Los Angeles Artists Union, founded in 2011, was a 3 year project that sought to reimagine compensation, equity, and mutual aid in the Los Angeles art industry and beyond. On May 13th, 2023 KCHUNG (also founded in 2011) invites the public to the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA for an afternoon of performances, installations, and publications that probe visitors to think about the relationship between artists, art workers, and labor movements and how it has evolved in the last 12 years.
Participants include Artzenkraft, Alejandra Herrera Silva with Trinidad McMurry Herrera, Llano del Rio Collective, Alan Nakagawa, Haleigh Nickerson, Nicholas Phillips, Kim Ye, and Kim Zumfe.
Artzenkraft is the nom de guerre of John Lewis. Performing accidental songs on temporary instruments with a focus on a third bridge and hammered guitar technique, Artzenkraft’s sound expands the acoustic guitar into that of a harp-like dulcimer. Performing in coffee houses and small art spaces since the late 1980s, Artzenkraft takes a more ambient and situational approach to performance. Sharing the marquee alongside soundscape architects such as Robert Rich, Paul McCarthy, Joe Potts, Tom Recchion among others, Artzenkraft is also featured on the eponymous LAFMS (Los Angeles Free Music Society) Box Box Set, demonstrating his unique style of musicianship. From live performances to his recorded work, Artzenkraft continues to explore the barriers of musical convention with noise and ambient projects ‘SolarNADA’ (ft. frequent collaborator Wild Don Lewis) and ‘Accolades’, and international collective of musicians and non-musicians from the US, Canada and Sweden. At present, Artzenkraft is the host of KCHUNG 1630AM, ‘Artzenkraft Presents’ live music broadcast and podcast since 2015 and now from KCHUNG PUBLIC at MOCA/Geffen Contemporary Exhibitions.
Alejandra Herrera Silva is a visual and performance artist. Her works are installation and performance based and through the explorations of her own body and gender, reference the inevitable biological implications that the body has as a social and political being. In recent years, she has been working on the issue of maternity and domestic life.
Herera Silva has a BFA from Universidad de Chile and further studies in Valencia, Spain and Belfast, Northern Ireland. She is the co-founder of PERFOPUERTO (Independent Organization of Performance Art based in Chile, 2002-2007) with several grants from FONDART (National Fund for The Arts and Culture of Chile) and DIRAC (Department of Cultural Affairs / Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Chile). Her work has been presented in performance exhibitions all over the world including Buzzcut, Glasgow; Trouble, Belgium; Anti, Finland; City of Woman, Slovenia; 7A11D, Canada; and other countries such as Germany, Poland, Japan, Mexico, Venezuela, Argentina, United States, and Northern Ireland. She currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California, USA.
The Llano Del Rio Collective aims to expand the cultural, social, and political imagination of Los Angeles through the production of thematic guides, related events and the hosting of a speakers bureau. We aim to frame practices, rather than be a practice. The collective is engaged in prefigurative research. Past Llano Del Rio projects include: An Antagonist's Guide To The Assholes of LA, Compassion & Self Deception: A Guide To LA's Moral Crisis; Utopia's of SoCal, and Rebel City Los Angeles. Llano's projects are distributed free to residents of LA County. More info on distribution and past projects at https://ldrg.wordpress.com/guides/. The project is organized by Robby Herbst.
Alan Nakagawa is an interdisciplinary artist with archiving tendencies, primarily working with sound, often incorporating various media and working with communities and their histories. Nakagawa has been working on a series of semi-autobiographic sound-architecture/tactile sound experiences, utilizing multi-point audio field recordings of historic interiors. Peace Resonance; Hiroshima/Wendover combines recordings of the interiors of the Hiroshima Atomic Dome (Hiroshima, Japan) and Wendover Hangar (Utah). Conical Sound; Antoni Gaudi and Simon Rodia combines recordings of the interiors of Watts Towers (Los Angeles) and the Sagrada Familia (Barcelona, Spain).
Nakagawa is in his fourth year as the artist-in-resident at the Pasadena Buddhist Temple through Side Street Projects, developing multi-disciplinary art projects in response to the history of the Temple and the Post-WWII Japanese American community it was founded by. He is also currently the artist-in-resident at the Gerth Archives, California State University Dominguez Hills assigned to the newly acquired L.A. Free Press/Art Kunkin Collection.
Premiered in 2023, Point of Turn, is Nakagawa’s first vibratory sound work involving the human voice; utilizing collected stories about moments or events that resulted in someone leaving their organized religion. For this work, the combining of these stories and the analog data stretching of a verse and chorus of the 1970’s seminal pop band, 10CC’s hit song, I’m Not in Love.
Point of Turn is a commission by Prospect Art.
Haleigh Nickerson explores the complexities and slippages of identity through real and imagined worlds in her multidisciplinary practice. Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, she currently lives and works in Los Angeles. She earned an MFA from Parsons: The New School for Design and a BA from the University of California, Berkeley in Art Practice with a minor in Ethnic Studies. Nickerson’s work has been shown at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Kopeikin Gallery, Los Angeles; The Growlerly, San Francisco; Phillips, New York; and Superposition Gallery, Amagansett, New York and Los Angeles. She was named one of Cultured Magazine’s 30 Under 35 Young Artist’s List in 2021.
Born 1985, Nicholas Phillips is an interdisciplinary artist, focusing on Psychoacoustics and Sculpture. His research and work involve media of all platforms, its influence on human consciousness-how values are reinforced by their public/private representations, hyperreal confusion, the circulation of “the image”/world events, and how ‘the acceleration’ of society impacts the individual. Working primarily in the anti-narrative of traditional sculpture, his work confronts ideologies and systems that enhance human suffering - He prefers to exist in a para-social media sense, using technology to challenge its relevance/while exploring new modes of expression. He currently lives and works in Downtown Los Angeles.
Kim Ye (all pronouns, born in Beijing, China) is a Chinese American multi-disciplinary artist whose research based practice encompasses performance, sculpture, video, installation, text, and social engagement. She received her MFA from University of California, Los Angeles; and BA from Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Their work engages gendered constructions around power, labor, and taboo by activating the artist/viewer dynamic to create situations of intimacy and exchange within public space. Remixing appropriated forms from mainstream culture with media from personal archives, the work seeks to describe the entanglement between private spaces of desire and fantasy, and popular trends in discourse and representation. Ye has exhibited, screened, and performed widely nationally and internationally at institutions such as The Getty, Wattis Institute, Hammer Museum, Banff Center for Arts, Material Art Fair, and Frieze Film Seoul among others. He has worked professionally as a dominatrix since 2011, and has been on the board of Sex Workers Outreach Project Los Angeles (SWOPLA) since 2019.
Kim Zumpfe is an artist, educator, sound-maker, and writer whose work engages with questions of how the body integrates into and might elude a desolate terrain of built structures, territories, and legacies. Solo and collaborative work has been presented at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Gallery TPW (Toronto), MAHA Pavilion at the Bangkok Biennial, Franconia Sculpture Park (Minnesota), Diverseworks (Houston), Audain Gallery at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver), CSUF Grand Central Art Center (Santa Ana), Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Human Resources Los Angeles, Los Angeles Contemporary Archive (LACA), UCR Culver Center for the Arts (Riverside), and several public and online sites. Zumpfe co-produces VOIDWAVE, a radio program that features experimental sound works and interviews from femme, queer, and non-binary artists.
This program is part of KCHUNG Radio’s ongoing residency at MOCA, KCHUNG PUBLIC.
Self-governed and operated on a shoestring budget, KCHUNG Radio was formed in 2011 as an open forum of artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers. Broadcasting live on 1630 AM from a studio-in-the-sky above a pho restaurant in Los Angeles’ Chinatown, KCHUNG Radio stands apart from other local LA-based stations in its programmatically evolving nature: currently broadcasting over 40 hours weekly of original & uncensored content. With the intention to platform traditionally underrepresented voices, there are talk shows, art reviews, interviews with psychics, scientists, plant life, and ghosts, live music, dressing room gossip, surrealist meditation lessons, advice panels, and unscripted gestures of an economic or performative nature. Functioning as a framework for the expression of local artists as individual contributors, the station is an open portal, accessible to any and all interested parties. It celebrates and promotes the efforts of the dedicated amateur while remaining an autonomous entity for collective expression.
KCHUNG PUBLIC is made possible with support from Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation (EHTF)
Wonmi’s WAREHOUSE Programs is organized by Alex Sloane, Associate Curator, with Amelia Charter, Producer of Performance and Programs, Brian Dang, Programming Coordinator, and Michele Huizar, Programming Assistant.
Wonmi's WAREHOUSE Programs is founded by Wonmi & Kihong Kwon and Family.
