octopus

Cover image by kate hers:
See more of her work throughout volume 3.

contributors :: volume 3: import/export

Chelsea Foxwell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University. She specializes in the historyof Japanese art and is currently writing her dissertation entitled “Kano Hôgai (1828-88) and the Making of Modern Japanese Painting.” Her research interests include Asian and East-West cultural exchange and the relationship between artistic production and the historiography of art history.

Krystal R.Hauseur is a doctoral student in the Ph.D. Program in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine, with an emphasis in Asian American Studies. She specializes in Asian American art and artists throughout the twentieth century and topics that address the negotiation of duality, identity, race, transmission, and reception within United States art and culture. Her M.A. thesis is titled, “The Displacing Gaze: Roger
Shimomura's ‘Campfire Diary.’”

kate hers, b. 1976, Seoul, Korea is a visual artist and current MFA candidate in Studio Art at the University of California, Irvine. She holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with a concentration in Performance and Time Arts. hers is a recipient of numerous awards including a Blakemore Foundation Fellowship, Fulbright Scholarship, and most recently a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship. She currently works and lives in Berlin, Germany. Please see www.katehers.com for more information.

Steven Lam is an artist and occasional curator. Lam exhibited in several venues including the Bronx Museum of Art, New York; PS 122 Gallery, New York; Eyebeam, NY; Art Interactive, Massachusetts; Diverseworks, Texas; Produce Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Pennsylvania; The Windtunnel at Art Center College of Art and Design, California.; Aljira: Center for Contemporary Art, New Jersey as well premiering video/choreographic work for various performance venues. He is currently one of four 2007-08 Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellows at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program and was the 2006-7 Lori Ledis Curatorial Fellow at Rotunda Gallery, Brooklyn. His work was reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum.com, Flash Art, among others. Lam holds an MFA from the University of California, Irvine.

Nicholas Mirzoeff has played a large role in the conception and development of visual studies as we know it today. Currently the director of the Ph.D. Program in Visual Culture at New York University, he has written An Introduction to Visual Culture (1999) and edited The Visual Culture Reader (1998, 2002). His other writings weave together his diverse interests, from critical race theory and Modern European history to disability studies and human rights. His most recent publication, Watching Babylon: The War in Iraq and Global Visual Culture (2005) interrogates the meaning of war as a visualized conflict, and what that means in an age of globalization. Mirzoeff’s next book, currently in progress, is titled The Right to Look: A Counter-History of Visuality.

Kelly Pendergrast is a filmmaker and MFA candidate in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of California, San Diego. She received a BA from Otago University, New Zealand, and has research interests in cinematic embodiment, food, and non-violent protest movements in New Zealand.Kelly’s filmmaking practice combines filmic essay, animation, and surreal fiction, and her films have shown at various festivals in New Zealand and North America.

Paul Roquet is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is focusing on Japanese film and literature. He is currently working on a study of mood regulation and the commodification of affect in contemporary Japan.

Bert Winther-Tamaki is Associate Professor in the Department of Art History and the Visual Studies Ph.D. Program at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Art in the Encounter of Nations: Japanese and American Artists in the Early Postwar Years (University of Hawai’i Press, 2000) and co-author with Louise Cort of Isamu Noguchi: A Close Embrace of the Earth (University of California Press, 2003). Winther-Tamaki’s current book project, titled Maximum Embodiment, is a study of images of bodies in the yôga movement of modern Japanese painting.

Bahar Zaker is a Ph.D. candidate in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. Her dissertation focuses on Surrealism’s role in shaping the relationship between memory and visual culture in interwar France, with special emphasis on investigating the place of the political in art production and reception.