REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater)
631 West 2nd Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012
(on the corner of 2nd and Hope Streets inside the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex)
Flesh Witness brings together contemporary artists, Bernice Akamine, Lani Asunción, Pelanakeke Brown, Crystal Z Campbell, Slow Futures Laboratory, Jisoo Chung, Sean Connelly, Kyuri Jeon, Jane Jin Kaisen, Mao Ishikawa, and Stephanie Syjuco, whose work examines global histories and ongoing conditions of militarism across Asia and the Pacific. Focusing on the Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawai‘i, and Samoa, the group exhibition examines how military power is inscribed in landscapes, bodies, and archives, revealing how imperial dominance has been established and maintained through intervention and occupation throughout the region. Flesh Witness includes artworks spanning from the 1970s to newly created work, ranging from video to sculpture, photography, mixed media, and installation.
The exhibition takes its title from participating artist Kyuri Jeon’s video work, 산증인, 活證人, The Flesh-Witness, which revisits American archival documentation of Korean War prisoners who were forcibly tattooed with anti-communist slogans. Expanding on Jeon’s exploration of the body as a living record of imperial/state violence, the artists in Flesh Witness recover and reinterpret these inscriptions of power embedded in official state footage, newspaper archives, photographs, naming conventions, plants, and coastlines.
Throughout, artists foreground intergenerational memory and Indigenous knowledge that persist beyond official archives, and illuminate practices of ecological stewardship and activism that sustain communities living with the ongoing consequences of militarized occupation. These artists recover and investigate the marks of martial presence carried by bodies, landscapes, and living ecologies, unsettling official colonial histories and presenting alternative narratives for understanding the past and imagining a different future.
In a present moment marked by border violence, territorial occupation, genocide, and ecological crisis, Flesh Witness reimagines the Pacific region through the intersecting legacies of military imperialism and envisions new shared futures of Oceanic peoples and diasporas.
Flesh Witness is organized by REDCAT guest curators GYOPO and Amy Kahng, with support from Katy Dammers, Deputy Director and Chief Curator.
Photo: Courtesy of Jane Jin Kaisen. Still from Burial of This Order, 2022.
Amy Kahng is the Florence Levy Kay Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian American and Asian Diasporas Art History at Brandeis University, a position supported by the Department of Fine Arts, the Rose Art Museum, and the Asian American and Pacific Islander Studies program. Her current research project examines twentieth-century Asian American artists and their relationship to land, colonial vision, and conditional racialization. Other research interests include global contemporary art, modern and contemporary art in Korea, and transnational queer and feminist art practices. Amy received her PhD in Art History and Criticism at Stony Brook University in 2025, and her research has been supported by fellowships at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Tyson Scholars Program at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, and the Center for Korean Studies at Stony Brook University. Her next project interrogates historical and artistic representations of “Asian Cowboys” in U.S. art and visual culture from the nineteenth century to the present.
Amy co-curated Revisiting 5+1 (2022-23), an exhibition that reexamined Frank Bowling’s historic 5+1 exhibition at Stony Brook University, and co-edited the accompanying catalog. She also exhibited Moving towards Home: Art for Palestine in New York City 1989 & 2024 (2024); Mis/Communication: Language and Power in Contemporary Art (2021-25), which toured five SUNY campuses; and Printing Solidarity: Tricontinental Graphics from Cuba (2021-22).
A lifelong learner and Kanaka Maoli artist, Bernice Akamine began to pursue her first love, art, later in life than many artists. Akamine chose to raise a family and then return to school. Still living with early memories of community activism surrounding the decades-long fight for self-determination rights of Hawai’i’s Waimanalo Village residents, during her studies at the University of Hawai'i Akamine rediscovered art; deciding that doing what one loves is most important, she changed her major and was awarded a Bachelor of Fine Arts in glass (1994) and a Master of Fine Arts in sculpture and glass (1999). While pursuing her studies at the university, Akamine also studied traditional Hawaiian art forms. Akamine has contributed to many competitive and invitational group exhibitions, as well as solo exhibitions.
Her work is in the permanent collection of the American Museum of Natural History in New York; Peabody Essex Museum in Massachusetts; Hawai’i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts; Portland Art Museum in Oregon; Australian Museum in Sydney; and Queensland Art Gallery/Museum of Modern Art in Australia. Akamine was recipient of a: Golden Hibiscus Honorable Mention Award, Honolulu Biennial 2019, Hawai'i; Artist-in-Residence, Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia, 2018; Cultural Capital Fellowship, First Peoples Fund, South Dakota, 2018; Native Hawaiian Artist Fellowship, Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, 2015; Community Scholar Award, Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, 2012.
Lani Asunción has a working studio at Midway Artist Studios in the Fort Point Arts Neighborhood in Boston, MA. They were the Curator & Public Art Manager of the 2024-2025 Un-monument initiative for Pao Arts Center (Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center) in partnership with the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture, supported by the Mellon Foundation. They are a 2026 Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2025 WBUR Maker, and a 2025-2026 Hidden Histories Artist-in-Resident in collaboration with Joanna Tam supported by The Reckonings Project focusing on Chinatown histories at Northeastern University Special Collections Archives. Asunción is a recipient of the MAP Fund Grant (2024), Kala Fellowship Award (2023), Future Frequencies Fellowship from MASS MoCA Studios (2022), NEFA Public Art for Spatial Justice Grant (2021), and Live Arts Boston Grant (2020). Their work is part of the online collection at the Peabody Museum of Archeology & Ethnology at Harvard University, and has published work in the Boston Art Review, and The Journal of the Pacific Arts Association at UC Santa Cruz. They have served on the Board of Directors of Fort Point Arts Community (FPAC), was a visiting artist juror of the Round 19: Idea Fund facilitated by DiverseWorks, Aurora Picture Show, and Project Row Houses in Houston, TX supported by the Warhol Foundation, and co-juror with Xander Marrow of the 2023 Brown Arts Institute 43rd Annual Juried Exhibition at Brown University. Asunción is the founding member of the queer multimedia collective Digital Soup and member of Mobius Artists Group.
Pelenakeke Brown (Gataivai, Siutu-Salailua) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections between disability theory and Sāmoan cultural concepts. Her practice spans visual art, text, performance, and curatorial practice. She is from Aotearoa (New Zealand) and is an Sāmoan/Pakehā, crip artist.
She has worked internationally presenting performances, exhibitions, published writing and residencies in New York, California, Berlin, Hamburg, London and Aotearoa.
She has worked with The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gibney Dance Center, The New York Library for the Performing Arts, MASS MoCA and other institutions, globally. Selected residencies include Eyebeam, The Laundromat Project, BRIC and Denniston Hill. Her work has been written about in Art in America, The New York Times, Art Agenda and The Art Paper. Selected awards include being recognised in 2024 with a Wynn Newhouse Award (US).
She is informed by the Samoan concept of the vā- relationships across time and space, crip time and is continually trying to find sites to investigate that hold both of these dual theories. Pelenakeke’s work straddles many mediums, is it a poem, a visual work or a choreographic score- she asks, why not all three?
Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complexity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s films and art have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Visual Arts Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, Museum of Modern Art, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, Semana Cinema de Negro in Belo Horizonte, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and SEA Foundation Tilburg, amongst others. Campbell’s film REVOLVER received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival (an Academy Award Qualifying Festival). Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo.
Slow Futures Laboratory is a multidisciplinary research agency interested in investigating ecological thought through play and imagination.
Jisoo Chung is a multimedia artist working across video, installation, drawing, and performance. As a Korean artist who relocated to the United States, she examines failures in language—mistranslations, autocorrections, and linguistic omissions—to trace the sociocultural power embedded in language and names. Her practice considers how identity is negotiated, distorted, or rendered invisible through systems of translation. Chung is a nominee for the United States Artists Fellowship, a fellow of the MacDowell Residency, and she has received grants from the LACE Lightning Fund (Andy Warhol Foundation), the Puffin Foundation, the Seoul Arts and Culture Foundation, and Jungwoon Prize at the Seoul International Experimental Film and Video Festival, among others. Chung holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA from Seoul National University. She is co-founder and a co-founder of an artist-run art educational studio, Drawwing Cabinet, Currently serves as an advisory board member of a nonprofit organization, Prospect Art, and an adjunct faculty at Bakersfield College. She lives, works, and teaches in Los Angeles.
Sean is an artist and spatial practitioner working across contemporary art, spatial practice, and civic engagement. His practice integrates sculpture, moving image, cartography, and site-based intervention to examine relationships between land, water, architecture, and power. Grounded in archipelagic and oceanic ways of knowing, the work approaches place as an interconnected familial, ecological, cultural, and political system rather than a fixed site.
Sean has presented work in solo and group exhibitions, public commissions, and biennials in the United States and internationally, including major museum contexts and triennials. The practice has been supported by artist residencies and fellowships and has been written about extensively by art historians, architects, and cultural critics. Sean has also designed and taught courses in leading university and public forums and serves in cultural leadership roles in Hawaiʻi. Writing and research by and about the work appear in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogs, and public platforms.
Korean artist and filmmaker based in New York. Jeon works with video, essay, drawing, and installation to explore time, vision, and its implications for the future. Through the lens of intersectionality, she questions ongoing transnational discussions about identity, feminism, decolonization, and cultural translation.
Jeon’s work has been featured internationally at MassArt Art Museum, Boston; Mimosa House, London; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Artists’ Moving Image Festival, Glasgow; Festival Film Dokumenter, Yogyakarta; Women Make Waves, Taipei; and DMZ International Documentary Film Festival, Seoul. She is an award winner in the Asian Shorts Competition at the Seoul International Women's Film Festival, a recipient of the Contemporary Visual Art Award from the AHL-T&W Foundation, and a 2025 MacDowell Fellow.
Jeon holds BFA from Korea National University of Arts and MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and Seoul National University.
Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in 1980 in Korea and currently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Spanning video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research, creative collaborations, and engagement with diverse communities. Kaisen represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) and was a finalist for Korea Artist Prize 2024, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea.
Kaisen has been Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art since 2020. She holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles, an MA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Mao Ishikawa (b.1953, Ogimi Village, Okinawa Prefecture) began her photography career in the 1970s, studying under Shōmei Tōmatsu at the WORKSHOP School of Photography in 1974. Based in Okinawa, she focuses on the island's people and social realities.
She received the Sagamihara Photography Award in 2011 for "FENCES, OKINAWA," and in 2019, the Photographic Society of Japan Photography Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2024, she was honored with the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Award, as well as the Ken Domon Award and the Higashikawa Award.
Ishikawa is also featured in I’m So Happy You are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now, an Aperture publication and traveling exhibition organized by Lesley A. Martin, Takeuchi Mariko, and Pauline Vermare. Showcasing the work of over two dozen artists across generations, I'm So Happy You are Here offers a critical reappraisal of Japanese photographic history through the lens of women, highlighting perspectives long overlooked in dominant narratives of the medium. Following its debut at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles (2024), the exhibition travelled to several venues, including Fotomuseum Den Haag in The Hague (2025) and FFF Frankfurt in Frankfurt (2025). It is scheduled to be presented next at The Photographers’ Gallery in London (2026), Hikarie Hall in Tokyo (2026), and International Center of Photography in New York (2026).
Her solo exhibitions have included the Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum (2021), the Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery (2023), KYOTOGRAPHIE (2025), and the Warwick Arts Centre (2025). Ishikawa has also participated in significant international exhibitions such as the Yokohama Triennale (2020), the Busan Biennale (2024), the São Paulo Biennial (2025), and the Whitney Biennial (2026).
Ishikawa’s works are included in the public collections of institutions such as the Okinawa Prefectural Museum and Art Museum, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Fukuoka Asian Art Museum, the Yokohama Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
Stephanie Syjuco is a research-based visual artist who works in photography, sculpture, and installation, moving from handmade and craft-inspired mediums to digital editing and archive excavations. Recently, she has focused on how photography and image-based processes are implicated in the construction of exclusionary narratives of history and citizenship. Born in the Philippines in 1974, Syjuco received her MFA from Stanford University and BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship Award, a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award and a Tiffany Foundation Award. Her work is in numerous collections, including at The Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Getty Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among many others. She was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Museum of American History in Washington DC and is featured in the acclaimed PBS documentary series Art21: Art in the Twenty-First Century. A long-time educator, she is a Professor in Sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley. She is represented by Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, RYAN LEE in New York, and Silverlens in Manila/New York. She lives in Oakland, California.