LOS ANGELES, CA.- Flesh Witness brings together contemporary artists whose work examines global histories and ongoing conditions of militarism across Asia and the Pacific. Focusing on the Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawai‘i, and Samoa, the group exhibition examines how military power is inscribed in landscapes, bodies, and archives. Flesh Witness includes artworks spanning from the 1970s to newly created work, ranging from video to sculpture, photography, mixed media, and installation.
On view from September 12 to December 13, the exhibition features the work of Bernice Akamine, Lani Asuncin, Pelenakeke Brown, Crystal Z Campbell, Jisoo Chung, Sean Connelly, Kyuri Jeon, Jane Jin Kaisen, Mao Ishikawa, Slow Futures Laboratory, and Stephanie Syjuco.
The exhibition takes its title from participating artist Kyuri Jeon’s video work, The Flesh-Witness, which revisits American archival documentation of Korean War prisoners who were forcibly tattooed with anti-communist slogans. The artists in the exhibition recover and reinterpret such inscriptions of power embedded in official state footage, newspaper archives, photographs, naming conventions, plants, and coastlines, revealing the intervention and occupation that established and maintained imperial dominance throughout the region.
Throughout the exhibition, artists foreground intergenerational memory, Indigenous knowledge beyond official histories and archives, and practices of ecological stewardship and activism that support communities living with the ongoing effects of militarized occupation. Presented in Los Angeles, a city historically influenced by transpacific migration and military infrastructure, the exhibition envisions new shared futures of Oceanic peoples and diasporas.
A related two-day symposium, As Ocean People: Symposium, Screenings, and Performance, on October 24–25, will feature panel discussions, screenings, soundscapes, and performances, bringing together artists and scholars of various diasporic Asian Pacific Islander identities whose work and scholarship examine the legacies of U.S. militarization and war, forms of Indigenous resistance, and environmentalism in and around the Pacific.
Flesh Witness is organized by REDCAT guest curators GYOPO and Amy Kahng, with support from Katy Dammers, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, and Kyla Kim, Getty Marrow Curatorial Intern.
The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) is a multidisciplinary center for innovative visual and performing art founded by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles. REDCAT continues the tradition of CalArts by encouraging experimentation, discovery, and lively civic discourse.
