Fundraiser for the Kyopo Project:
About the Kyopo Project:
The Kyopo Project began in November 2004 and is comprised of photographic and textual portraits that explore the nature of Kyopo identities of first, second and third generations. The over 200 Kyopos profiled embrace a myriad of roles in their communities. They range in age from 5-90 and were raised in Brazil, Canada, China, Brazil, Denmark, France, Japan, The UK as well as in the U.S.
The Project was created to engage the public in the new movement of the Korean Diaspora characterized by Kyopos adopting roles and professions outside of stereotypical norms and traditional expectations. Today’s Kyopos are an active presence in politics, arts & entertainment, literature, sciences and all aspects of their communities. This phenomenon is an inevitable result of Kyopos spending a longer time in their respective adopted countries and speaking the local language with command. What surfaced is a multiculturalism that’s infused in many of the participants embrace and the many definitions of their identities.
CINDY HWANG (CYJO), PHOTOGRAPHER
CYJO specializes in portraiture and beauty. After working many years in the fashion industry, Ms. Hwang began her photographic career after having one of her photos published in the New York Times. Her recent work focuses on capturing the collective persona of cultural diaspora and the inherent synergy produced by subjects during the documentation process. Ms. Hwang is a graduate of FIT and the University of Maryland. Her clientele includes the following: Guess Watches, Equilend, Elle International, Angelo Filomeno, Jessica Corr and others.
Introduction from Korea Society Panel on May 29, 2008:
Asian American Art and artists have been perpetually in the past been thrown back from art historical inclusion and specifically within the global arena of diasporic art. I would venture to suggest that even pre-2000, the specific political project of Asian American visibility for some critics, administrators and artists who identified within the Asian American art community, which overlay the terminology, wished Asian American art to remain separated from what they may have seen as a wish to “go global” as an overly progressivist trend rather than responding to the reality of the need to remain local — by which I mean, to emphasize U.S. subjectivity — being included within the American art historical canon.
However this was arguably the remnants of a political project of a movement, one that would alter the terrain upon which Contemporary Asian diasporic artists, and Asian American artists within that, worked, that originated from a need to unify from the days of the civil rights movement through to the 80s multicultural moment and 90s backlash But the use of the terminology and political landscape has shifted, especially with more inclusion of Asian Americans within the mainstream U.S. museums and institutions as both artists and administrators, though by all means not an overwhelming amount, and the definite increase in visibility of Asian American artists within the U.S. showing in international art fairs, such as Paul Pfeiffer who won the first Bucksbaum award at the Whitney and was selected to represent the U.S. at the Cairo Biennial in 2003.
The political project has been shifted from its roots and to now view Asian American art as artificially U.S.-based and circumscribed is naïve and has lost much of its original purpose. Also, what has been seen is that even within the Asian American art movement, in the 70s through to now, and specifically in the New York mainstream and alternative art space, Asian American art had always been diasporic in nature, inclusive of artists from Asia working in the U.S., as well as artists who travel back and forth between Asia, and have returned to live in Asia from the U.S., such as Dinh Q. Le or Zhang Huan, or have just declared that they find “home” in an airplane, such as Xu Bing, who can be seen as residing under that mysterious “international” artist rubric. For these artists, some fall under the more priviledged schema of the cosmopolitan artist, but for many, their international migration is a necessary way to support their work, to enter art schools to increase their cultural and creative capital, to be seen within an art market where they can feasibly sustain a living, find funding, or to be able to create certain work without censorship, among other realities.
What is very interesting about The Kyopo Project is that it immediately denies the artificial construct of the citizen subject as confined to the nation-state and specifically Korea and also hovering about: the U.S., however, at the same time, it does highlight difference as well — of location, occupation, of dress and appearance. At the outset, CYJO has found herself as a nexus of an international community — a portal or artist organizer who has found the very juncture of internationalism common to urban spaces such as Post-war Paris, or lets say most major cosmopolitan cities such as New York or more specifically in her 21st century studio in New York City, where her subjects pass through, leaving their stories and narratives to accumulate in her project, that in itself has become a larger one of linkage between not only these subjects, who were chosen through acquaintances, but to other communities who find an affinity of similarities to the diasporic connection illustrated by the very diasporic practice and processes of the creation and continuation of The Kyopo Project. (Alexandra Chang, May 2008)
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