• Exhibition Dates: June 3 – June 17, 2023
  • Location: AHL Foundation, Inc. 2605 Frederick Douglass Blvd., New York, NY 10030 
  • Opening Reception: Saturday, June 3, 3 – 6 pm
  • Please join us for an artist talk from 4 – 5 pm, which will be moderated by Senti Sojwal, Communications Director for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York and Member of the Asian American Feminist Collective. 
  • This exhibition is free and open to the public. Although not required, it is strongly recommended to reserve a time slot for the VR experience.

 

 

Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) 

Presented publicly for the first time in this exhibition, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) is a Virtual Reality (VR) experience that centers generational struggles for reproductive justice. The work revolves around an autobiographical account of theatremaker Amy Mihyang Ginther’s illegal abortion in South Korea, the country from which she was adopted to the US. The artist initiated the piece in 2019 in response to a wave of new legislation attacking reproductive rights in the US, coupled with the persistent narrative that adoption is an equivalent alternative to abortion. Ginther disrupts this myth by emphasizing solidarity with her Korean mother in opposition to the intersecting systems of power and domination that restrict bodily autonomy and the right to carry, not carry, or parent a child. Acts of resistance such as this are crucial as states escalate their assault on reproductive rights in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which revoked the constitutional right to abortion.

A collaboration between Ginther and media artists Susana Ruiz and Huy Truong, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) is an interdisciplinary, experimental VR experience designed for individual guests. Opening in a brightly illustrated valley surrounded by high mountains, the guest is invited to engage in an animated sing-along of “Santoki” (산토끼), a popular children’s song about a lone mountain rabbit searching for chestnuts. Following Ginther’s live-action performance in a realistic 3D bathroom setting, the sun sets on the valley and the Santoki theme returns transformed into an expression of grief. By integrating aesthetic variation, narrative guidance, and cued interaction, the immersive VR experience prompts both active participation and affective contrast.

Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) consciously foregrounds the dissonant, nuanced dynamics at play in Ginther’s story, denying its reduction to a spectacle for easy consumption. This approach challenges the tendency of VR experiences with documentary narratives to exploit real suffering and trauma to elicit sympathy or intense emotions. In such scenarios, the audience’s emotive responses serve to entertain or gratify viewers with a sense of virtue, which reinforces existing hierarchies of supremacy and control. Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) is designed to preclude performative compassion and proposes a more complex engagement with one’s position and complicity in systems of reproductive injustice.

 

Accessibility and Content Information

  • The VR experience requires wearing an Meta headset and holding a controller in each hand for 10-12 minutes. 
  • The headset will be disinfected between guests. 
  • Closed captioning is not available. A printed transcription of the narration will be available at the gallery by request.
  • Content includes a sudden feeling of high elevation, Korean phrases and words, pregnancy, abortion, physical pain during abortion, family separation, loss and grief related to family separation, emotional suffering, classism. English translations of Korean words and phrases are provided in the printed transcription.
  • During the VR experience, guests will be prompted at the midpoint to choose whether to stay or leave and may opt out of any portion of the experience by removing the headset.

 

This exhibition is curated by Miso Jeong, Guest Curator; supported by Korea Overseas Foundation.

Mountains After Mountains (산 넘어 산) is a collaboration between Amy Mihyang Ginther, Susana Ruiz, Huy Truong, and their team Patrick Stefaniak (VR Development), Atom Kruckenberg (Sound), Leah Nichols (2D Art/Animation), and Alessia Cecchet (Associate Producer).

Postcard design by Lincoln Ruiz-Truong

 

About the Artist Collaborators

Amy Mihyang Ginther is a queer, transracially adopted Korean American theatremaker who specializes in autobiographical, verbatim, and documentary performance. Her award-winning play Homeful, which explores belonging, identity, and grief, has been performed Off-Broadway, in San Francisco, and in London. Ginther is currently co-creating an original musical, No Danger of Winning, which examines race and representation in reality television. 

Susana Ruiz’s work is concerned with how the intersection of art, play, storytelling, speculative design, and technology can enable useful approaches for public pedagogy, aesthetics, and justice. She is a first-generation middle, high school, and college graduate, and co-founder of Take Action Games, a multiple award-winning artist collaboratory at the intersection of games, art, activism, and storytelling.

Huy Truong is a war refugee from Viet Nam whose family moved to Queens in the 1970s. He is an Emmy Award-nominated director of photography, media artist, and creative producer with extensive experience in documentary, feature films, television series, and mixed reality production. His research interests include emergent aesthetics and technologies of cinematography and new approaches to storytelling that include Extended Reality and participatory co-creation. 

About the Curator 

Miso Jeong devotes themself to ancestral, spiritual, and storytelling practices. Born on the Korean Peninsula, adopted to Turtle Island, and based in Brooklyn, NY, they engage in learning, transforming, and building liberatory relationships with people and place in collectives of queer and displaced folx. Miso serves as a member of the inaugural coordinating committee for the Woori Network, an emerging community of queer and interspiritual practitioners of Korean descent. They also organize with an unnamed collective of adopted, fostered, and trafficked people envisioning the abolition of systems of family policing and separation. Prior to their current pursuits, Miso managed the gallery and art collection at the McKnight Foundation in Minneapolis. They graduated from Sorbonne Université (Paris IV) with a master’s in contemporary art history.

 

Image description: A still image from Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) showing English and Korean text reading LET’S SING TOGETHER/함께 노래하자!/HAM-KKE NO-LAE-HA-JA! Small white rectangles float in the background, a dark purple sky encircled by green and blue mountaintops. 

 

Image description: A still image from Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) showing an Asian femme wearing a colorful sleeveless dress and gazing in a bathroom mirror surrounded by dozens of illustrated white rabbits floating in disarray.