Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산): A Virtual Reality Experience by Amy Mihyang Ginther with Susana Ruiz and Huy Truong

• 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
• Gallery hours: Wednesday to Saturday, 11 am – 5 pm
• 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.

AHL Foundation is pleased to announce the first public exhibition of Mountains After Mountains (산 넘어 산), 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’s story challenges the persistent myth that adoption is an equivalent alternative to abortion, instead 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.

Ginther initiated the narrative text for Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) in 2019 in response to a wave of new legislation attacking reproductive rights in the US. Acts of resistance like Ginther’s have become increasingly crucial in the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs decision, which revoked the constitutional right to abortion, overturning both Roe (1973) and Casey (1992).

Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) represents a collaboration between Ginther, media artists Susana Ruiz and Huy Truong, and their team Patrick Stefaniak (VR Development), Atom Kruckenberg (Sound), Alessia Cecchet (Associate Producer), and Leah Nichols (2D Art/Animation), who was also adopted from Korea. The piece integrates multiple, interdisciplinary media to create an experimental VR experience that consciously denies the reduction of Ginther’s story 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. Rather than aiming to entertain or gratify viewers with a sense of virtue, Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) proposes a more complex engagement with one’s position and complicity in systems of reproductive injustice.

Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) serves as a powerful statement in the face of attacks on reproductive justice and claims that VR-induced feelings are, in themselves, a form of social change. Its distinctive narrative and critical point of view will undoubtedly enrich all who experience it. We invite you to join us for the public debut of this immersive VR experience and participate in the public discourse surrounding some of today’s most important issues.

Mountains after Mountains (산 넘어 산) opens with a reception on June 3, 2023 at 3 p.m. and runs through June 17, 2023. An artist talk will be held on June 3 at 4 pm moderated by Senti Sojwal, Communications Director for Planned Parenthood of Greater New York and Member of the Asian American Feminist Collective.

For more information, please visit https://www.ahlfoundation.org/mountainsaftermountains/.

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 Vietnam 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.

About AHL Foundation

AHL Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit arts organization established in 2003 by Sook Nyu Lee Kim to support artists of Korean heritage working in the United States and promote exposure of their work in today’s highly competitive contemporary art world. AHL Foundation seeks to accomplish its mission by promoting the work of emerging artists of Korean descent active in the United States through exhibitions, informing and educating artists on the business side of the art practice, and building a community of supporters and art enthusiasts.