HERE NOW: THE IMMIGRATION SHOW (2016)

Here Now: Four Los Angeles Artists
Kyung Cho
Phung Huynh
Peter Liashkov
Marianne Sadowski

Here Now brings together four artists who have traveled through political and cultural boundaries to arrive at and live in Los Angeles.

While our country is embroiled in a divisive discussion about immigration, this exhibition reminds us that migration and human movement, which are as old as humankind, are the wellsprings of civilization. Without the free flow of ideas, civilizations wither. Immigration is essential for the health of the nation. At the entrance to the exhibition, you are confronted with two perspectives, Emma Bourne's 1940 poster for the Council Against Intolerance in America, America-A Nation of One People from Many Countries and several appliquéd and embroidered hangings created since 2016 by the Women of Tanivet in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico.

Artists have immigrated here throughout American history. Consider the great painter of the American landscape, Thomas Cole from England, the abstract expressionist Wilhelm de Kooning, from The Netherlands, Emanuel Leutze best known for Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Max Beckmann from Germany, Philip Guston from Canada and Yasuo Kuniyoshi from Japan. The current group of immigrant artists is distinct in a significant way. Their works refer directly to their own journey or to migrations in general. Is this because we live in very unsettled times, described by the Polish philosopher Zygmunt Bauman as liquid modernity in reference to the condition of constant mobility and change he saw in relationships, identities, and global economics within contemporary society.* The four artists now represented in the gallery depict distinct aspects of personal memory and social commentary.

Kyung Sun Cho is a visual artist and professor of art at the California State University, Fullerton. She was born in Korea, raised in Brazil, educated in the United States and now lives in Los Angeles. She received her BA, MA and MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of California, Berkeley. She has exhibited in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York and elsewhere. She has traveled to Brazil, Korea and France for creative and scholarly research. In her current large-scale paintings, she continues to explore internal landscapes and personal fragments. There is a sense of displacement and desire in her work stemming from memories that evoke the past, present and future. Kyung Cho seems not to address her past or her native country of Korea in an obvious way, but rather to evoke it in a dreamlike film of color.

Peter Liashkov was born in Rouen, France, and lived in France and Argentina before arriving in the United States. He earned his MFA from Otis Art Institute and is Professor Emeritus from Art Center College of Design. He, has traveled extensively throughout Europe and the Middle East. Since retiring from teaching he has done residencies in Russia, Norway, Argentina and the U.S. Liashkof's collages are responses to visits to his former homes in Paris and Buenos Aires. His installation pays homage to his parents who emigrated from Russia to France. The video records his 2015 performance in Buenos Aires. By layering actual materials on his works, Liashkov addresses the many layers of his past, and his connections to artistic traditions from his origins in Russia.

Phung Huynh was born in Vietnam. Her mother is Chinese, born in Vietnam. Her grandparents emigrated from China during World War II. Her father is Cambodian. Her family were among the "boat people" of the 1970s and spent eight months in a Thai refugee camp before arriving in the United States. Her MFA is from New York University. Huynh's recent work examines the efforts of young Asian women to Westernize their bodies whether through measures as radical as surgery or as mild as make-up, but inevitably as a rejection of their natural selves. Her work investigates notions of cultural identity from a kaleidoscopic perspective, a continual shift of idiosyncratic translations. The contemporary American landscape is where she explores how “outside” cultural ideas are imported, disassembled, and then reconstructed.

Marianne Sadowski was raised in Mexico City where she earned an MFA from the Academy of San Carlos. She tackles migration directly and with a strong sense of local history. What we know as the 101 Freeway was a trade route of the Tongva people and others traveling from what is now Washington to Mexico. Sadowski's paintings, prints, and mixed media works reflect her concerns for social justice and humanity at a time when a personal or local problem merges with a global concern. Further more, elements of nature are always present in her art and often work as symbols to convey the fine line of life itself.

As a counterpoint to these accomplished artists, embroidered works are presented in the hallway to draw our attention to the hardship faced by a town whose able young men have emigrated. They may send funds back into the community, but no one is left to do the work of running farms and other businesses except the women, who must do everything. To support themselves and maintain their community, the Women of Tanivet have developed a collective to tell their story in textile images. http://www.revistascisan.unam.mx/Voices/pdfs/10010.pdf

America - A Nation of One People from Many Nations, the map by Emma Bourne issued by the Council Against Intolerance in 1940, is used with permission from the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. New Haven, Connecticut.

Curated by Jody Baral and Nina Berson
Thanks to Marietta Bernstorff and the Women of Tanivet.

* For Zygmunt Bauman, the consequences of this condition can most easily be seen in contemporary approaches to self-identity where constructing a durable identity that coheres over time and space becomes increasingly impossible. He observed that we have moved from a period where we understood ourselves as “pilgrims” in search of deeper meaning, to one where we act as “tourists” in search of multiple but fleeting social experiences.
Learn more about his ideas at https://baumaninstitute.leeds.ac.uk/collection/