AHL Foundation Presents Feminism is not Your Enemy: Live Conversations on Gender, Sexuality, and Identity

AHL Foundation, Inc. is pleased to present Feminism Is Not Your Enemy, featuring the AAPI Women Artist Cohort: Soeun Bae, Lena Chen, hamsa fae, and Ibuki Kuramochi. This exhibition brings together AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) women artists who explore the complexities of desire, agency, and power dynamics in their work. 

This initiative was made possible by the AAPI Community Development Fund (AAPI CDF). The AHL-AAPI Women Artist Cohort was established to provide a platform for AAPI women artists to explore and address critical issues through their artistic practices. Over the past four months, the selected artists have worked closely with curator Joyce Chung (Curator at Asia Art Initiatives, Philadelphia) and Jiyoung Lee (Director of Programs at AHL Foundation) to refine their concepts and ideas for this exhibition through a series of workshops. Feminism Is Not Your Enemy is the culminating exhibition of those conversations.

Curated by Joyce Chung, Feminism Is Not Your Enemy addresses how the misunderstood meaning of feminism has created a divide in the society while exploring the actual definition of the movement. Feminism is such a broad movement which encompasses liberal feminism, socialist feminism, and radical feminism, each with its own perspectives and priorities. This exhibition specifically focuses on the intersectionality of the movement by taking into account different experiences of oppression suffered by racialized women. Centering the various voices in AAPI communities, the exhibition celebrates women’s strengths to build agency and challenge societal norms to create positive change in society.

Styled as ‘women artists’ performance art festival,” packed with four performances into an all-day run on the opening day, Saturday, March 15, at AHL gallery, this soft-power flex of the event is a snapshot of the feminist arts of today. After the sensorily disquieting and provocative manifestation, the gallery showcases videos, sculpture, and sound elements used during the performances to allow visitors to continuously engage with the conversation, making the curation ever more cross-disciplinary.

Soeun Bae invites viewers to an intimate sleepover experience where two female bodies become a central site of production which constantly dismantles ambiguous boundaries between individual zones. The performance brings a collective display of the artist’s ongoing exploration of self-regulation and autonomy. As a testament to the organic connectedness of the whole, the work examines the questions raised by the dual and its split–between private and public, autonomy and dependency, and intimate and antagonistic partners. 

Lena Chen converts the gallery into a dining space where she will serve five dishes in collaboration with local Asian American sex workers, including members of Red Canary Song, a Flushing-based coalition that advocates for the rights of Asian and migrant massage parlor workers. By inviting Asian Americans and sex workers to the table, this community-based intervention addresses long-standing issues of exclusion in the feminist movement and creates spaces for self-expression, a fundamental theme of her work. Her work Five Flavors centers feminist discussion of consumption and being consumed and the ways in which these objectifications can provoke contradictory feelings of violence, pleasure, oppression, and power for API women.   

hamsa fae creates a live, vocal sound installation that viscerally evokes the transfeminine experience. Incorporating the vibrations of shamans and ritualists of the Asian Pacific alongside the hyper-sexualized femme body, the artist explores social contracts associated with the female voice. Throughout the performance, audiences are encouraged to engage with her work by recording their personal voices with the prompt: how’s this for a girl voice?

Ibuki Kuramochi incorporates Noh, an ancient Japanese performing art exclusively performed by men. The work traces entanglements of patriarchy and tradition, offering counter-narratives of resistance and transformation through the female body. During the performance, the artist wears a traditional Noh mask while projected video features an AI-generated masculinized version of her elderly self, alongside the faces of a traditional elderly man mask and a traditional Japanese woman mask to bring into question the established binary understanding of gender and age.

The words sexuality, gender, identity, and pleasure must be pluralized to allow for infinite interpretations and contexts. The featured artists confront sexually suggestive representation and dismantle binary oppositions between subjectivity and objectivity while reclaiming their own pleasure and agency. Spotlighting practices of three West Coast-based artists —Lena Chen, hamsa fae, and Ibuki Kuramochi —as well as one NY-based artist, Soeun Bae, Feminism Is Not Your Enemy aims to foster dialogues across the states around the various experiences of women artists.

Feminism Is Not Your Enemy will be on view at AHL Foundation from March 15 to March 29, 2025, with a public opening reception on March 15, 2025, from 2:00 to 5:00 PM. Visitors will have the opportunity to engage directly with the artists and curator, gaining deeper insight into the themes explored. The opening reception will feature live performances by participating artists and a special collaboration with AAPI women-owned vendors, who will share food as part of the event’s celebration of AAPI women’s voices.

For more information, please visit www.ahlfoundation.org or contact Jiyoung Lee at jlee@ahlfoundation.org.

About AHL Foundation 

The AHL Foundation is dedicated to supporting and promoting Korean-American artists and fostering cross-cultural dialogue through art. Since its inception in 2003, the foundation has played a pivotal role in preserving the history of Korean-American art and providing platforms for artists to achieve recognition and success. Through exhibitions, research projects, cultural programs, and community initiatives, the AHL Foundation continues to bridge communities, inspire future generations of artists, and foster an appreciation for Korean-American contributions to the global art landscape.

About Artists

Soeun Bae (b. South Korea) was raised in Alabama, and now based in New York. Bae works with sculpture, technology, and performance to question what it is to be living inside of a body. She participated in Wave Hill’s Sunroom Project, and completed residencies at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (CO), NARS Foundation (NY), and Velvetpark Media (NY). Bae completed her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2023.

Lena Chen (b. 1987, San Francisco) explores care, intimacy, race, and gender through an artistic practice spanning performance, new media, and socially engaged art. Collaborating with communities including sex workers, reproductive health workers, and trauma survivors, she has exhibited, screened, and performed her work internationally. Awarded Mozilla Foundation’s Creative Media Award and Best Emerging Talent at B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, her art is in the collections of the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, the MUST Museo del territorio in Vimercate, Italy, and the University of California, Irvine. Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in performance studies at UC Berkeley, she earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University and a M.F.A. at the Carnegie Mellon School of Art.

hamsa fae (b. Los Angeles) is a trans, Vietnamese-French performance artist and poet living and working in Southern California. Her practice combines live performance with movement, sound, and found objects to remember the in-between and beyond. Her recent works have been exhibited at the Mingei International Museum, Bread & Salt, Athenaeum Art Center, and Fronte San Ysidro. Her solo exhibition, Trans Aphrodisia, was in 2024 at the Brown Building.

Ibuki Kuramochi (b. Japan) is an interdisciplinary artist specializing in Butoh dance, performance, video, installation, and painting. Her work delves into the poetic physicality of Butoh and themes of metamorphosis, Womankind, and sexuality. Since 2016, she has trained with Yoshito Ohno at the renowned Kazuo Ohno Butoh Dance Studio. Kuramochi’s work has been exhibited internationally in New York, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Paris, and Rome, and she was featured as Artist of the Year in LA WEEKLY’s “People 2019.” She is a recipient of the 2024 City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Performing Arts Division awards and the 2022 SCIART Ambassador Fellowship. Recent highlights include exhibitions at the Torrance Art Museum, PST Art and Science Collide presented by Getty, and Craiova Art Museum Romania, as well as lectures at art college in Tokyo and the NY Film Academy.

About Curator

Joyce Chung is the Curator at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, where she oversees the exhibition and performance program. Her curatorial projects focus on the complexity of identity and representation through the lens of the politics of place. Chung is also interested in artistic exploration of struggles and hardships that are often overlooked, such as those of ethnic and gender minorities, women, and immigrants. She previously worked at a number of museums and galleries both in Korea and the United States, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Hyundai Card, Kukje Gallery, as well as for the Gwangju Biennale and Performa, New York. Chung holds an MA in the Humanities with a concentration in Art History from the University of Chicago and a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University.