YFFY (CONNIE FU + JUNGMOK YI)
Connie Fu (she/her) is an American-born daughter of Chinese immigrants. She is a transdisciplinary artist working in textiles, performance, and research-based practice to reconfigure traces of her bicultural heritage as living environments. Her work has been exhibited at Maelstrom Collaborative Arts (Cleveland, OH), FiveMyles (Brooklyn, NY), and La MaMa Theatre (New York, NY). She is the Gallery and Community Outreach Director at Praxis Fiber Workshop, an artist-run community fiber studio and educational center located in Cleveland. These days, she is learning how to ferment soy sauce.
Jungmok Yi (they/them) is a queer non-binary 1.5 generation Korean-American immigrant and transdisciplinary artist who works with performance, installation, video, writing, and workshops. Born and raised in South Korea, they moved to Southern California when they were 13. Jungmok cultivated their voice as an artist at Pasadena City College and California State University, Long Beach, where they studied ceramics and sculpture. Over the years their work has addressed themes including the duality and contradiction of identities resulting from spending half of their life in Seoul and the other half in the U.S., and from their transition to being a non-binary persyn. They hold an MFA from Tyler School of Art, Temple University in North Philadelphia.
Queer Asian collective YFFY (Connie Fu and Jungmok Yi) engage in transdisciplinary practice to create sensory social environments that hold space for interwoven experiences of queerness and time. For if time is nonlinear, going about in nested orbits or numerous simultaneities, then the navigation of time as such is inherently queer. The core of YFFY's projects is to drive recognition that freely navigable time and queer existence in social spaces of the real go hand in hand.
The constraining of time into linear chronology allows for debased arguments that embodied queerness is an aberration best stamped from lineage and collective hxstory. By setting flexible physical and social parameters and destabilizing categories of performer/spectator and tradition preserver/tradition maker, YFFY and collaborators practice radical engagement with crystalline moments in time. The moment in question is not one in a series from past to present to future, but rather an instant framed as cyclic and infinite. This method allows for open-ended interaction, discourse, and play to emerge as guiding principles for how we communicate and share space.
Fu's Chinese and Yi's Korean ancestry are frequently embedded in project parameters. Traditional customs and rituals influence performances and chosen materials, resulting in contemporary manifestations. In so doing YFFY acknowledges that the so-called past is not recoverable, and yet ancestral lives carry on through the bodies of those who work to reshape the rituals, and ways of living, in their own image.
The Portal of Answers
Woven screen, video shadow, sound, painted figure, aroma and colors of peaches, painted cloth pillars.
The Wise Lump
Yellow Lump, yellow skirt, a border, a door to the portal, and the portal.