As Ocean People: Symposium, Screenings, and Performance

GYOPO is a volunteer-powered nonprofit that organizes free public programs and projects connected to diasporic Korean arts and culture in Los Angeles and beyond. 

Julian Aguon is a hybrid attorney-author-activist whose work centers around international law, specifically human and Indigenous rights. He is the author of several collections of political essays focusing on people struggles in Guam and the wider Micronesian region around issues of colonization, neocolonialism, and militarism, and several law articles in US law reviews and journals on the legal nuances and complexities surrounding the international law on the self-determination of peoples and its present-day invocation and application. Licensed to practice law in Guam, the Republic of Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, Julian runs a boutique regional law firm from which he provides legal counsel to these and other Pacific peoples and governments on a range of international legal issues. Julian lectures widely on human rights law and policy at numerous academic and civic institutions. The New York-based Petra Foundation chose Julian as a Petra Fellow in 2011, naming him a “human rights hero” in recognition of his work in Micronesia.

Kerri Ann Borja is an indigenous Chamoru womyn with roots in both Guåhan and Sa’ipan, an educator, community organizer, photographer, and creator of body ornamentation. Living on unceded Chochenyo Ohlone land (Oakland), she has been an educator for 18 years, currently as an Ethnic Studies teacher in SFUSD and lecturer of Pacific Islander Studies at SFU. Kerri Ann is actively involved in Guåhan’s decolonization movement as co-chair of the OD committee in Independent Guåhan – Bay Area chapter. As a photographer, she uses her photography as a way to document the beauty and struggle of life both back home in Guåhan and here in the continent. Kerri Ann began carving in 2009, when she apprenticed under Master of Body Ornamentation, Julie “Mama Jill” Avente. Through the various mediums which Kerri Ann uses to create, the focus is the promotion, protection, and perpetuation of the Chamoru culture, which she holds sacred.

Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved. Working through archives and omissions, Campbell finds complex­ity in public secrets—fragments of information known by many but undertold or unspoken. Campbell’s films and art have screened and exhibited internationally: MIT List Visual Arts Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Walker Art Center, The Drawing Center, Nest, ICA-Philadelphia, Museum of Modern Art, BLOCK Museum, REDCAT, Artissima, Studio Museum of Harlem, Bemis, Project Row Houses, SculptureCenter, Semana Cinema de Negro in Belo Horizonte, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and SEA Foundation Tilburg, amongst others. Campbell’s film REVOLVER received the Silver Hugo at the Chicago International Film Festival (an Academy Award Qualifying Festival). Campbell is currently a Visiting Associate Professor in Art and Media Study at the University at Buffalo.

Tony Cho is a PhD student, artist, designer, and researcher based in San Diego, CA. His research investigates how contemporary design manifests notions of acceleration and anti-acceleration, as well as the different critiques and alternatives emerging around these terms. Prior to PhD studies, Cho worked as a design researcher at Samsung’s Corporate Design Center and The Institute for Human Centered Design. His work in design has received recognition through the iF Award, Korea Design Award, and as a finalist in the Social Progress Prize during Dubai Design Week. Cho also runs a design and research lab called ‘Slow Futures Laboratory’ where they run workshops and exhibitions around ‘slow culture’ and the Anthropocene. His works have been exhibited in international venues such as the 17th Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Sean Connelly is an artist and spatial practitioner working across contemporary art, spatial practice, and civic engagement. His practice integrates sculpture, moving image, cartography, and site-based intervention to examine relationships between land, water, architecture, and power. Grounded in archipelagic and oceanic ways of knowing, the work approaches place as an interconnected familial, ecological, cultural, and political system rather than a fixed site. He has presented work in solo and group exhibitions, public commissions, and biennials in the United States and internationally, including major museum contexts and triennials. His practice has been supported by artist residencies and fellowships and has been written about extensively by art historians, architects, and cultural critics. Connelly has also designed and taught courses in leading university and public forums and serves in cultural leadership roles in Hawaiʻi. Writing and research by and about the work appear in scholarly journals, exhibition catalogs, and public platforms.

Mariquita “Micki” Davis (b. Gainesville, GA, 1982) is a CHamoru artist and educator based in Los Angeles, with an MFA from UC San Diego (2011). Her work explores artistic collaboration through personal, familial, and communal memory. She participates in MALI’E, a 13-moon performance research project uniting Matao/CHamoru artists from the homeland and diaspora to create a traveling exhibition between Guåhan, Los Angeles, and Seattle. She co-curates Pasifika Transmissions, a monthly series inviting Indigenous artists to engage the archive of the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum of Long Beach and produce a video “transmission” of the exchange. She currently programs for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and mentors for Visual Communications’ Armed with a Camera Fellowship. Her work has shown internationally, including the Institute of American Indian Arts, Honolulu Biennial, Vancouver Art Gallery, UNSW Galleries, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, and Guam International Film Festival.

Alfred Peredo Flores is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at Harvey Mudd College. His research and teaching focuses on diaspora, indigeneity, militarism, oral history, and settler colonialism in California, Micronesia, and the greater Oceania. Professor Flores’ book, Tip of the Spear: Land, Labor, and US Settler Militarism in Guåhan, 1944-1962 (Cornell University Press, 2023) received honorable mention from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association for the Best First Book Award and honorable mention from the Asian Pacific American Librarians Association for best adult non-fiction. His previous work has appeared in Amerasia Journal, American Quarterly, Critical Ethnic Studies Journal, Okinawan Journal of Island Studies, and Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Currently, he is working on a book tentatively titled, Militarized Memories, which is a family memoir that examines militarism and the Cold War through the life experiences of his Chamoru and Korean families.

Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi is an associate professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (Tovaangar). Her interdisciplinary research engages critical refugee studies, comparative ethnic studies, Global Asias, and transpacific studies. Dr. Gandhi’s first book, Archipelago of Resettlement: Vietnamese Refugee Settlers and Decolonization across Guam and Israel-Palestine (University of California Press, 2022), was awarded the 2025 ACLS Open Access Book Prize in History. This project analyzes what she calls the “refugee settler condition”: the vexed positionality of refugee subjects whose very condition of political legibility via citizenship is predicated upon the unjust dispossession of an Indigenous population. Dr. Gandhi is the co-editor with Vinh Nguyen of The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives (Routledge, 2023). She is currently working on a second book project which revisits Gramsci’s “southern question” by constellating the southern spaces of South Korea, South Vietnam, and the US South during the Cold War and its afterlives.

Madeleine Han is a PhD candidate in the Yale University American Studies Program working on a dissertation about the cultural politics of militarized space and collective memory in South Korea. Their writing has been published in The Nation and MENT Magazine. Their research has received support from the Korea Foundation, Yale MacMillan Center, and International Center for Korean Studies, housed within the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University.

hearthealer is a Los Angeles-based DJ, producer, and writer known for world-building, big emotion, and weaving narrative into their music. They’ve performed in clubs and parties internationally, such as OIL in Shenzhen, Taipei’s Final, Cakeshop Seoul, Bussy Temple in Singapore, Bali’s Orbitware, Finder Beijing, and Shapeshifter in Bangkok, among others. As a writer, hearthealer has developed an animated fantasy series with Netflix, is a fantasy/erotic author, and a game designer. They are currently in development on a rave-based animated TV series with the studio behind Adventure Time and Castlevania.

Dr. Sohl Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History at Stony Brook University in New York. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary art in East Asia, visual culture, postcolonial theories, histories of the avant-garde, and pedagogical curating. She edited Being Political Popular: South Korean Art at the Intersection of Popular Culture and Democracy, 1980-2010 (2012) and her publications have appeared in multiple academic and art journals. Her first solo-authored book, Reimagining Democracy: The Minjung Art Movement and the Birth of Contemporary Korean Art, is forthcoming with the Duke University Press. Her current project explores the global circulation of North Korean art and visual culture as it intersects with the history of socialist international friendship, Third World solidarity, and decolonization projects across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in 1980 in Korea and currently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Spanning video installation, narrative experimental film, photographic installation, performance, and text, Kaisen’s artistic practice is informed by extensive interdisciplinary research, creative collaborations, and engagement with diverse communities. Kaisen represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019) and was a finalist for Korea Artist Prize 2024, the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea. Kaisen has been Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art since 2020. She holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA from the University of California Los Angeles, and an MA from The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.

Dr. Leora Kava is an Associate Professor of Critical Pacific Islands & Oceania Studies, housed within the department of Race and Resistance Studies at SF State. She has a BA in East Asian Studies from Brown University (2012), her Masters in Pacific Islands Studies from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (2015), and her PhD in Creative Writing (2019), also from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is the founder of the Pacific Verse project, a community-based workshop series based in Nukuʻalofa, Tonga, that works with participants to create, perform, and publish original poetry and music. Dr. Kava’s areas of research and practice are rooted in Pacific Islander literary studies, Indigenous theory and poetics, and creative writing as a vehicle for critical imagination and decolonization. Her poetry can be found in Kore Press and The Hawaiʻi Review, with recordings available on podcasts It’s Lit with PhDJ (based in Honolulu) and For The Qultures (based in the Bay Area). 

Sung Hwan Kim has most recently exhibited his work at daad galerie, Berlin, the 57th Venice Biennale Arte, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Gwacheon, Korea, and Berwick Film and Media Arts Festival, Berwick, UK. With David Michael DiGregorio he inaugurated Asian Arts Theater, Gwangju, with the operatic theater piece, 피나는 노력으로 한 [A Woman Whose Head Came Out Before Her Name] (2015) and created two radio plays, commissioned by Bayerischer Rundfunk: one from in the room (for which they won the Karl-Sczuka-Förderpreis), and Howl Bowel Owl (2013). Solo exhibitions include Sung Hwan Kim, CCA Kitakyushu; Life of Always a Mirror, Artsonje Center, Seoul; Sung Hwan Kim, The Tanks at Tate Modern, London; Line Wall, Kunsthalle Basel and Sung Hwan Kim, From the Commanding Heights…, Queens Museum, New York.

jas lin 林思穎 is a performance artist, choreographer, and movement facilitator whose work lives between experimental, art, commercial, and everyday worlds. Centering play in the everyday, they experiment with multiplicity and contradiction while dancing with the world as their body. lin’s choreographies, films, workshops, and lectures have been shared around the world, including at Danshallerne Copenhagen, MOCA Los Angeles, Power Station of Art Shanghai, the V&A Museum, Kassel Dokfest, SXSW, NOWNESS ASIA, and 4:3 Boiler Room. Their first solo exhibition, Schindler House Haunting, was presented by the MAK Center for Art + Architecture in 2022. Lin choreographed their first world tour, a 22-song set for Mitski’s Laurel Hell Tour (featured in The New York Times and i-D magazine), and has also movement directed live performances for Melanie Martinez, Phoebe Bridgers, and SASAMI.

Maria Maea is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, film, and sound. Through her art practice, she deepens her connection to land, somatic memory, and ancestry. Her works act as a residue of her lived experience as a first generation Los Angeleno of Samoan and Mexican heritage. Using plants and repurposed found material gathered throughout Los Angeles, Maea builds film set-like sculptures that relate to storytelling & myth-making.

Tuấn Andrew Nguyễn, born in 1976 in Saigon, lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City. His practice treats memory as a form of political resistance, engaging communities affected by colonialism, war, and displacement. Working collaboratively, he approaches storytelling as a tool for healing, empathy, and solidarity, empowering his collaborators. Nguyễn works primarily in moving image and sculpture, often building projects around a single object—a destroyed refugee memorial, the remains of Vietnam’s last rhino—and the story it carries. Treating memory as intangible and non-linear, he moves beyond fixed ideas of time, using ghosts and hauntings as political tools. Nguyễn holds a BFA from UC Irvine (1999) and an MFA from CalArts (2004). His work has shown at the Asia Pacific Triennial, Whitney Biennial, Sharjah Biennial, and Berlin Biennale. In 2006, he co-founded The Propeller Group, an art collective shown at the New Museum Triennial, Venice Biennale, and MCA Chicago.

Photo: Still from Pohakuloa, karaoke video (2024), Sean Connelly.