other
Curated by Karl Krause
Flashpoint Gallery
August 2007
As part of an installation project interrogating the idea of art and ecology, writers were buried in San Francisco’s Crissy Field and Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and lived to write about it.
Neo-Benshi
According to wikipedia: “The art form’s acknowledged starting point is in Korea, Japan, Taiwan and other East Asian nations during the silent film era. Benshi is a Japanese word referring to the oral “interpreter” who performed a live narrative accompaniment to silent movies, in lieu of showing intertitles with dialogue, etc. In Korean the practice is known as pyônsa. Currently, it is finding a resurgence among experimental poets in the San Francisco Bay area and Los Angeles.”
The New Talkies: Bollywood Night
Curated by Konrad Steiner and Summi Kaipa
Bollyhood Cafe, San Francisco
November 2008
“Bobby”
Benshi Come Home
Curated by Amar Ravva and Harold Abramowitz
Betalevel, Los Angeles
2007
Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle
Pond Gallery
March-April 2005
‘Tag’ is the text-based component of ‘Shopdropping: Experiments in the Aisle’ (March 11-April 11, 2005), an exhibition organized by Pond that both catalogues and instigates the insertion of art into public places of commerce. For ‘Tag,’ various text-based artists and writers were asked to create labels or tags that were later pinned to garments in local upscale department stores or chain conglomerates.
Intercept: To Thwart, Cradle, Exchange
August 2002 & January 2003
Intercept: To Thwart, Cradle, Exchange was a two-part creative experiment that sought to promote avant-garde Asian American writers in the public and performative sphere, with the intent to draw together a broad-based community of enthusiastic, experimental art-goers. The project aimed to support experimental literature and related genres, to foster community among Asian American artists, and to encourage artists to question constructions of identity in literature. Another primary goal of Intercept was to cultivate a youth audience and to make public literary arts available to young artists in the Bay Area. Both components of Intercept, designed as two distinct events, presented local artists in performance. The first component, held August 23, 2002, was a literary reading and performance art piece around the publication of the literary magazine interlope, at Locus 1640 Post in San Francisco’s Japantown. The second component occurred January 24 and 25, 2003 at Noh Space/Theatre of Yugen and was a production of Summi Kaipa’s play Triptych: Stories of Three South Asian Women. Triptych explored the notions of false historical lineages and badly translated identities, and presented a soap opera-like tale of an intercepted “nationhood,” appropriate to the current political landscape.