nov 13th @ 5p with Dr. Kyunghee Pyun, art historian and faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology (see her recent interview about the Suseok in Parasite in Artnet), Dr. Aida Yuen Wong, art historian and faculty at Brandeis University, and two artists in the show: Furen Dai and Woomin Kim. This talk will address how the concepts of viewing stones and scholars rocks have influenced popular culture in movies, such as Parasite, and interior design, such as Feng shui. The artists will address the multiple interpretations of these stones, including their irreverent and very relevant approaches.

Kyunghee Pyun is Associate Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology, State University of New York. Her scholarship focuses on the history of collecting, reception of Asian art, diaspora of Asian artists, and Asian American visual culture. She was a Leon Levy fellow in the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection. Pyun is the co-editor of the book Fashion, Identity, Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan) which surveys modernized dresses in the early twentieth century. Since 2013, Pyun has collaborated with contemporary artists in New York as an independent curator. Her trilogy featuring Korean American artists are Coloring Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean-American Artists, Part One 1950–1990 (2013): Shades of Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean-American Artists, Part Two 1989–2001 (2014); and Weaving Time: An Exhibition from the Archive of Korean Artists in America, Part Three: 2001–2013 (2015), held at the Korean Cultural Center New York and Queens Museum.

Aida Yuen Wong is a Professor of Asian Art History at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., who has written extensively on transcultural modernism. Among her major publications are Parting the Mists: Discovering Japan and the Rise of National-Style Painting in Modern China (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2006) and the edited volume Visualizing Beauty: Gender and Ideology in Modern East Asia (Hong Kong University Press, 2012). Wong is the author of the chapter on Chinese modernism in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, 2nd ed. (2014). Her book, The Other Kang Youwei: Calligrapher, Art Activist, and Aesthetic Reformer in Modern China (Brill, 2016), explores the art theory and legacy of the late Qing-early Republican reformer whose paradigmatic thinking about painting and calligraphy cast a long shadow on modern/contemporary Chinese art discourses. Wong is the co-editor with Pyun of the volume, Fashion, Identity, and Power in Modern Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is currently researching 20th-century ink painting in Taiwan and its intersections with gouache and oil painting.

Furen Dai’s practice has focused largely on the economy of the cultural industry, and how languages lose function, usage, and history. Dai’s hybrid art practice utilizes video, sound, sculpture, painting, and installation. Her years as a professional translator and interest in linguistic studies have guided her artistic practice since 2015. She has presented her work at the National Art Center, Tokyo and the Athens Digital Arts Festival, Greece. She has participated in residencies, including International Studio and Curatorial Programs, Art OMI, NARS Foundation, and has received public art commissions from The Art Newspaper (2019) and Rose Kennedy Greenway (2020). 

Dai focuses on the transportation of the Scholar Rock rather than the rock itself. Tracing Scholar Rocks' history, she is interested in thinking about the fluctuation in the stone's value when moved from a natural environment to someone's garden. For this show, Dai decided to make a series of drawings proposing possible approaches for moving these massive rocks from one point to another.

Woomin Kim is a South Korean artist currently based in Queens, NY. Kim’s recent solo shows were exhibited at the Boston Sculptors Gallery (Boston, MA) and Maud Morgan Arts
Center (Cambridge, MA). She has participated in several residency
programs including the Queens Museum Studio Program, Ox-bow School of Art and Studio MASS MoCA. Kim has received fellowships and awards from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Korean Cultural Center. Her works have been featured in The New York Times and Hyperallergic. Kim holds a B.F.A from Seoul National University an M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Through making sculptures, she reveals what things are made of. “Minerals in Use” is a series of fictional minerals she made from daily objects such as toilet paper, box tape, plastic nails, kitty litter, used soaps, that she soaked, melted, or broke into pieces, then clustered, reassembled, and wove together creating sculptures that resemble mineral samples in natural history museums.