Category: Features & Commissions

For ‘Flash Art’ magazine

Yo, peep this out. Supa fly artist Nikki S. Lee is takin’ over da city this month with photographs of Hip Hop’s dopest scenes. Nikki throws down some bustin’ new work at The Bronx Museum and in her solo show at dealer Leslie Tonkonow, plus showing highlights from the past four years in “Purloined” at Artist’s Space. The ‘Hip Hop’ project is Lee’s latest series of photographs, taken as she hung out with newfound friends on the New York Hip Hop scene. In work that is half photography, half performance, Lee is an outsider giving her audience the inside view of Hip Hop culture.

Last summer, Lee was sponsored by the Bronx Museum to create work now on show at “One Planet Under a Groove”, an exhibition examining the connections between art and Hip Hop. Her trademark way of working is to radically transform her physical appearance in order to look like a member of various communities, including punks, skaters, senior citizens, and yuppies. She researches each group extensively and learns the skills necessary to fit in, in one case getting sponsorship to cover a gym membership to tone her body, and at another time, spending weeks in Riverside Park learning to skateboard. In the Hip Hop project, Lee closely imitated styles of dress, makeup and hair popular in the Hip Hop community and spent hours in a tanning salon to darken her skin. In the resulting photographs, Lee works the dance floor, pouts at the camera and just hangs out with a crowd that includes music producers and graffiti artists.

Although she studied and practiced commercial photography for the better part of a decade, Lee adopts a hands off approach to the camera. Instead, she asks friends and onlookers to take snapshots of her as she hangs out with her crowd. In the same way that she relinquishes control of the camera, she embarks on her performance projects uncertain of the outcome. In last year’s Exotic Dancers project, in which Lee applied for and got a job as a topless dancer in a nightclub in suburban Connecticut, she worked in platform shoes, garters and not much else. Before this, she created the Lesbian project, in which she is seen sharing intimate kisses with an accommodating blond. In both projects, Lee left her comfort zones far behind, taking risks that give her work strength as performance art.

On a superficial level, Nikki Lee seems to be acting out the American immigrant experience – trying on different aspects of the new culture to see what she’ll take or leave. The fact that she emigrated to the U.S. from Korea only seven years ago makes it all the more surprising that she has been able to master the details of so many subcultures in so short a time. But her forays into individual and group identity are even more profound considering Korea’s conflicts over national identity in the last century. A divided country, recovery from the attempted annihilation of the Korean culture and language by Japanese colonialists, and rapid urbanization and industrialization have put ‘traditional’ Korean folk culture in sharp contrast to modern city life. Anti-American sentiment at home, particularly with regard to U.S. military forces in Korea, makes the position of a Korean immigrant in the U.S. all the more meaningful.

Although fractured identity is fundamental in Lee’s photographs, Leslie Tonkonow points out that, “…One thing people misunderstand about Nikki’s work is that even though it touches on issues of multiculturalism, cultural identity and cultural politics in the United States, this is not really her issue…She is approaching these series very much as someone who is Asian and who has an Asian perspective on the individual in the group…” Lee has made it clear that she is focusing on the way in which any individual will define him or her self in relation to a group while contrasting the pursuit of individual identity in the West with the Asian orientation towards group identity. In an interview earlier this year, she told ICA Boston assistant curator Gilbert Vicario, “…In my work, I take pictures with a group and with other people of the group. So I describe like-people and their cultures, and then it goes back to my identity: I describe myself.”

Lee foregrounds the question of her identity by making artwork which resists a story line. Usually, her pictures look like she is just ‘hanging out’ on a normal day with her normal friends. Often compared to Cindy Sherman or Nan Goldin, Lee denies that either artist has substantially influenced her. She tells Vicario that her work is, “…not about Nan Goldin’s work, you know, going from bathroom to bedroom. Go to your house and look at your snapshot album. You don’t have pictures of sex scenes. Most people only have snapshots when they go traveling.”

Her extreme travels into foreign cultural and racial territory have produced images of subtle incongruity. In gesture, makeup and clothing she plays her parts perfectly, but her Asian features give her away every time, resulting in an initially confused reading. With an ‘anything is possible in New York’ attitude, it is feasible that a young, Asian-American woman might be a swinger, yuppie, lesbian or punk. But it is when she steps across racial barriers that questions of identity and not just subcultures come to the fore, and she creates her strongest work.

Because there is little suggestion of narrative in her photos of group life, the work has the feel of documentary. However, Lee subverts the expectation that the ‘reality’ of each group will be faithfully captured by the camera by the simple fact of her presence in each shot. Like the current trend for ‘reality’ programming on TV, the audience knows that the situations are heavily manipulated and the actions of the characters are influenced by their setting. Lee engages the demand for manipulated reality with work that revels in the contradictions of the global culture. By suggesting that Western viewers consider themselves as part of communities, not total free agents, the artist proposes an alternative way of conceptualizing life and community. She also offers an antidote to the isolation of modern, urban culture.

for Centro de Arte de Salamanca, Spain.

“Experiencing nature was not enough, so we sought to understand it. Understanding nature was not enough, so we seek to control it. Controlling nature was not enough so we seek to enhance it. Enhancing nature was not enough, so we seek to reproduce it. Reproducing nature is not enough, so we seek to replace it. These are all human pursuits, but it’s only through digitization that we are able, now, to take them to their ultimate conclusion.”
Richard DeGrandpre

“Simply put, the inhabited grid has become the irreducible sign of the world we live in today.”
Dan Cameron

Below his seat, the ground begins to tremble. A roar fills his ears and suddenly, he is pinned to his seat as the aircraft gains momentum and lifts into the air. Cruising at altitude, the plane tilts to the right and left, making minor course adjustments as tiny earth whizzes by in a blur below. Torben Giehler’s landscapes are a view from the cockpit. High above the ground, civilization turns into a patchwork of color featuring an occasional boxy piece of architecture or globe-topped communications tower. In the distance, mountain ranges come into view, their craggy peaks still too far away to awe us with their scale. Each painting is a challenge to the gravity that keeps us tethered to earth and the limitations of our physical bodies. Like flight simulation computer games, they fulfill a simultaneous fantasy of escape from and dominance over the landscape. But their effect is physical, and viewers are propelled forward into Giehler’s brave new world.

It’s unclear how high above the planet we are in these paintings, but one thing is certain – there are no ant-like people or tiny farmhouses visible at this altitude. In ‘Circling Overland’ (2002), the plane flies over a landscape dominated by a white grid and swoops down to the left so that the horizon nearly disappears into a wedge at the top of the canvas. The painting shares a title with a song by the Belgian electro-music band Front 242, which describes a midnight surveillance flight over Western Europe. The year is 2029 and intelligent robots do the bidding of their military commanders by monitoring the activities of humans below them. Two paintings with a similar composition, ‘Bad redandblue’ (2002), and ‘Night Train’ (2002), feature layers of blue and purple sky hovering over an ominous, blood red horizon. Suddenly, we’re in the future, we’re being watched, and we don’t know what’s coming next.

Not all of these flights are night missions, however. One of Giehler’s trademarks is his use of bright colors that neutralize the darker edge of the digitally enhanced world he depicts. ‘Ziplock’ (2002), for example, is a spaghetti junction of thick, overlapping lines in orange, green and white. As if Barnett Newman’s famous ‘zips’ have gathered for a party, the grid has loosened up and lines overlap at random. ‘Push’ (2003) is a crazy quilt of distorted rectangles each pulling down toward the bottom left of the canvas. Although it has spatial distortions similar to Giehler’s aerial views, there is no horizon and the sunny yellows, peppy oranges and pinks, and mellow blues and greens are the subject of the painting. The pattern resembles the patchwork of colors that underlies the white grid in ‘Circling Overland,’ suggesting that this painting is a partial view of the larger piece. ‘Ziplock,’ may look like a busy junction, but it also resembles fibers under a microscope, magnified to reveal the component parts of a larger structure. If ‘Circling’ is an aerial overview from a surveillance flight, ‘Ziplock’ and ‘Push’ are the data gathered, snapshots taken by a zoom lens.

Whether the perspective is micro or macro, Giehler’s pixilated aesthetic is familiar to anyone who has used a CAD program, played a combat video game, seen flight simulation or watched a manga cartoon character fly through a futuristic city. Computer mediated reality and virtual reality, less common in painting, permeates daily life. The ubiquitous grids that lie over the surface of the earth in the paintings are a visible manifestation of the ever-expanding web of human communication accessible through the Internet, e-mail, cell phones, satellite beams and TV signals. So while Giehler might, through Front 242’s lyrics, envision a futuristic race of free thinking machines serving man as they cruise the airspace, his paintings are resolutely set in the present. Hidden communications networks are made visible, but these webs exist now and deny his work the designation ‘futuristic.’

During the last century, artists were no strangers to scientific progress, sometimes adapting the latest findings in their artwork. The Impressionists’ daubs of paint and the Cubists’ fractured picture planes occurred in tandem with scientific advances in understanding the structure of reality. But while the Futurists, for example, were in awe of the material world, others like Kandinsky and Mondrian investigated a way to communicate the unseen, spiritual structures that they felt dominated life. By elaborating these hidden relationships in line and color, Mondrian set a precedent for artists like Giehler, who depict the invisible, wireless world. Mondrian’s unfinished, final painting, ‘Victory Boogie Woogie,’ (1944) is a tribute to his intoxication by the energy of wartime New York, and his continuing meditation on the meaning embedded in his grids. Giehler quotes Mondrian in his own ‘Boogie Woogie’ (1999) and a similar piece titled ‘Yeah, Yeah, Yeah’ (2002). Each is a painting within a painting – a close-up on the surface of a gridded canvas. Like Mondian’s, Giehler’s lines resemble a circuit board, broken up by squares of color that give the composition the energy of a dance step and the speed of a microprocessor.

Circuit boards, microprocessors and the Internet may be the innovations of the present day, but they’re also the platform for tomorrow’s advanced technology. Giehler references both present and future in every image. With one foot in fact and one foot in science fiction, the artist reminds us that the difference between reality and virtual reality is sometimes one of perspective. By painting specific places, like ‘Lhotse’ (2002) and ‘K2-North Spur’ (2002), Giehler counters the anonymity of his other landscapes. Titled or not, the mountain paintings suggest real places, whether they are laid over with a patchwork of light and shade, as in ‘Untitled’ (2002) or bask in the setting sun, as in ‘Untitled (Brown)’ (2002). Side by side on the wall, mountains and vast planes push and pull the viewer between the present and the future, the real and the virtual. But what is specific to the mountain pictures and particularly the Himalayas, are their identity as a final frontier for adventurers who pit their strength and wits against Nature. They symbolize the last remaining real life challenge to human dominance of the planet.

As our communities become increasingly virtual, when we can shop, pay bills and do our banking on line and then take a break to converse in chat rooms or e-mail a friend, convenience increases alongside impersonality. The premise for Giehler’s paintings, visions from the air, posits the lone individual against the masses below. The pilot whose viewpoint we share has broken free from his fellows and speeds through the atmosphere alone, a free agent. Below him, the grid remains in force, but unable to extend its grip to his freewheeling ship. Inevitably, the pilot must sooner or later return to his rightful place and whatever mediated version of reality he inhabits. As he descends back into the colorful architecture of the ‘Downtown’ series (2001), he resumes his participation in the dream that is progress, still a citizen of a cyberspace that is, “…a conscious reflection of the deepest desires, aspirations, experiential yearning and spiritual Angst of Western man.”

For ‘ART AsiaPacific’ Magazine

Translated Acts is the first large scale exhibition in New York of work by Asian artists since the landmark ‘Inside Out’ show in 1998 at the Asia Society and PS1. In contrast to the previous sprawling survey, this more concise exhibition focuses on performance and body art from Japan, Korea, Taiwan and China. In her catalogue essay, curator Yu Yeon Kim outlines two organizing principles, explaining first that East Asian artists have uniquely conveyed their historical and political positions through performance art, and second, that photography, video and other digital media and are no longer used solely as documentation, but are now integral to the artwork. By flagging this change, Kim herself documents the way in which the particular cultural and economic situations of Asian countries has resulted in an avant-garde art fundamentally different from the West.

While there is a slight bias towards male, Chinese artists, the nearly thirty featured artists are a diverse group that includes those living and working in their native countries as well as ex-pats from different generations. Young, international artists like the ubiquitous Mariko Mori and Michael Joo, whose sculpture was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial appear alongside artists like Xu Bing, Zhang Huan and Gu Wenda. All of the above continue to receive significant attention in the US and provide some anchors to aid the New York audience in understanding this ambitious and intense exhibition.

Translated Acts does not propose to be a ‘who’s who’ of performance artists in Asia, nor is it a historical survey. Instead, the assembled group of work has similarities and differences that inspire reflection on the multitude of conceptual tactics employed by East Asian artists over the past decade. In her catalogue essay, Yu Yeon Kim warns her audience against interpreting the artwork solely in relation to the Western, modernist paradigm. To this end, she briefly outlines the tumultuous political and economic events of the last 50 years in each of the countries represented. She also develops an argument that Asian artists are likely to be influenced by Buddhist or Taoist ideology, which opposed to the hierarchies implicit in Western thought, accepts a more fluid concept of structure. Considering that at least a third of the artists in this exhibition live or were born in the West and taking into account the popularity of Eastern philosophies in the West in the past 50 years, this dichotomy may be less useful than Kim suggests. However, on a less philosophical level, many of the featured artists do acknowledge the importance of their faith in their work. Further, an approach which privileges the spiritual is an interesting counterpoint to the recent observations that China’s lack of “godly morality” has resulted in the use by some artists of the living or dead human body with little regard to its sanctity.

In keeping with Kim’s assertion that video and photography have become inseparable elements of performance art, the exhibition is stronger on performative photography and installation than actual performance. The promising but poorly organized opening events featured appearances by Chiharu Shiota, who slept in one of the many cot-like beds featured in her installation, Wang Jian Wei, who presented a red carpet resting on a bed of glass, which was methodically crushed by the visitors, as well as other performances by Ja-Young Ku and Chun-Chi Lin. A past performance by Chun-Chi Lin is presented on video, and documentation of Tehching Hsieh’s year long projects occupy one room. Hsieh’s performances, which double as feats of endurance, are meaningful in a Western performance tradition, but it is in the context of this exhibition alongside fellow Taiwanese that his radical experiments make fuller sense.

Fellow Taiwanese artist Chieh-Jen Chen’s recent large-scale photographs are the most disturbing pieces in the show, and likely contributed strongly to the Museum’s decision to restrict access for children. Suggesting the invasion of a devastating epidemic, or the impact of a tyrannical regime, the photographs feature scores of prostrate human bodies, covered with sores and invaded by metal clamps, harnesses and tubing. Also unnerving is Yuan Goang-Ming’s “The Reason for Insomnia”, an interactive sculpture in the form of a bed. When the bedposts are touched, different projections of blood, fire and feeling hands appear on the sheets.

These dark images contrast sharply with Kim Atta’s ‘Museum Series,’ in which nude models hold prolonged poses in glass boxes placed in Buddhist temples and serene landscapes. These sublime bodies establish a recurrent theme of the idealized versus the absent, injured or defiled body. Contrasts appear throughout the exhibition, for example between Mariko Mori’s ‘alien body’, a perfect specimen enclosed in a pill-like capsule and deposited in various locations around the world, and the defiling rituals carried out by her countrywoman Chiharu Shiota.

Unclothed bodies result in the most striking imagery of Translated Acts. Collages and videos from Ma Liuming’s nude photo sessions with the public, during which he places his own unprotected body at the disposal of his audience, show the artist in a sometimes meditative, sometimes indifferent state. A public dynamic was also central in Zhang Huan’s ‘My America’, seen in Spring 2000 at Deitch Projects in Soho. This video, created from documentation of a performance in which a large group of Western volunteers shed their clothing and followed Zhang’s directions, is a portrait of the artist as he navigates a place for himself in his new country.

Other fruitful juxtapositions surface in the show’s installation. Gong Xin Wang’s ‘The Face’, his own laughing and eventually disappearing head, is positioned opposite Young Kyun Lim’s serene portraits of Korean youth. In another room, photos from Qui Zhijie’s ongoing Tattoo series, in which the artist continues a pattern from the wall behind him onto his own naked torso, appear next to documentation of the now legendary performance, ‘Cultural Animal,’ by Xu Bing, in which a mannequin and live pig were stamped in nonsensical Chinese and English script. Next to these two pieces is a video document of Gu Wenda’s ritual performances in which he writes calligraphy with an enormous brush. This combination of three uses of calligraphy by three Chinese artists who privilege the body is a mini-exhibition in itself.

Yu Yeon Kim’s triple concerns of ‘…cultural identity, historical legacy and inner expression…” cut across national borders in Asia, and apply to artists living at home and abroad. They also offer a way for Western viewers, unfamiliar with the unique and turbulent histories of East Asia over the past half-century, to engage the artwork. Kim has successfully brought together a mixed body of work that comments on the specific cultural backgrounds of the artists and the political situations in which they find themselves. She also addresses the need to develop an understanding of work that has been produced on the other side of the planet and outside of Western frameworks of thought, in an era of globalized culture. ‘Translated Acts’ challenges Western viewers to look beyond the easily digested and much imported anime inspired artwork seen so often in the US recently, and to instead grapple with East Asian art through the truly universal subject – the human body.

For ‘NYArts’ magazine

As the weather grows warmer and New Yorkers start longing for life outside the city, the attention of the art world begins shifting to Biennials, Triennials and other international group exhibitions outside of the U.S. This summer, the granddaddy of them all, ‘Documenta XI’ in Kassel, Germany, is rolling around again in its five-year cycle. Documania started early in New York, however, with the arrival in February of ‘The Short Century’ an exhibition of African art from the last fifty years, curated by ‘Documenta’ curator Okwui Enwezor. After traveling through several European venues, the exhibition arrived at PS1, stoking the fires of speculation about the content of ‘Documenta’.

New York based curator Lauri Firstenberg was a member of the curatorial team for ‘The Short Century’, and a curatorial assistant for ‘Documenta’, but she isn’t giving away any secrets. “I am excited to see what the artists’ projects are going to look like and how they manifest themselves after four or five years of discussion and labor,” she said. “I worked on ‘Documenta’ before a major staff was hired in Kassel and prior to the concrete infrastructure being set into place. Our research was broad, encompassing all aspects of the exhibition process, and the activity was centered in the New York office at that time.”

Although the hype for Documenta is building, and ‘The Short Century’ has finally arrived in New York, Firstenberg completed these projects almost a year ago. She is still in her late 20s, and had the golden opportunity to work with Enwezor right out of graduate school. According to Firstenberg, she was most impressed by “…what Okwui Enwezor refers to as ‘transparent process’ – that the discourse around the making of an exhibit is as acute as the exhibition proper. The extra-Documenta platforms perform a deterritorialization of the exhibition – distributing its influence over a wide field of venues and media.” What is perhaps most apparent in her current New York shows is the influence her of academic background. Firstenberg explains, “I see the creation of inter-discplinary programming and coordination with other institutions as ideal. What I bring with me, having been subject to collaborative teams of academics, curators, critics, architects, designers is an incredible mode of alliances as a critical model.” In 1998, Firstenberg finished her PhD coursework in Harvard’s art history department and moved to New York. Her short stint as assistant to former Whitney Museum curator Thelma Golden ended abruptly with Golden’s departure from the museum, but Enwezor’s offer to work together on ‘The Short Century’ came shortly after Golden’s boxes were packed. This led to Firstenberg’s involvement with Documenta. When the time came for the Documenta office to shift from New York to Kassel, Firstenberg decided to stay in New York. A few months later, she became the Curator at Artist’s Space where she has now mounted two well received shows.

Although it has only recently arrived in New York, ‘The Short Century’ first opened at the Museum Villa Stuck in Munich in February 2001 and is not intended as a precursor to this summer’s happenings in Germany. In fact, the project was originally conceived of as a book and is accompanied by a hefty catalogue chronicling 50 years of African film, theater, literature, music, art and architecture. Firstenberg explains that her academic background in photography structured her place on the curatorial team, saying “A lot of my responsibility stemmed from my own interest in the photo archives and dealing with the contemporary photography, but everything was done really collectively.” In light of her extensive archival research, her catalogue essay profiling the photographers Seydou Keita, Samuel Fosso, Santu Mofokeng and Zwelethu Mthethwa examines how photographic practice in Africa has impacted both colonial and post-colonial formation of identity.

Unlike many curators with an interest in African art, Firstenberg did not grow up in Africa, and in fact didn’t travel there until she made two graduate school research trips to Johannesburg. During her undergraduate years, she happened to spend a semester working at an African art gallery in L.A., and her interest grew from that point on. By the summer of ‘93, she turned down an internship at MOMA to spend the summer working at the Museum of African Art. When she went on to Harvard for her MA, Firstenberg took Nigerian artist Iké Udé’s photographic work as the subject of her thesis, which led to both a monograph and a touring exhibition that eventually appeared as part of a trio of African shows at Harvard University’s galleries last October.

In August, she arrived at Artists Space, the non-profit gallery for unaffiliated artists, with plans already in progress for her first exhibition, ‘Urban Pornography.’ Featuring the work of sixteen photographers, her inaugural show focused on architecture in urban, suburban, and rural spaces. From Alex Slade’s image of the decrepit skyscraper housing Brazil’s Ministry of Agriculture to doreen morrissey’s minimal roadside rest-stops in the wide open space of the American West, the exhibition laid bare the built forms which might in everyday life be seen as unremarkable. Peter Zellner, Firstenberg’s architect fiancée worked with her on the project, and the two have plans to keep working on ‘Urban Pornography’ in the form of the book.

Firstenberg may have moved to a new institution and taken up her twin fascinations with photography and architecture, but she hasn’t abandoned her academic and curatorial background. In fact, the curator’s second show at Artists Space ‘Context and Conceptualism’ took a 1996 article by Okwui Enwezor on artist Kendell Geers as its starting point. Enwezor questions how an artist’s context (national origin) determines his or her entry into the discourse of the global art world. In response, Firstenberg presented a captivating installation of South African postage stamps by Siemon Allen, an intelligent video by Coco Fusco in which Spanish speakers from around the world discuss their exclusion from or inclusion in Catalan society and Melissa Gould’s installation relating her to grandfather’s deportation to Auschwitz.

For thirty years, the aim of Artists Space has been to exhibit work by “unaffiliated contemporary artists working in the visual arts.” With her international background, Firstenberg is taking this remit global. From late March to early May, she has invited architect Didier Faustino, who lives in Paris and Lisbon, and London artist John Timberlake to show work in the gallery’s project rooms. In terms of working with international artists, Firstenberg explains, “It is most interesting to work with artists whose work is critical, poses interesting questions, and will translate well to New York audiences. I think that the nature of my job is to look beyond Chelsea and try to travel as much as possible. As both an academic and curator, it’s about as much research as possible.”

New York artists don’t need to feel left out, however. In an independent curatorial project with Lombard Fried Fine Arts in Chelsea, Firstenberg is showing work by seven artists who live and work in New York. During the month of April, ‘Retrofit’ will showcase art that works in tandem with architecture, design and technology to ‘refit’ existing concepts and adapt them for new situations. Lombard Fried director Michael Lieberman explained the adaptability of the theme by saying that the gallery, curator and artists envisioned a show that “…created a dialogue between their work but didn’t impose too much of a heavy-handed curatorial vision or structure on their work. I think it makes sense to have a show that has… a theme and unifying idea but also lets the work breathe and stand up on its own.”

Lauri Firstenberg may have stepped out of the Documenta limelight, but she is by no means receding into the shadows. With her program of exhibitions at Artists Space, continuing independent shows, the ‘Urban Pornography’ book project, and the numerous articles she writes about the artists with whom she works, she is making the most of her location in New York and her role at Artists Space. In her commitment to research, Firstenberg regularly plows through the hundreds of slides sent in to her by emerging artists. In fact, it is from these slides that Firstenberg is charting new territory for herself by developing ‘Painting as Paradox’ a group show of painting scheduled for the winter at Artists Space. Firstenberg admits that the prospect of exhibiting painting, with her background in photography is daunting. But what could have been more daunting than working on the world’s biggest exhibition in Summer ’02?

For ‘NYArts’ magazine

Is Christine Y. Kim stuck in the shadows, or does she have it made in the shade? Shortly before Kim started her current job as Assistant Curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem, curatorial heavyweights Lowry Sims and Thelma Golden moved into the respective roles of Director and Deputy Director/Chief Curator, creating a media fuss and much art world speculation on the institution’s new identity. Golden’s star power attracts a steady stream of media attention and recently made her the subject of a lengthy profile in The New Yorker.

So how is a young curator able to find her own voice in a small museum with two big personalities? Smiling out from the pages of The New York Times ‘Sunday Styles’ photographs last month, Kim didn’t seem to be having much of a problem. The newspaper photos featured the opening of the Museum’s winter exhibitions, the crowning jewel of which is ‘Africaine’, a show of work by four female artists from Africa curated by Kim. At the tender age of 30, she has navigated the competitive world of young curators, to snag a job in one of New York’s most exciting museums, as well as planning independent shows at Artists Space, Gale Gates, and other venues.

‘Africaine’ is the feminine form of ‘African’ in French, and while only one of the featured artists is actually from a country formerly colonized by the French, the title evokes a post-colonial discourse appropriate to the artwork. Kim laughed when I asked about the show’s title, reflecting on someone’s suggestion that ‘Africaine’ might be a new kind of designer drug. Turning serious, Kim explained, “I prefer not to give shows titles that directly locate demographics, race and identity, like ‘Four African Women’, or ‘Nine Korean or Asian-American Artists.’ I like to put the work and the concept of the exhibition before the rest.”

All four artists in ‘Africaine’ grapple with the female form, creating collages or photographs that question how the bodies of African women have been viewed. Twenty-four framed collages of individual women by Wangechi Mutu recall Hannah Hoch’s sexually charged, mixed race collages from the 1920s, while Fatimah Tuggar presents domestic scenes and mixed race couples. Tracey Rose, from South Africa, offers four large photographs featuring herself in the varying roles from porn star Ciccolina to ‘Venus Baartman’ crouching nude in the bush, near the spot where the oldest human remains have been found. Fellow South African Candice Breitz’s images of semi-nude women in tribal dress from 1996 are taken from postcards and transformed by covering the women’s skin with white-out.

Like many people who have a point to make, Kim has a catchphrase. Whether she is referring to Tracey Rose’s provocative photos or the violence of Breitz whiting out black bodies, Kim values ‘pushing the envelope.’ She applies the same phrase to the artists of ‘Purloined,’ the show which opened the ’01-’02 season at Artists Space. All of the participating artists dealt with thievery as a practice or a theme and, as Kim explained, focused on “…challenging the conventions in a community, culture or society.

” Starting with Sophie Calle’s exploits as a nosy chambermaid, the show moved on to look at Polaroids by Lilah Freedland, taken while breaking into the houses and apartments of strangers, and stolen and tagged items presented by Lisa Levy. Other artists, like Nikki Lee and Nancy Hwang, investigated what it means to assume another’s identity. “One of the things that was special about the show for me…” said Artists Space director, Barbara Hunt, “…was Nancy Hwang’s performance where she undertook manicures…You entered through… semi-transparent curtains and sat at table with a sandblasted glass screen, so you couldn’t see the person performing the manicure. She talks about the way in which people really did confess to her and were telling her their secrets five minutes into the manicure.”

As Kim starts to lessen the focus on independent curating and concentrates on her role at the Studio Museum, no doubt she’ll develop her talent for pulling together artists from a variety of backgrounds into tightly themed shows. She is equally interested in artists from the East and West coasts, and says that in her exhibitions, “…most of the time, more than half of the artists are women, more than half are artists of color, but it’s never really mentioned. It’s more about artists working in a certain vein or addressing a pertinent process or idea…” Referring to ‘Africaine’, curator and critic Franklin Sirmans said, “Christine Kim’s approach of mixing up the very local and the global in that show is trademark for her energy in looking everywhere and being able to make the meaningful connections among artists that a lot of people just don’t see.”

Combining the local and global is very Christine Kim. For her next show, tentatively titled ‘Black Belt: Third Arena,’ the curator is planning to explore the conjunction of African-American and Asian-American culture through Kung Fu culture. She points to the popularity of martial arts and eastern spirituality in the African-American communities and is mapping how this has had a significant impact on art by many African-American artists. She is careful to say, “I don’t want to create a narrative that connects Blacks and Asians. But for a generation of people of color strongly influenced by popular culture and urban culture of the seventies and eighties, there was an emergence of another possibility beyond the dichotomies of Black and White from the decade that preceded. There was a transcendent space that mapped spirituality, rebellion, entertainment…and a realization that there were other ‘Americans/Non-Americans’ who perhaps didn’t have exactly the same kind of struggles but experienced social and national alienation whether in the workplace, academic sphere, Hollywood, in sports, or who knows.”

Over the past two years, in addition to working on her own shows, Kim’s assistance to Thelma Golden has provided her with new working strategies. Like others in the field, she uses the word mentor to describe her older colleague, saying “I thought I knew what a mentor was until I met her…It’s not about instruction, it’s about example and about energy.” Kim even admits that her choice of wall color for ‘Africaine’, chartreuse not an earthy ‘African’ color, owes something to Golden.

Far from languishing in the wake of her colleagues, Kim is locating herself as a curator, a second-generation, Korean woman working in Harlem, and a West coaster educated and living on the East Coast. Late one afternoon in February, Kim and I were the last ones left in the museum galleries, when suddenly the lights were turned out. Unfazed, Kim continued talking for another 20 minutes in the dark, enthusing about her ideas for shows and plans as a curator. If the energy of her personality continues to translate onto the walls of her shows, the stars will continue to shine in Harlem.