Bachelor of Education

Drawing on my lived experiences with caregiving for my aging grandma, the following short story explores what day-to-day life looks and feels like for youth in caregiving roles. Evoking bitter-sweet emotions, my words familiarize readers with the reality many young caregivers face. Stereotypical ideologies regarding caregiving for elders primarily focus on the physical aspects of providing care, and while I engage these aspects, such as managing my grandma’s medication, I also emphasize the emotional burden that both aging elders and young caregivers face, highlighting the importance of establishing a healthy routine in which both parties have their needs met. Further, I not only examine the hardships of being a young caregiver, but the positivity and joy I try to find from my responsibilities. I subtly bring attention to small details when describing the relationship between my grandmother and me. The simplicity and sweetness in our bond, fills my life with wholeness in a way that ...

Drawing on my lived experiences with caregiving for my aging grandma, the following short story explores what day-today life looks and feels like for youth in caregiving roles. Evoking bittersweet emotions, my words familiarize readers with the reality many young caregivers face. Stereotypical ideologies regarding caregiving for elders primarily focus on the physical aspects of providing care, and while I engage these aspects, such as managing my grandma's medication, I also emphasize the emotional burden that both aging elders and young caregivers face, highlighting the importance of establishing a healthy routine in which both parties have their needs met. Further, I not only examine the hardships of being a young caregiver, but the positivity and joy I try to find from my responsibilities. I subtly bring attention to small details when describing the relationship between my grandmother and me. The simplicity and sweetness in our bond, fills my life with wholeness in a way that makes caregiving meaningful. Even though caregiving as a young adult brings with it many challenges, especially when managing the twists and turns of life, I have found there is always light within the darkness, beauty within the aging flower.

In ACROSS BOUNDARIES, Yoo deploys the metaphor of the convenience store as well as the demilitarized zone to share her acknowledgement of multiple barriers Korean-Canadian people face as immigrants and tries to both question and recognize these divides better. In so doing, she proposes that if we recognize these concerns along with the political and economic histories that created them, we can perhaps understand them better and begin to imagine how we may enact moving beyond these boundaries while trying to seek a better understanding of one's own ancestral history to continue into further praxis work.

The exhibition, curated by Aird Gallery Director Carla Garnet, is on view between June 2nd to June 24th, 2016 at the John B. Aird Gallery http://www.airdgallery.org/, located in Toronto. The artist will be in attendance during the opening reception on Thursday, June 2nd at 6 p.m. and will perform an iteration of Across Boundaries on Friday, June 24th, 2016.  Gallery hours of operation are: Monday to Friday, 10am to 6pm.

Artists: Jungju An (Korea), Philbert Gajadhar (Guyana), Joonho Jeon (Korea), Yunjoo Kwak (Korea), Suntag Noh (Korea), Polit-Sheer-Form (China), George Simon (Guyana), Diana Yoo (Canada)

Co-Curated by Wonseok Koh and Vicki Sung-yeon Kwon

The exhibition garnered the largest grant of the 2016 Arts Council Korea exhibition grant.

While Korea experienced imperialist military competition, World War II, the Cold War, division, and political upheaval first-hand in East Asia, on the other side of the hemisphere, Guyana experienced a similarly tragic history of modernity in the Caribbean. During 300 years of European colonization, Guyana saw the dislocation and extinction of Amerindian people and cultural heritage, and the division of their land. The newly independent Guyana underwent Cold War ideological conflicts and the political extremes of a socialist regime and a pro-US neoliberal regime.

This exhibition consists of an archive collection of the Mass Games in Guyana in the 1980s–'90s and contemporary artists’ work that explores the theme of “mass and individual.” The Co-Operative Republic of Guyana, a socialist regime in the independent Guyana, was fascinated by the collective identity portrayed in the North Korean Mass Games. Guyana invited North Korean artists to learn how to stage such spectacles. Guyanese artists incorporated their own cultural elements into the North Korean Mass Games and staged the event annually. The Guyanese Mass Games show interesting cultural elements: they manifest distinctive cultural codes of the postcolonial and the Cold War eras, critical aspects of collectivism in the performing arts, an alteration of Socialist Realism by incorporating local elements, and the transnational exchange of art and culture via sharing an ideology.

The exhibition suggests that such a cultural spectrum was not simply a trend in the past; rather, it is still an ongoing issue in contemporary visual art. Participating artists Jungju An, Jeon Joonho, Yunjoo Kwak, Noh Suntag, Polit-Sheer-Form, and Diana Yoo demonstrate that such cultural elements are still influential in our contemporary life and culture. The exhibition presents the significant cultural implications of the Mass Games and the contemporary works and, in doing so, invites the viewers to think about the visual culture surrounding us today. We invite the viewers to encounter a unique intersection of history and reality as well as the disparate geographic spaces and times presented together in the exhibition space.

During the exhibition, four public and academic programs including lectures, talks, and screening will be held to explore the collectivism of modern nations.

In my research about the Korean War, I became interested in what it means to identify with Koreanness as an artist. I found the artwork of internationally renowned contemporary artist Do Ho Suh to be deeply compelling and very much tied to identifying with transporting one’s home from one place to another. With great luck, I was able to connect with Suh in my planned trip to Gwangju when I went to research the massacre of May 18th, 1980. The following interview helps me to better understand the term “diaspora” in the context of Korean-North American hybrid identity. I learned that there is a difference between Suh’s first-generation Korean-American experiences of hybridity and my second-generation Korean-Canadian experience of hybrid identity. Interestingly, Suh has noticed that the trend in mobility of going back and forth between places renders identity more fluid and dynamic in an increasingly globalized world. This flow between cultures materialized in his installation of the art piece Home Within Home, where his work is the result of having to process his new surroundings between one place and another by fabricating his dwelling sculpturally.

This paper focuses on the artworks Sandy Bay Residential School Series (2009) by Robert Houle and #whatdoyoufeelwhen (2018) by Wayne Dunkley, respectively, two contemporary Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC) visual artists based in Canada who call into question specific historical acts of colonial and racial violence. These works provide a means to reckon with the trauma of two important historical moments that have been omitted from Canada’s historical records. I argue that these narratives of trauma can be conveyed and witnessed through visual art. While Houle’s paintings illustrate his recollections of his traumatic childhood in the Canadian residential school system, Dunkley’s photo-based art project confronts viewers with his digitally altered self-portrait series resembling 17th Century drawings of runaway slaves in Canada. This paper questions how these artworks, as narrations of past traumatic injustices, provoke critical questions about the haunted present. I a...