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. 

Crystal Z Campbell, 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts, is a visual artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose archive-driven works center the psychogeographic, historical perception, and the underloved. Campbell’s films and visual art have screened and exhibited internationally: European Media Arts Festival, SFMOMA, Chicago International Film Festival (Silver Lion), National Gallery of Art, MIT List Center, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Berlinale, MOMA, St. Louis Museum of Art, Studio Museum of Harlem, Artists Space, Bemis, Block Museum and others. Campbell has received honors from NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship, Creative Capital, Harvard Radcliffe Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner, Skowhegan, Rijksakademie, and Whitney ISP program. Campbell is an Associate Professor at the University at Buffalo who works between Oklahoma and New York.

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 is a CHamoru artist and educator based in Los Angeles. Her work explores notions of artistic collaboration in the contexts of personal, familial, and communal memory. She is the co-founder of Pilele Projects, an exhibition and workshop space dedicated to supporting projects by Pasifika artists in Southern California. Other notable projects include Pasifika Transmissions, a monthly learning series she co-curated that invited indigenous artists to visit the archive of the Pacific Island Ethnic Art Museum of Long Beach and develop a video “transmission” of this exchange. She has programmed for the Los Angeles Asian Pacific Film Festival and mentored for Armed with a Camera Fellowship program at Visual Communications for which is an alum. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Honolulu Biennial, University of Queensland Art Museum, Vancouver Art Gallery, and UNSW Galleries, Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, as well as Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival (YIDFF) and Guam International Film Festival. She is currently a participating artist and cultural worker for Gi Matan Gu’ma, a cohort of culturally rooted Matao/CHamoru artists in the homeland and in the diaspora.

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 writer and researcher based between the US and Korea. They are also a PhD candidate in American Studies at Yale University. Their dissertation explores the cultural, memorial, and spatial politics surrounding current and former US military camptowns in South Korea. Their research has received support from the Korea Foundation, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, Yale MacMillan Center, Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM), and International Center for Korean Studies (ICKS), housed within the Kyujanggak Institute for Korean Studies at Seoul National University.

sárah sao mai habib is an artist, cultural worker, and diasporic child of the lands of Vietnam & Beit Nahrain. habib storytells about intercultural solidarities and ancestral embodiments of defiant kinships. sárah supports their communities by working alongside them to cultivate inner and outer infrastructures of care. She does this through and beyond: home sovereignty studio: a practice at the crossroads of ancestral remembrance, social ecological repair, land based and contemplative devotion. You can experience some of habib’s work at The Arrow journal, Mindfulness Bell magazine, Hyperallergic, The Maintainers blog, and Minnow’s The Dive zine.

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. Hearthealer (Peter Ferris Rosati) has developed original animated series with studios like Netflix, Nickelodeon, and Fred Films (Adventure Time, Castlevania), is a fantasy author, and a game designer. Their board game Season of Seeds will be launching early next year.

Sohl Lee is Associate Professor of Art History at Stony Brook University (SUNY), specializing in modern and contemporary Asian art, decolonial visual culture, socially engaged art, and ecological art history, with a particular interest in oceanic and transpacific frameworks. Her first book, The Minjung Art Movement: Decolonization and Democracy in South Korea (Duke University Press, 2026), historicizes an influential movement of activist art from the 1970s and 1980s. Her current book project, “Seaweed as Method: Art History with Oceans, Multispecies Life, and Empire,” examines the global visual cultures of seaweeds through the intertwined lenses of ecology, decolonization, food sovereignty, and Indigenous onto-epistemologies. She is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching (2020) and has received grants and fellowships from the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC), the Korea Foundation, the Korean Ministry of Culture, the Academy of Korean Studies, the Getty Research Institute, and the Andy Warhol Foundation, among others.

Jane Jin Kaisen is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born in 1980 in Jeju Island, Korea and currently lives in Copenhagen, Denmark. Spanning video installation, 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 participated in Korea Artist Prize 2024 at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea. Kaisen was Professor of the School of Media Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Art from 2020-26. She holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen, Department of Art and Cultural Studies, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio from University of California Los Angeles, 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 B.A. 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 is a Los Angeles-born, newly New York-based performance artist, choreographer, and movement facilitator. Lin stages exorcisms and tantrums for purging choreographies of the learned body. This involves a practice of interrupting both internalized and external surveillance mechanisms that contribute to bodily policing. Their practice of deep feeling is invested in remembering what the queer, neurodivergent, ancestral body has been manipulated into forgetting. Their works range from durational site-specific happenings to disruptive rave performances, channeling spectacle hauntings, sacred trickery, and soft cuddle puddles. Lin’s performances, films, workshops, choreographies, and lectures have been presented internationally, including at M+ (Hong Kong Art Week), MAK Center for Art & Architecture (LA), BOFFO Performance Residency (NY), Drifts Festival (Helsinki), Creamcake HD Festival (Berlin), MOCA LA, Danshallerne Copenhagen, Queer East Festival (London), and BlackStar Film Festival (Philadelphia). Jas believes movement to be a manifestation of potentiality– that together, we can dance the possible into being.

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, (b. 1976, Saigon, Viet Nam) explores the power of storytelling through video and sculpture, reworking colonial histories and supernaturalisms into imaginative vignettes. He has had solo presentations at the New Museum (2023), Fundació Joan Miró (2024), Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (2024), Smithsonian American Art Museum (2024), and Art Institute of Chicago (2025). Nguyen has received numerous awards, including the 2023 Joan Miró Prize, 2025 Trellis Art Fund Milestone Grant, and 2025 MacArthur Fellowship. His work is included in the collections of MoMA, Singapore Art Museum, SFMoMA, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art, among others.