kate-hers RHEE (이미래)

Honored in 2014 by the AHL Foundation in New York, with the 1st Prize of the Visual Arts Competition, this piece from the series, The Chocolate Kiss Project, suggests the complicated ways racialized and gendered bodies get (re)produced, reduced and essentialized. The implicit reference to the Los Angeles riots and the violence between Korean-American and African-American communities only became comprehensible as the artist began to articulate the work as one that could evoke and be in dialogue with the theory of racial triangulation between Blacks, Asians and others (Whites). According to political science scholar Claire J. Kim, who coined this term, “Asian Americans have not been racialized in a vacuum, isolated from other groups; to the contrary, Asian Americans have been racialized relative to and through interaction with Whites and Blacks. As such, the respective racialization trajectories of these groups are profoundly interrelated.”