Ivetta Sunyoung Kang is a first-generation South Korean interdisciplinary artist and language-nerd, based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal and Tkaronto/Toronto, Canada. She obtained a BFA degree in South Korea and an MFA from Concordia University. Her works have internationally been presented at Jeon-Ju International Film Festival (2009), Leonard Bina Ellen Gallery (2016), MAI (2017), Arlington Arts Center (2020), Xpace Cultural Center (2020), The Korean Cultural Center Washington DC (2021), among others. She was shortlisted for the Simon Blais Award in 2016. She self-published a collection of poems that transformed into songs entitled Absent Seats in 2019. She is a co-founding member of Quite Ourselves, a group of artists seeking sustainable mobility in life and art creation.
Kang's practice is concerned with archive, video installation, text, performative work and participation. The artist observes colonial patterns of burdening linguistic encounters and bio/socio-political impacts of binary psychiatric approaches on individuals in order to propose reparative perception and movement that may free one from the oppressing eyes. Kang researches how the practice of psychoanalysis has overnormalized multicultural people. Her work attempts to subvert the binary foundation of the history of psychiatry built upon ableism and stigmatization. These problematized matters are aligned with the otherness and normalization toward racialized groups within her works. Kang is curious to create and apply imaginative means to ease mental disorders exacerbated by the dominant life model in excessive urbanism and post-colonialism. The artist seeks transcultural transmissions, diasporic and unsettling languages, and decolonial narratives against the western trajectory of psychoanalysis as caring and reparative means in art.
Let’s face the question rising here:
Where does this impulsive yet perpetual loving of mine come from toward whomever I encounter?
Which future of my humanity do I strive for?
︎ Yes, that’s right.
I tend to carry many questions every day that can’t/won’t/shouldn’t be answered.
If you want to join a series of my questions, here is the gate.
ivetta.kang@gmail.com
www.yourtenderhands.com
www.quiteourselves.com
All right reserved by Ivetta Sunyoung Kang 2021
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