Dear Reader w/ Joyce Chung

For this iteration of Dear Reader, join curator, Joyce Chung, in a conversation focusing on one selection from Candice Lin’s Commodities #3 reading list in relation to Lin’s practice and the works currently on display in Studio 105.

Dear Reader is a programmatic series that follows the model of an informal book club to delve into Ulises's quarterly reading lists through facilitated workshops, lectures, performances, and screenings.

Joyce Chung is the Curator at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, where she oversees the

exhibition and performance program. Chung is interested in the complexity of identity and

representation through the lens of the politics of place. Her curatorial projects focus on artistic exploration of struggles and hardships that are often overlooked, such as those of ethnic and gender minorities, women, and immigrant workers. She previously worked at numerous museums and galleries both in Korea and the United States, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Hyundai Card, Kukje Gallery, as well as for the Gwangju Biennale and Performa, New York. Chung holds an MA in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University.

Link to the reading:

“Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species” - Anna Tsing

Photo by Jino Lee

More on Commodities:

This edition of Ulises’s projects ends a three-part exhibition series titled Commodities, which emphasizes the populist and defiant nature of the artist’s multiple. Poised around a dynamic between the art as an object and its social life, artists' multiples are artists’ works made in copies or editions. Like the artist’s book, artists’ multiples tend to bypass regulatory systems and rail against the structures and frictionless efficiencies of the art market. “Bringing the art to the people,” they promise to be accessible, affordable, and, occasionally, universal. Our series of artists’ multiples claim no less trouble. The artists invited to take part in Commodities will present projects that are timely and heartfelt in different ways, touching upon the vulnerabilities and discord of our moment.

For her artist’s multiple, Candice Lin slyly converges natureculture with wellness culture to produce a new canned beverage, Broth Soda, intended to be enjoyed together by people, cats, and other animals. This exhibition then serves as a communal gathering to engage in the social or ritualistic act of ingestion - smelling or eating or drinking - and indulge in the permeability of our bodies and the corporeal negotiations we make in shared space.

Host or Publisher Ray Philly