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