In the early 90s, before there was a gallery scene in Chelsea, Connie Walsh and I both worked at Dia on 22nd Street in New York. After we reconnected in Los Angeles and she asked if I might want to do a show at Foyer LA, I immediately thought about the distance between the art world she and I knew as young artists, and the one(s) young artists encounter today. What were we thinking about then? And what are they thinking about now? The early 90s was also when I began teaching. Back then, it was in New York City public high schools. By the mid-90s, I’d graduated to teaching at CalArts; and after a few years of visiting gigs on both coasts, I’ve taught at UC Irvine since 2001.
In each year of our current decade, I do a group project with my undergraduate students, always with the idea of not only doing something collaborative, but also something self-reflexive for the students. Last year, it was a performance on the theme of “student life.” Next year, the plan is to make a film together. Sometimes we invite grad students, professors, and staff to participate. fiction/nonfiction is this year’s project, growing out of a class of the same name last quarter in which we looked at how “something real” is mediated via representation. There was an 80s/90s tinge to the class, because Douglas Crimp’s “Pictures” was one of the guiding forces for our thinking; but we also looked at how the theorization of postmodernism gave way to AIDS as a primary concern in the art world, and how that reformed the consciousness of its inhabitants.
It’s perhaps an understatement to say that a sense of anxiety, if not crisis, saturates our consciousness today. While there was no prescribed theme for the students’ collaborations, each contribution to the show, it seems to me, is a meditation on modalities of “being with” one another, on the edge of the fiction/nonfiction of “the self.” Joining the 21 undergraduate students who made collaborative pieces for this project are 4 graduate students, some of whom have put works in the show, and others are collaborating through events that will take place on April 26 and during a closing celebration on May 2. On that day, I’ll also make a new piece, one that will function as the middle part of a relay between some students’ works.
Simon Leung
Isabella Anderson, Genevieve Belleveau, Mae Bradley, Kaylie Chao, Emily Cortez, Crystal Dang, Jebediah Dunn, Eva Errera, Jack Fink, Jered Frigillana, Phoenix Fulton, Iris Hallax, Simon Klein, Hannah Le, Aarilyn Jessica Lee, Simon Leung, Angelina Jiaqin Li, Rey Mar Negrete, Nhi Phan, Karen Rodriguez, Youyoung Shin, Lily Tricarico, Alex Eto Van Duyne, Chris Waligora Bradford, Loren Yuehan Wang, Lucas Zafiriou Zeeberg