I am a social practice artist and scholar based mainly in New York, sometimes in Seoul, and now in a postgraduate program in Architecture and Critical Studies at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm.
Through my art practice, I seek to meet communal needs. From commemorations of female Asian immigrants from the 19th century to a trilingual community newspaper and a piece assisting queer and immigrant homeless youth applying for federally issued IDs, I attempt to mobilize traditional art spaces to provide community services and in so doing to critique the public structures in which we exist.
Since 2018, I have exclusively worked on projects called Book Repair Lab and The Banned Book List exploring how public libraries, private universities and carceral systems are connected in a double bind of complicity and restorative justice around incarceration in the US. Inspired by recent protests by my friends against police brutality and NYC’s plan to open new borough-based jails, my projects about carcerality aim to examine the geopolitical relationship between the new jail locations and immigrant neighborhoods, particularly Chinatown.
During my residency, I will continue to work on my digital community-archive project, The Banned Book List which collects hundreds of thousands of titles of books censored and rejected by American prisons.
www.suejeongka.com
The pandemic came to me when I genuinely needed a vacation from our sleepless world. It gave me a chance to reflect on myself and try different things. The UNIDEE residency is one of these, I actually appreciated the fact that we all found ways to interact with earth other through new tools. As the author Viet Thanh Nguyen, it is less human warmth, but more human connection.