Chinatown In/Flux Artists

Rebecca Hackemann

Proposed In/flux Installation: Visionary Sightseeing Binoculars
Currently based out of Philadelphia, PA

Artist Bio: 

Rebecca Hackemann is an emerging conceptual artist based in Philadelphia, PA, who makes public art,  optical sculptures and installations, stereo photography and conceptual drawings.  Rebecca Hackemann was born, raised and educated in West Germany, England and America.  She is British and is an MFA graduate of Stanford University, CA (1996) and received her BFA (Hons) from the University of Westminster (then PCL), London in 1994. In 2001 she participated in the Whitney Museum ISP Program in New York.  Recent residencies include the Headlands Center for the Arts, CA (2005), Light Work, Syracuse, NY (2002) and Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY (2003).  She has shown her work with blasthaus, San Fransisco, CA, Gigantic Art Space, New York, Fishtank Gallery, Brooklyn, Sotheby’s New York, Printed Matter and at LMCC, New York and other non-profit spaces such PS122 Gallery and Article Projects, NY.  The work is in the artist book collection of MOMA New York, Musée Français de la Photographie, France; the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Germany; the Museum für Fotografie, Germany and in private collections in New York and England.  More, including new conceptual drawings on photography, her miniature image/text books and recent public art projects can be seen at www.rebecca-h.net.

Nadia Hironaka

Proposed In/flux Installation: Strange stories from a Chinese Studio
Currently based out of Philadelphia, PA

Artist Bio:  

Nadia Hironaka received her Masters of Fine Arts in film from The Art Institute of Chicago and her Bachelors of Fine Art from The University of the Arts.  Currently she resides in Philadelphia and teaches at The University of Pennsylvania.  Active within the community she is a supporter of local art venues and is co-founder of Philadelphia’s video gallery, Screening.  In addition she is a member of the non-profit artist-run gallery, Vox Populi.  In 2006 she was awarded a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and has received past awards from The Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Leeway Foundation, Peter Stuyvessant Fish Award in Media Arts, prog:me  video artist award, The Black Media Film Festival, and The New York Short Exposition Film Festival.  Her films and video installations have been exhibited internationally in: PULSAR (Venezuela), Rencontres Internationals (Paris/Berlin), The Den Haag Film and Video Festival (The Netherlands), The Center for Contemporary Arts (Kitakyushu, Japan), The Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Morris Gallery, The Black Maria Film Festival, The Donnell Library (NYC), The Fabric Workshop and Museum (Philadelphia), The Institute of Contemporary Art (Philadelphia), The Galleries at Moore college of Art (Philadelphia), and Vox Populi, (Philadelphia).

Hiroko Kikuchi and Jeremy Liu

Proposed In/flux Installation: Chinatown TM
Currently based out of Jamaica Plain, MA

Artist Bio:  

Independently and as collaborators, we have conceived and produced, curated, or created five community-based, performance, new media, and installation art projects in and with the Boston Chinatown community over the past six years. These projects include: Culture Clubbing, A Chinatown Banquet, Car Jam, Sifting the Inner Belt, and the New Modern Cultural Center. Our National Bitter Melon Council project won First Place for the Best Educational Exhibit at the 2006 Topsfield Fair (the nation’s oldest agricultural fair), and received one of the top three Boston Artadia Awards in 2007.

Each of these projects has centered on a particular aspect, opportunity, or challenge facing the community. Culture Clubbing engaged performance artists to respond to “Chinatown” the idea, place and residents. Car Jam was a Situationist response to the proposed development of a luxury-rate apartment complex in the heart of Chinatown including 300-car garage; it involved dozens of cars slowly, and legally, circling the site of the proposed complex, generating a jam of traffic that captured the fears of downtown office workers, who circulated emails imploring one another not to go downtown during lunch that day, and prompting a drive-by visit by the Mayor. A Chinatown Banquet and Sifting the Inner Belt were long term, sustained research and engagement projects. The New Modern Cultural Center project used performance, video and installation to imagine – or rather claim – a cultural center re-use for an abandoned theatre in Chinatown.

We have also developed a collaborative practice over the past few years that we call Social Performance Art, the adaptation of existing social systems as artists that creates new ideas, meanings, relationships, and interdependences. Our projects include: Sifting the Inner Belt, the National Bitter Melon Council, Gifu Machi-JIN-zukuri project, and the Treasure Hill Garden Portrait Studio.

While Hiroko continues the development of Fluxes-inspired Instruction work and Performance Art and deals with themes of cultural identity, she has continued to work with youth who are from or part of the Chinatown community in her work as the Teen Arts Council manager at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Hiroko is committed to empowering youth to be leaders through their creative energy and artistic expression within the realm of the arts and in the wider field of community development.

Jeremy has worked with the Boston Chinatown community for over eight years, and currently is the Executive Director of the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC). ACDC is the leading Asian-based community development organization in New England, and has worked for nearly 20 years to preserve, protect, and expand Boston’s Chinatown. ACDC is part of a national movement to build healthy, vibrant and just neighborhoods for all Asian and Asian American communities. He has developed a wide range of strategies to accomplish this mission, including work that involves preventing gentrification of cultural space at local community gardens, economic development through culture, youth media program, building affordable housing and offices, developing technology for social change, and creative events promotion for community development. He is also an installation artist and photographer.

Jonathan and Kimberly Stemler

Proposed In/flux Installation: Chinatown Map and Chicken Broccoli
Currently based out of Green Lane, PA

Artist Bio: 

Jonathan Stemler is a local artist who was born and raised outside of Philadelphia.  He grew up on a farm which has been foundational and inspirational in his artistic endeavors.  Currently he resides in Green Lane with his wife Kimberly and their two sons Asa and Avi.
    
He attended Antonelli school of art and Tyler school of art but left both before graduating because they were interfering with his artwork.  While he calls himself a painter at heart, everyone knows him as a sculptor because he cannot stop.  He cannot stop collecting, welding, balancing, sculpting.  His materials of choice are metal, rock, wood, and quite recently paper.  Throughout his art career he has slowly but steadily developed a visual language through his pieces- one of universal truths.
   
Much of his work is kinetic; it is playful, significant, and beautiful.  It is to be accessible intellectually and artistically to all audiences.  Both Jon and his work are absent of loftiness, condescension, and pretense.  Instead, one finds both the artist and his work to be humble, simple, and powerful.
   
His machining business lends himself to other artist, he is known for supporting others by fabricating and installing pieces.  He has also designed and created “machines” to assist artists in their process. as much of his current work is large exterior pieces, his present goal is to return to his studio to create smaller and more intimate interior pieces.
   
His most recently showed at the Michener museum where he and his brother collaborated on 5 large outdoor kinetic sculptures.  Public collections include an installation at Eastern state penitentiary since 2003.

Kimberly Stemler is a local artist who was born and raised in Philadelphia and currently resides in Green Lane with her husband Jon and two sons Asa and Avi.  She received a bfa in painting from Tyler school of art, Temple university and attended the “Temple university abroad” program in Rome for a year.

Current shows include an abstract group show at the jms gallery and an annual invitation to take part in the “nap invitational salon exhibition of small works”, Kutztown, pa.  Other recent shows include the mainline art center’s juried “landscape revisited” exhibition and a winter abstract show at the jms gallery.  Public collections of work include the Franklin Mint Federal Credit Union, Chester, PA and Triune in Old City, Philadelphia, PA.

Currently she as been fluctuating between small acrylic paintings on paper and larger oil paintings on canvas.  The work revolves around landscapes-aptly described in the following excerpt:

“I am captivated by the earth’s linear quality, the moment of place where the horizon is created by our view of land and all of the lines that gather in between.  Where it touches the earth and what happens in that area and in those remaining spaces that eventually arrive at our feet. I chisel away at the natural world, patching together bits and pieces, composing and rebuilding the landscape.

repeated fragments, dissected skies, slabs of earth.”