How to Restore a Broken Vase - Youngsook Choi and Naomi Woo (2020)

How to Restore a Broken Vase (2020) is a digital piece created by Youngsook Choi and Naomi Woo, commissioned by Tangram for New Creativities performance-symposium

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How to Restore a Broken Vase reflects on and reimagines Asian femininity. Asked to reflect on the guiding question--what does it mean to create East Asian identity in the West today?--the artists turn to the past, asking Afong Moy, the first East Asian woman in North America.

​At once a figure of cultural curiosity and a tool of capitalist expansion, Afong Moy was displayed throughout the United States in the 19th century alongside the exotic oriental luxuries of silk, mahogany, and porcelain. Her body, her singing voice, and her little feet were seen as something between human and object—setting the tone for the ways in which Asian feminity continues to be perceived in the West to this day. In the piece, we visit Afong Moy in her dressing room. With care and attention, we lend her our own eyes and ears, and help her—help ourselves—to shatter the unbearable cage of the Western gaze and construct an alternative vision of who we are. ​

Notes by Youngsook Choi and Naomi Woo

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Youngsook Choi is a multi-disciplinary artist, public arts practitioner and researcher with a PhD in human geography.
Youngook’s practice stands in line with feminist geography that concerns underrepresented social subjects and undocumented histories through the voice of minorities in regard to specific places and spaces. Youngsook produced a series of works about female factory workers both in a rural area and urban industrial complex, provoking conversations around contemporary value system of human labour. Since settling in London in 2014, her practice has carried on being critical about institutionalised abuse of human labour and nature in a global system, interpreting neo-liberalists’ progression as a highly militant operation based on the brutal hierarchy that divides humanity and exploits nature. Her body of visual works dis-camouflage and performative series about migrant cleaners are part of this criticism. 

https://youngsookchoi.com/

Naomi Woo is a prominent young Canadian conductor, recognized by CBC (30 Under 30) and Flare Magazine (How I Made It) as a rising star on the Canadian classical music scene, and notable for her work as a socially-engaged artist and educator. As Assistant Conductor of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra, Naomi programmes and conducts educational concerts and is a leader in community engagement. Naomi is also the first Music Director of Sistema Winnipeg, a music programme for social change in the city’s North End. A commitment to using music to imaginatively transform the world runs through all of her work, including her recently-completed PhD thesis, The Practicality of the Impossible. 

Her passion for new work and artistic creation has also led to trainings and residencies at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, the International Ensemble Modern Academy at Klangspuren Schwaz, Nida Art Colony (Vilnius Academy of the Arts), the Cortona Sessions for New Music, and more. As a pianist, she has been a prizewinner at the Eckhardt-Grammatté Competition for Canadian and Contemporary Music and winner of the Hélène Roberge Prize for Canadian Music. 

http://www.naomiwoo.com/