The Art of Kimbap: A Reflection on Trust and Vulnerability

My Right Hands and Your Left Hand, Cooking with Joshua Kun Kyung Sok. 2025.

Kun Kyung Sok’s latest performance, “My Right Hand and Your Left Hand,” held at Space 776, invites audiences into an intimate and aromatic exploration of collaboration, creativity, and trust. The performance centers on Kun and her co-performer (a rolling cast of artists and non-artists) working together to prepare kimbap, a traditional Korean dish, using only her right hand and the other participant’s left hand. On opening night, while the salted streets of the Lower East Side froze, Kun’s audience huddled in close to witness a warm scene of clumsy vulnerability and palpable humor. “Armed” with a single knife, the two performers navigated the challenges of mutual control, toppling salt shakers and spilling rice, all the while the hypnotic scent of freshly prepared food permeated the space.

Continue reading “The Art of Kimbap: A Reflection on Trust and Vulnerability”

Watershed—Grace Mitchell in conversation with Mary McCoy

HOT AIR

A landscape with a river and a blue sky

Description automatically generated

Grace Mitchell-Eternal Return IV, Oil on panel, 30”x30”, 2022

The deep, rich colors and textures of Grace Mitchell’s oil paintings will draw you in, but it’s often the title that sets you thinking. Interweaving layers of color glow through the marsh grasses in her newest series, Watershed Assessment. You could get lost in the sheer beauty of these paintings with their glints of tidal water and shadowy mountains looming in the distance, all saturated with a moist, misty atmosphere that seems to glow with fecundity. But the title gives pause. These lush, luminous landscapes are meant to be “assessed,” and careful observation finds them full of scars and flaws.

Continue reading “Watershed—Grace Mitchell in conversation with Mary McCoy”

Eva Davidova: Re-coding Our Paradox

HOT AIR
Garden for Drowning Descendant/Garden Sequence from “Flying and Drowning Dream,“ interactive mixed reality installation, 2022, with performer Danielle McPhatter.

Eva Davidova makes new media works that focus on ecological disaster, our interdependence as a species, and the political implications of technology which she unpacks with performative works rooted in the absurd. She imagines the paradox that one day our descendants–human or cyborg–will be constructing our reality as a simulation, and asks: “If we are the games our children will program one day, can we influence the code they are writing?”

Continue reading “Eva Davidova: Re-coding Our Paradox”