A tender tale of Asian-American travails and resilience: 'Minari' review
Review Danni Cheng Review Danni Cheng

A tender tale of Asian-American travails and resilience: 'Minari' review

An immigrant’s heart is a battlefront. Torn between past and present, the home that once was and the home that is now, we are above all most homesick for a place we have never known: a place of stability. It’s the hunger that beckons the uprooting of the Yis, the Korean-American family at the forefront of Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari. With the hazy focus of a memory, the film traces the travails and resilience of immigrants in the lure of America’s ill-defined promises. Indeed, the Korean herb from which the film takes its name is capable of flourishing on the most unforgiving of terrains, its verdant sprouts brimming with hope- the question is whether the same will prove true for the Yis.

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Immersive proximities / Critical distances: Revitalizing the Gesamtkunstwerk and Brecht's Dialectical Theatre in the metaverse
Essay Danni Cheng Essay Danni Cheng

Immersive proximities / Critical distances: Revitalizing the Gesamtkunstwerk and Brecht's Dialectical Theatre in the metaverse

From its outset, the ‘total work of art’ has been marked by unreconciled dialectical tensions. Between its sharp-tongued condemnations of technology and simultaneous reliance on it, its yearning for decentralised mass transcendence and its slippage into totalitarianism, the multifarious incarnations of the Gesamtkunstwerk have not served as actualized visions so much as a recurring dream. That is not to say, however, that these contradictory impulses signal a hopelessly vague lineage, destined for “the trash heap of history” as Lebbeus Wood has proclaimed. Even while its specific taxonomy remains ambiguous, the Gesamtkunstwerk- precisely its dialectical struggles- have proven fruitful as a means to understand critical pedagogies in the new millennium, taking on forms far beyond the term’s geographical and disciplinary locus. When taken to be a loose assembly of aesthetic elements rather than a monolithic, centralised endeavor, the potency of the Gesamtkunstwerk as an aesthetic ideal among interdisciplinary art forms since the nineteenth century becomes undeniable.

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The ‘Cool’ in Cool Britannia: Yinka Shonibare’s double appropriations of the ‘Ethnic’
Essay Danni Cheng Essay Danni Cheng

The ‘Cool’ in Cool Britannia: Yinka Shonibare’s double appropriations of the ‘Ethnic’

Against a lurid pink wall hangs some fifty small canvases coated with dollops of impasto in variegated patterns that play off African fabric designs. At first glance, the exuberant clash of its gaudy patterning and colour- barely offset by the panels’ minimalist arrangement- signals a mimicry of the ‘ethnic’ fabrics one might see donned by black Britons in a show of their solidarity with African culture. But just how authentically ‘ethnic’ are these exoticised emblems of the Other?

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What's new about new materialisms? Collectivizing the terrain of decolonial struggle in contemporary art
Danni Cheng Danni Cheng

What's new about new materialisms? Collectivizing the terrain of decolonial struggle in contemporary art

In the wake of onrushing ecological crises, riddled with an urgency seemingly irreconcilable with our temporalities, how might we cultivate curatorial and artistic practices that resist the coloniality of the Anthropocene’s self-mythologisation? With every fiber of our being intertwined in webs of processes that require repatterning, this time of precarity urges us to undertake the daunting task of a collective recuperation at the intersection of myriad disciplines, one that resists capitulating to humanist paradigms.

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