Bernice Akamine, Lani Asunción, Pelanakeke Brown, Crystal Z Campbell, Slow Futures Laboratory, Jisoo Chung, Sean Connelly, Kyuri Jeon, Jane Jin Kaisen, Mao Ishikawa, Stephanie Syjuco

Opening Reception: September 12, 6-8 PM RSVP

Flesh Witness brings together contemporary artists whose work examines global histories and ongoing conditions of militarism across Asia and the Pacific. Focusing on the Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawai‘i, and Samoa, the group exhibition examines how military power is inscribed in landscapes, bodies, and archives, revealing how imperial dominance has been established and maintained through intervention and occupation throughout the region. Flesh Witness includes artworks spanning from the 1970s to newly created work, ranging from video to sculpture, photography, mixed media, and installation. 

The exhibition takes its title from participating artist Kyuri Jeon’s video work, 산증인, 活證人, The Flesh-Witness, which revisits American archival documentation of Korean War prisoners who were forcibly tattooed with anti-communist slogans. Expanding on Jeon’s exploration of the body as a living record of imperial/state violence, the artists in Flesh Witness recover and reinterpret these inscriptions of power embedded in official state footage, newspaper archives, photographs, naming conventions, plants, and coastlines. 

Throughout, artists foreground intergenerational memory and Indigenous knowledge that persist beyond official archives, and illuminate practices of ecological stewardship and activism that sustain communities living with the ongoing consequences of militarized occupation. These artists recover and investigate the marks of martial presence carried by bodies, landscapes, and living ecologies, unsettling official colonial histories and presenting alternative narratives for understanding the past and imagining a different future. 

In a present moment marked by border violence, territorial occupation, genocide, and ecological crisis, Flesh Witness reimagines the Pacific region through the intersecting legacies of military imperialism and envisions new shared futures of Oceanic peoples and diasporas. 

Flesh Witness is organized by REDCAT guest curators GYOPO and Amy Kahng, with support from Katy Dammers, Deputy Director and Chief Curator.