Tour: Kenneth Tam: Standing in Soft Formation

Join TUAG director and chief curator Dina Deitsch and SMFA faculty Ihnmi Jon for an interdisciplinary conversation about the sculptures, photographs, and videos on view in Kenneth Tam: Standing in Soft Formation.

Ihnmi Jon was born and raised in Seoul, Korea. She studies visual and material cultures within and beyond East Asia after 1945. After obtained her Ph.D. in Art History at Binghamton University in 2021, Ihnmi’s research and teaching have focused on the methodological challenges of an art history that recognizes the movement of art and artists across temporal, cultural, and discursive formations in the late 20th and early 21st century. Through both her research and teaching, Ihnmi has endeavored to overcome predominant understandings of Asian modern and contemporary art that rarely problematize the artists’ highly racialized and essentialized identity formation. Ihnmi is currently working on converting her dissertation into a book manuscript. Titled When Willful Institutionalization Becomes Form: Artworld Globalization, Cai Guo-Qiang, and an Aesthetics of Contingency, the first book project examines the construction of the figure of the “global artist,” using the Chinese-born contemporary artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s active practices of career building from 1986 to 2008 as a case study. Ihnmi is currently a full-time lecturer in the Visual and Material Studies Department at the SMFA at Tufts.