Courtyards: A Collaboration

As part of the Brown Arts Institute IGNITE Series, composer and writer Bonnie Han Jones and I are staging a series of small experiments — performances, installations, and community collaborations. We will be in residence at BAI in May in preparation for public performance in September.

As transnational, transracial, and translinguistic Korean adoptee artists, we have collaborated on projects that consider questions of discloation, disruption, and identity formation. The displaced adoptee artist confronts particular complexities with respect to aesthetic lineage and the development of the literal and figurative language for their work. What does it mean to write in a language and in narrative forms that are not your own? How do you invoke a lineage to which you cannot lay claim? With what forms of imaginative experimentation must the adoptee artist engage?

From our individual practices, we bring preoccupations with speech and language acts, sonic textures, improvisational methods, and experimental textual forms. Our project draws together these threads to explore themes of LANGUAGE (home); IMPROVISATION (community), BODY (memory), and TENDERNESS (intimacy).

Documentation of the work in progress, collaborative experiments, and occasional commentary: Courtyards.