Installation view of Garage Exchange: Jun Yang / Bruce Yonemoto. Photography by Joshua White, 2016.
For this tenth iteration of the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series, former Artist-in-Residence Jun Yang worked together with L.A. artist Bruce Yonemoto. Overlaps in the distinct practices of the two participants—especially in their treatments of history—are identified and enhanced via the sculptures, film, and photographs installed throughout the Garage Top space.
Yang presented his film The Age of Guilt and Forgiveness (2016) as an attempt to look at Hiroshima seventy years after the end of World War II, highlighting the burden of history in the context of contemporary Japan. Balanced with Yonemoto’s Made in Occupied Japan (1998-ongoing)—eight porcelain figurines of imperial era Europeans with accompanying colonized peoples—and his photographs showing Asian men wearing U.S. Civil War uniforms from both armies, North South East West (2007), a viewer is pulled into considering how history is something constantly being edited and re-written in the present.
Yang’s film was shown within the installation A Maze and Observatory as a Memorial to the Past, which references the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park and the Jantar Mantar observatory in Jaipur, India. The large-scale staircases and pedestals were counterbalanced by Yonemoto’s sculptural works of Kintsugi, the art of fixing broken pottery with a lacquer resin infused with powdered gold that the artist has adopted for broken contemporary objects and mass-produced commodities—an act of rebirth, renewal, and reconsideration in line with any other historical endeavor.
about garage exchange vienna-los angeles
In order to expand the cultural exchange at the core of the Artists and Architects-in-Residence program, the Austrian Federal Chancellery and the MAK Center invite Austrian and Vienna-based alumni residents to collaborate with L.A. artists and architects of their choosing at the Garage Top at the Mackey Apartments for the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series.
Artists
Jun yang
Jun Yang (b. 1975) is an artist based in Vienna, Taipei, and Yokohama. His works include film, installation, performance and projects in public spaces while addressing institutions, societies and audiences. Having grown up and lived in varied cultural contexts, he examines the influence of clichés and media images on identity. As well, he seeks out the intersections of contemporary visual art with business and politics, via his gastronomic and institutional projects. With his brother Tie Yang and Dong Ngo, he is founder of the restaurant/bar ra’mien, 2002 and the ra’mien go chain, 2012. His artwork was featured in the Gwangju Biennale 2012; the Taipei Biennial 2008, the Liverpool Biennial 2006, the 51st Biennale di Venezia 2005, and the Manifesta 4 in 2002. He is the recipient of the 25th Otto Mauer Art Award in 2005 and is also one of the founders of the Taipei Contemporary Art Center. Yang is represented by Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, Beijing; ShugoArts, Tokyo.
bruce yonemoto
Bruce Yonemoto (b. 1949) has developed a body of work that positions itself within the overlapping intersections of art and commerce, of the gallery world and the cinema screen. He has been honored with numerous awards and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Film Institute, The Rockefeller Foundation, and the Maya Deren Award for Experimental Film and Video. In 1999 Yonemoto’s work featured in a mid-career survey show at the Japanese American Museum in Los Angeles. His solo installations, photographs and sculptures have featured in major one-person shows at the ICC in Tokyo, the ICA in Philadelphia, the St. Louis Art Museum and the Kemper Museum in Kansas City. He has had solo exhibitions at Alexander Gray Gallery, New York; Blum & Poe, Los Angeles; Tomio Koyama, Tokyo; Galerie Quynh, Ho Chi Minh City; and his work was part of Los Angeles 1955-85 at the Pompidou Center, Paris; the Generali Foundation, Vienna; Getty Center, L.A.; and the 2008 Gwangju Biennial. Recently, he completed the film Far East of Eden with performance artist Karen Finley. A retrospective of his work will be presented at the Tate Modern in London in 2017.
This exhibition series is made possible by the Austrian Federal Chancellery.