[-empyre-] Borders and Migration research and Contemporary Art

[Renate Ferro]

Dear Junting,
Many thanks for sharing Michael Joo’s pieces, both the Salt Transfer Cycle and Migrated at the Smithsonian. I am so happy to be introduced to our Cornell alumni’s work.  What an uncanny juxtaposition to Robert Smithson’s salt sculptures that were exhibited at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in the late 60’s.  Smithson’s sculptures were installations of piles of salt crystals that he mined about four miles from campus under Cayuga Lake’s Salt Mines, also a site for his art at the time.  He identified the relationship between the two as having a site/non-site relationship.

The resonances between Joo’s three sites in his performance/installation video Salt Transfer Cycle begins in Chinatown in a pile of salt, continues to the Great Salt Lake in Utah (where to the north of the lake lies Smithson’s own creation, Spiral Jetty). The piece finally ends with his return to South Korea.  In the three segments Joo’s body accepts traces of salt onto his body; salt to represent the salt from sweat and labor.

Thanks Junting for sharing your own research on spatial narrative and the contemporary works, Liquid Borders and Sonic Territories. Global geopolitical narrative and the potential were sound flows and oozes between the cultural and political spaces of borders is especially fascinating in relationship to propaganda. If you can share other work or specifics about your own research though out the month hope you will.  Also would love to hear from others in your network in Asia.

I was just talking to a colleague of mine last night.  We were reminiscing about another exhibition here at Cornell at the Johnson Museum of Art curated by Iftikhar Dadi, Partition as a Productive Space. https://www.academia.edu/10615321/Lines_of_Control_Partition_as_a_Productive_Space_co-edited_
The exhibition and conference that followed was an early discussion of the border.  Dadi’s catalog entry, Partition and Contemporary Art, discusses the relationship between space, political crisis, and contemporary art.  That early exhibition and conference in 2012 was one of the first for me to collapse issues of space-borders- and the politics of culture.
I am wondering if there are others whose research or art are resonating from these issues.
Ricardo Dominguez and Amy Sara Carroll come to mind who both work on the site of the Mexican/ US Border.  Hoping I can poke them back channel to perhaps post about their recent work.

Thanks again Junting.  Renate

Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu<mailto:rferro at cornell.edu>

I have recently been thinking a lot about how artwork restructures space. Taking on Renate’s opening thread of this month, I want to share my recent experience and perhaps reflect on the global identity that -empyre- as a platform has instituted throughout the years.

I was at a conference called “Global Asias” earlier this month. And for some, the title itself may already invite controversies. As paradoxical as it sounds, how could a geographical area called Asia be global?

With that question in mind, I was fascinated by a presentation by Terry K Park, who analyzed the works of the Korean-American artist Michael Joo (who was born in Ithaca to a South Korean couple studying at Cornell!), from his earlier works like Salt Transfer Cycle (https://redflag.org/magazine/issue-8/salt-transfer-cycle-a-video-piece/ <https://redflag.org/magazine/issue-8/salt-transfer-cycle-a-video-piece/>) to more recent ones like Migrated at the Smithsonian (https://www.apollo-magazine.com/meditations-on-migration-michael-joo-at-the-smithsonian/ <https://www.apollo-magazine.com/meditations-on-migration-michael-joo-at-the-smithsonian/>). As seen in both works, the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) becomes a recurring trope in Michael Joo’s oeuvre, not simply as an identifier of the physical space, but rather a constituent of a spatial narrative about movement and migration, whose ecological and/or humanitarian consequences demand a global identity.

Some of my recent research on contemporary art in China/Hong Kong/ Taiwan also resolves around this restructuring of space as a global narrative. I have been writing about artworks like Liquid Borders (http://cargocollective.com/samsonyoung/Liquid-Borders/ <http://cargocollective.com/samsonyoung/Liquid-Borders/>) and Sonic Territories (https://news.artnet.com/art-world/taiwan-kinmen-island-sonic-territories-1332893/ <https://news.artnet.com/art-world/taiwan-kinmen-island-sonic-territories-1332893/>), where the spatial narrative is exactly an integral part of the global geopolitical discourse. But in any case, I appreciate that -empyre- provides the space for discovering the connections we need towards that global identity.

Junting

Junting Huang
Department of Comparative Literature
240 Goldwin Smith Hall
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853




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