Talk

MFA Photography, Video and Related Media presents a conversation between faculty member Shimon Attie and program alumnus Ming-Jer Kuo (2014), led by Shan Jayakumar, professor of Graduate Studies in Urban and Regional Design at NYIT. As 2019 recipients of the New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) Award in Architecture, Environmental Structures and Design, Attie and Kuo will discuss their practice and its evolution from traditional photographic concepts to physical objects in multi-functional environments. The artists will each present a survey of their work and elaborate on the importance of lens-based theory to their unique creativity.

This talk is part of MFA Photography, Video and Related Media's Scheimpflug Lecture Series. Under this year's theme of "shifting the focus," discussions will feature distinguished department alumni and colleagues thematically centered around lens-based media as the foundation towards a greater creative practice.

Shimon Attie is a visual artist whose practice includes creating both permanent and temporary site-specific installations in public places, immersive mixed-media installations for museums and galleries, art photographs, and new media works. In many of his projects, Attie has used a variety of media to animate sites with images of their lost histories or speculative futures. This has included introducing the histories and narratives of marginalized and/or forgotten communities into the physical landscape of the present. In other, often video works, Attie engages local communities in finding new ways of representing their history, memory and potential futures.

Whether working with public sites or in museums and galleries, Attie’s work explores how contemporary media may be used to re-imagine new relationships between space, time, place and identity. His work has been exhibited and collected by numerous museums around the world, including by New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, The National Gallery in Washington DC, the ICA in Boston, and the Miami Art Museum, among many others. In addition, he has received numerous visual artist fellowships and awards, including the Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize and a Visual Artist Fellowship from Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute.

Ming-Jer Kuo (born in Taipei, Taiwan) is a New York-based artist. He had worked as an environmental engineer for 11 years and came to New York for art. He creates interdisciplinary visual artworks based on his lens-based media experience, urban living interests and engineer’s analytic perspective. Kuo graduated from the MFA program in Photography, Video and Related Media at School of Visual Arts in 2014. He is a member of The Elizabeth Foundation for The Arts in NYC (2017), a participant of NYFA New York Foundation for the Arts Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program in NYC (2015), a recipient of Paula Rhodes Award for Exceptional Achievement in NYC (2014), and was awarded as Honorable Mention of Taoyuan Creation Award in Taiwan (2011). Kuo’s work has been exhibited in solo and group shows of EFA 20|20 Gallery in NYC (2019), Trestle Gallery in NYC (2018), Gallery Sejul in Seoul (2017), Chashama Space to Present Program in NYC (2017), QCC Art Gallery in NYC (2017), NARS Foundation in NYC (2016), Gallery 456 in NYC (2016), Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ (2016), New York Hall of Science in NYC (2015), Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art in NYC (2015), The 2 Gateway Center in Newark, NJ (2014, 2015), Fotoaura Institute of Photography in Taiwan (2009) and Pingyao International Photography Festival in China (2004). Kuo’s work has been featured by numerous publications, including Aint-Bad (2014) and Steadfast Arte (2015). His work, "Everyday Practice of Art" was solo exhibited and was included in a publication of government in Taiwan (2010).