Poster for What’s carried through the winds? designed by Mianwei Wang.
What’s carried through the winds?
2025 AHL-Chun Family Foundation Open Call Exhibition
- Curated by Sophia Park, Recipient of the AHL-CHUN Family Foundation Curatorial Open Call
- Exhibition Dates: May 3–May 31, 2025, Wednesday–Saturday, 12pm–6pm
- Exhibition Location: AHL Foundation (2605 Frederick Douglass Blvd, New York, NY 10030)
- Artists: Hyoju Cheon, Calvin Kim, Christina Yuna Ko, Eunwoo Nam, Kanthy Peng
AHL Foundation is pleased to announce What’s carried through the winds? an exhibition and accompanying series of public programs opening Saturday, May 3, 2025 and closing Saturday, May 31, 2025. The exhibition explores the many sides of tenderness through the works of five artists: Hyoju Cheon, Calvin Kim, Christina Yuna Ko, Eunwoo Nam, and Kanthy Peng. The opening will take place with a public program hosted by Eunwoo Nam at 4pm ET in the AHL Foundation gallery, followed by a reception from 5:30pm–8pm ET with a performance by Hyoju Cheon and Gladstone Deluxe at 6pm ET. The exhibition is organized by Sophia Park, selected for the 2024 AHL-Chun Family Foundation Curatorial Open Call Exhibition.
What’s carried through the winds? examines how tenderness operates within intimate interpersonal relationships and larger societal structures. Acknowledging tenderness as an important feeling and quality in relationships, and the challenge in quantifying and defining as it is influenced by individual experiences, the exhibition gathers five artists with diverse interpretations of tenderness. Each of the artists’ work included in the exhibition explores tenderness from varying perspectives and approaches. Working across sculpture, painting, video, sound, performance, and installation, these artists serve as one set of constellations that investigates tenderness as a capacity, feeling, action, and memory. The artists’ works fill the space with warmth, nostalgia, skepticism, play, and love as byproducts and essential ingredients of tenderness.
Curatorial Statement by Sophia Park
As is for many, my first understanding of relationality did not come from reading something in a book; it started with family, specifically my grandparents’ home. Nestled in the mountains of northern Gumi, South Korea, my grandparents’ home takes many hours of travel to get to and once there, is a breath of fresh air filled with hot meals, the quietest of nights for sleep, and a daily morning greeting by a punctual rooster. When my mom moved back in with my grandparents, her parents’ home, after years of living in diaspora, she started a garden. Each year, the garden grows and somehow their home changes even more under the bountiful vision of my mom, the quiet discipline of my grandma, and the begrudging yet dedicated hands of my grandpa. More and more plants take up space each year across their home, and now there are also plenty of gathering spaces that are typically in use by church retreats, flower classes, small concerts, and other events throughout the whole year. Every aspect of my grandparents’ home requires many hands, labor that constantly fluctuates between work and love, and an understanding of time that is stretched, in and out of sync with the busyness beyond the mountains. This home is filled with many clues to what it means to be with each other. The gift baskets of fresh fish and apples that guests bring, immediately shared back with neighbors. Drying flowers for teas from the plants on the land and sharing them with visitors. My grandma chatting with the chicken in the mornings and packing away leftovers from restaurants to give to the neighborhood cats and dogs. Tears when it’s time for me to head to the airport, back to another home in Brooklyn. Tense, loud exchanges between all family members about the state of the country and the very conservative province that this home is situated in. This home taught me to pay attention to the unspoken, felt materials that exist between living beings that serve as the glue that builds and sustains relationships. This glue can be made of love, obligations, frustrations, uncertainty. This glue can be small, just the early buds of a feeling, or big, like a strong wave crashing into the rocks. My curiosity about the different components of this “glue” led to this project. While there are many components that make up such a glue in relationships, this project is focused on tenderness. Defined as a “tender quality, such as gentleness and affection, being succulent and easily chewed, and sensitivity to touch or palpation,” (Merriam-Webster) tenderness is moderated by distance, sensorial and subjective. This project proposes that tenderness functions simultaneously as material and feeling, all of which can be molded to understand how we relate to each other. What’s carried through the winds? gathers the work of five artists: Hyoju Cheon, Calvin Kim, Christina Yuna Ko, Eunwoo Nam, and Kanthy Peng. Each of the artists’ work included in the exhibition proposes tenderness as one that is mediated by distance, requires dedicated space for it to be nurtured, and stretches time. While easily defined on paper, the edges and depth of tenderness becomes more ambiguous when it is affected by interpersonal relationships at the individual, familial, societal, and spiritual realms. Working across sculpture, drawing, video, sound, and installation, these artists serve as one set of constellations that investigates tenderness as a capacity, feeling, material, action, and memory. The works weave cultural and social contexts with fluctuating notions of tenderness that is both felt and invites tender acts from visitors. The artists’ works fill the space with warmth, nostalgia, skepticism, play, and love as byproducts and ingredients of tenderness. The title of the project What’s carried through the winds? stems from this continued questioning of the atomic, material or spiritual ingredients that are felt in relationships. What are the boundaries of affect, actions, feelings, and desires that sculpt the relationships that we form with other humans, beings, and the environments that we occupy? How are these relational ingredients transformed and transported between us? What’s carried through the winds between us that forms and deteriorates bonds? What’s carried through the winds from me to you? What’s carried through the winds? Thank you for visiting and carrying tenderness’s traces with you to where you go next.
Thank you to Mianwei Wang, Caroline Taylor Shehan, Darren Huang, Eugene Hannah Park, and Sammy Kim for their support of this project. This exhibition is supported by AHL-Chun Family Foundation and supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
Artist Biographies
Hyoju Cheon (b. Seoul, Korea) is an explorer and interdisciplinary artist currently residing in New York. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a Painting BFA from SungShin University. Her multimedia practice–often casting a space, an object, or a body in motion–responds to the conditions of a site. Her work documents bodies as they move through space:drawing their trajectories and archiving the material traces left behind. Hyoju has exhibited her works in Seoul at Dongsomun, Meindo, Gallery Imazoo, and Gaon Gallery; and in New York at the Lenfest Center for the Arts, Half Gallery and Chashma among others. She has been an artist in residency at Kunstraum LLC and NARS Foundation HDTS high desert test sites residency and Triangle residency.
Calvin Kim (b. Los Angeles, CA) currently lives and works in New York City. Kim received his M.F.A. in Visual Arts from Columbia University, his B.F.A. and B.A. in Psychology at Cornell University, and was a recipient of the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend Yale Norfolk. Selected exhibitions include “Soft Pangs,” Situations, New York, NY; “Holiday,” Harper’s, New York, NY; “What’s New In Still Life, Portrait, and Landscape,” LaiSun Keane, Boston, MA; “Genius Loci,” Charles Moffett, New York, NY; among others. In 2023, Kim received an award through the The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts’ Studio Program, New York, NY.
Christina Yuna Ko is a Queens-based artist and member of the collective Asian Feminist Studio for Art Research (AFSAR). Her work reclaims the visual language living in the Asian diasporic experience as a means of imagining and speculation. Selected exhibitions include: “39 Footnotes”, Accent Sisters, New York, NY; “Gathering”, Five Myles, Brooklyn, NY; “Late Night Enterprise”, Perrotin, New York, NY; and “Bathing in Public”, Selenas Mountain, Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been featured in Artforum, FAR–NEAR, Hyperallergic, and The Washington Post among others. She has further participated in programs at the Palais de Tokyo and GYOPO (LA), among others.
EunWoo Nam is a New York-based composer, music producer, and socially engaged artist originally from South Korea. His work weaves together sound, storytelling, and community engagement to explore themes of migration, memory, and cultural identity. After studying Social Practice Art at Queens College, he collaborated with institutions such as the Queens Museum and Queens Public Library. He has served as a panelist for the Queens Council on the Arts and continues to work independently, creating participatory works that foster connection through shared histories and sound.
Kanthy Peng is an artist who specializes in lens-based mediums. Her current practice focuses on people’s uneven mobility embodied in colonialism and globalized tourism, and caused by illness and disaster. Peng holds an MFA from the Yale School of Art (2019) and a BFA from the School of Art Institute of Chicago (2016). Her works have been exhibited and screened internationally, including, most recently, at Jimei x Arles International Photo Festival, China, European Media Art Festival, Germany, and FotoFocus Biennial, United States. Peng has received fellowships and residencies from the Spazju Kreattiv in Valletta, Malta, the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht, Netherlands, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, United States.
