Soyean Goak
Gwangju, Korea
Soyean Goak has been a curator in the curatorial team of Asia Culture Center/ Asia Culture Institute in Gwangju, South Korea since 2016, and was a researcher in the ACC Creation Team of the same institution from 2012 to 2015. In 2011 she worked as director of a non-profit art space, Community Space Litmus, and from 2009 to 2010 as program manager of the non-profit art space Stone&Water. She has studied History of Art, European Cultural Anthropology, and German Language and Literature in both South Korea and Germany. Her interests lie in the function of the exhibition from the perspective of knowledge production, and as a medium of communicating cultural knowledge and information, as well as in multi-disciplinary projects and cultural politics. She has carried out several exhibitions, public projects and residency programs, and most recently participated in the exhibitions ACC in FLUX. Archive Exhibition for the 1st Anniversary of Asia Culture Center (2016); Tomás Saraceno’s solo exhibition Our Interplanetary Bodies (2017); PARKing CHANce 2010-2018 (2018); and FOOD TODAY: Indonesian Food, Society, and Media Art (2018).
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Mixrice, project preliminary research image for Narrative of Modern Asian Migration: Modern Migration, the Tropics, and Landscapes (working title), 2019 -
Mixrice, project preliminary research image for Narrative of Modern Asian Migration: Modern Migration, the Tropics, and Landscapes (working title), 2019
“Narrative of Modern Asian Migration:
Modern Migration, the Tropics, and Landscapes” (working title)
Mixrice, an artsit duo (Ji Eun Cho, Chul Mo Yang)
Soyean Goak invites Mixrice, the artist duo of Ji Eun Cho and Chul Mo Yang, for the new project Narrative of Modern Asian Migration: Modern Migration, the Tropics, and Landscapes (working title). This project aims to create a narrative of modern Asian migrations by following the traces and stories of modern Asian migrants who traveled from Korea to Japan, from Japan to Southeast Asia, or through Korea and Japan to Southeast Asia, for different reasons, during the Pacific War and the period of colonial occupation by Imperial Japan. Among these modern migrants are Zainichi Koreans who traveled to Osaka from Jeju Island; Koreans who relocated to Southeast Asia after being enlisted as POW guards during the Pacific War; an ethnically Korean film director who migrated to Indonesia by way of Korea and Japan; and a Japanese cartoonist who fought in the Pacific War. As individuals, these modern Asian migrants—people who left behind their homes amid conflict, colonization, and the chaotic historical situations surrounding the Second World War—are forgotten figures in official historical narratives. This project seeks to approach and invoke the traces and stories of modern Asian migrants, their positions of foreignness and their conflicts of identity, amid the contradictory states of affairs created by ideologies of nationality, state, colonization, empire, and war, in order to shed new light on a previously unexamined part of modern Asian history.