Tina Kim Gallery is pleased to present ‘Revolt of the Body’ curated by Simon Wu, opening on Thursday, December 14th, 2023. Participating artists include Cole Lu, Dean Sameshima, Lotus L. Kang, Maia Ruth Lee, and Tosh Basco.

‘Revolt of the Body’ explores conceptions of flesh, sexuality, and time that precede modern and contemporary ideas of identity and self, borrowing its name from the final solo performance of Japanese choreographer Tatsumi Hijikata (1926-86). Taking place at Tokyo’s Nihon Seihan hall in October 1968, “Revolt of the Body” was Hijikata’s most intense articulation of Ankoku Butoh, an avant-garde movement practice he founded nine years earlier, literally denoting ‘dance of darkness.’ Hijikata sought to re-invent the boundaries of art, life, and humanity in the shadow and devastation of World War II.

While the artists do not explicitly cite Hijikata, their works invoke alternative, rebellious bodies in line with Butoh’s historic provocations. The radically recombinant body is typefied in Dean Sameshima’s Erotic Dot Series—fields of connect-the-dot paintings that make images of gay sex when connected as prescribed, or something else alien, unrecognizable, if you choose your own paths. In Cole Lu’s sculptures, etchings and drawings, he produces mythic images of celestial and premodern lives. Flesh is reimagined as wirey, ghostly baskets in Maia Ruth Lee’s social sculptures—assembled as a singular column like an arm or a body—and as bruisable, photosensitive surfaces in Lotus L. Kang’s drawings. And as in Tosh Basco’s hand prayer drawings, each of them are a kind of flesh in themselves.

Cole Lu lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Melding historical and literary references with poignant personal experience, Lu’s work tells stories of dissonance and longing through twirling odysseys that carry the echoes of trauma, transformation, and regeneration.

Dean Sameshima lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Influenced by queer subcultures, Sameshima works with photography and painting to explore themes of sexuality, community, and memory. He often incorporates archival materials, such as vintage magazines, flyers, and pamphlets, into his works, creating a dialogue between the past and the present.

Born in Busan, South Korea, Maia Ruth Lee is currently based in Salida, Colorado. Deeply informed by questions surrounding the self in times of dispersion, mobility, and rootlessness, Lee's multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, painting, and sculpture. Using translation as an apparatus, Lee transmutes her works between mediums, connecting themes of borders, community, and language, with embodiments of carriers, loss, and self-preservation through process and materials. 

Maia Ruth Lee has held solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, Denver, Francois Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles; and Jack Hanley Gallery, New York. Lee has participated in numerous group exhibitions including the Aspen Art Museum, Aspen 2019 Whitney Biennial, New York; Helena Anrather Gallery; New York, among others. Lee attended Hongik University in Seoul, and the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada. Lee was the recipient of the Gold Art Prize in 2021 and the Rema Hort Mann grant in 2017. Her work is held in the public collections at the Whitney Museum of American Art.