'REVOLT OF THE BODY': Curated by Simon Wu

Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present ‘Revolt of the Body’ curated by Simon Wu, opening on Thursday, December 14th, 2023. Participating artists include Cole Lu, Dean Sameshima, Lotus L. Kang, Maia Ruth Lee, and Tosh Basco.

‘Revolt of the Body’ explores conceptions of flesh, sexuality, and time that precede modern and contemporary ideas of identity and self, borrowing its name from the final solo performance of Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata (1926-86). Taking place at Tokyo’s Nihon Seihan hall in October 1968, “Revolt of the Body” was Hijikata’s most intense articulation of Ankoku Butoh, an avant-garde movement practice he founded nine years earlier, literally denoting ‘dance of darkness.’ Hijikata sought to re-invent the boundaries of art, life, and humanity in the shadow and devastation of World War II. 

While the artists do not explicitly cite Hijikata, their works invoke alternative, rebellious bodies in line with Butoh’s historic provocations. The radically recombinant body is typefied in Dean Sameshima’s Erotic Dot Series––fields of connect-the-dot paintings that make images of gay sex when connected as prescribed, or something else alien, unrecognizable, if you choose your own paths. In Cole Lu’s sculptures, etchings and drawings, he produces mythic images of celestial and premodern lives. Flesh is reimagined as wirey, ghostly baskets in Maia Ruth Lee’s social sculptures––assembled as a singular column like an arm or a body––and as bruisable, photosensitive surfaces in Lotus L. Kang’s drawings. And as in Tosh Basco’s hand prayer drawings, each of them are a kind of flesh in themselves.

About the Curator

Simon Wu is a curator and writer involved in collaborative art production and research. He has organized exhibitions and programs at David Zwirner, The Kitchen, MoMA, and the Brooklyn Museum, among other places. In 2021 his art writing was awarded an Andy Warhol Foundation Art Writers Grant and he was featured in Cultured magazine's 2021 Young Curators series. He was a Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and is currently in the PhD program in History of Art at Yale University. His first book, Dancing On My Own, is forthcoming from Harper Collins June 25, 2024.

About the Artists
 

Cole Lu

Cole Lu lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Melding historical and literary references with poignant personal experience, Lu’s work tells stories of dissonance and longing through twirling odysseys that carry the echoes of trauma, transformation, and regeneration.

His sculptures and paintings are made of burnt wood panels, linen, engraved metal, and concrete, with elaborate scenes of a mythological retelling. Through pyrography (writing with fire) and the use of extensive and subversive titles, Lu returns to the poetic origins of narrative that liberate his work from established linear hierarchies of thought and form. The meditative and laborious repetition of his burning spans greatly in scale, from intimate to immersive, and allows Lu to build worlds where mythological and autobiographical come together and are thus reborn.

Lu’s work has been exhibited at Chapter NY, New York; Herald St, London; Nir Altman, Munich; Company Gallery, New York; The Drawing Center, New York; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; La Casa Encendida, Madrid; and the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, St. Louis, among others. The artist’s new publication, First Pylon by Inpatient Press, was launched in October 2023. 

 

Dean Sameshima

Dean Sameshima lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Influenced by queer subcultures, Sameshima works with photography and painting to explore themes of sexuality, community, and memory. He often incorporates archival materials, such as vintage magazines, flyers, and pamphlets, into his works, creating a dialogue between the past and the present.

Sameshima has held solo exhibitions at O-Town House, Los Angeles; and Queer Thoughts, New York, and included in group exhibitions at MOCA, Los Angeles; Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, Seattle;  Museu de Arte (MASP), São Paulo; and The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York. He is in the permanent collections of the Getty Museum and LACMA, Los Angeles and his upcoming solo exhibition will be held at Soft Opening, London in 2024. 

 

Lotus L. Kang

Lotus L. Kang is a Toronto-born artist, currently based in Brooklyn, New York. Through sculpture, photography, and site-responsive installation, she explores the body as an ongoing process and environment. Her work combines theory, poetics, and biography, and takes a regurgitative rather than prescriptive or reiterative approach. Known for her sprawling installations and distinctive material repertoire (which often involve industrial materials paired with pigmented silicones and cast aluminum organic forms), her practice is a dialogue with the impermanent and the in between.

Kang’s first institutional solo show in the UK was held at Chisenhale Gallery, London in June 2023, and was co-commissioned with CAG Vancouver where it is currently on view. Her first monograph, In Cascades, was published alongside the exhibition by Hurtwood Press, including contributions from Amy Jones, Estelle Hoy, Victoria Sung, and CAConrad. She has participated in notable group exhibitions at Hessel Museum of Art, New Museum, SculptureCenter, Cue Art Foundation, New York; Night Gallery, Los Angeles; Catriona Jeffries, Vancouver; The Power Plant, Art Gallery of Ontario, Franz Kaka, Cooper Cole; Toronto, among many others. 

Maia Ruth Lee

Born in Busan, South Korea, Maia Ruth Lee is currently based in Salida, Colorado. Deeply informed by questions surrounding the self in times of dispersion, mobility, and rootlessness, Lee's multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, painting, and sculpture. Using translation as an apparatus, Lee transmutes her works between mediums, connecting themes of borders, community, and language, with embodiments of carriers, loss, and self-preservation through process and materials. 

Language as a mechanism in its ability and failure to shape and give account to experiences, memories, and emotions has been a major thread in Lee’s work, as for those whose lives are precarious and unrooted—maps, atlases, and banners become a device that calls to mind their life of movement, and often, loss. 
 

Maia Ruth Lee has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; and Jack Hanley Gallery, New York. Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York; Helena Anrather Gallery; New York, among others. Lee attended Hongik University in Seoul, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the public collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Tosh Basco

Tosh Basco was born in California and rose to prominence in the drag scene in San Francisco in the 2010s. Well known for her movement-based performances under the name boychild, Basco’s photography and drawing accompany the performance practice. Viewed as a whole, Basco’s work attempts to enfold language, becoming, and representation together in spaces where they are presumed to exist as discrete entities.

She is co-founder of the collaborative entity Moved by the Motion with Wu Tsang, and collaboration remains a vital aspect of her work. Basco’s solo exhibitions were held at Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai; Karma International, Zürich; Carlos/Ishikawa, London; and Company Gallery, New York; Basco’s work has also been presented at the Venice Biennale; the Sydney Biennial; The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; MOCA, Los Angeles; and ICA London, among other institutions.