Kayla, Umi, and Nic have been working on this meet-up and sharing for a while. We are very excited to invite you all to participate in a picnic, art-making, and sharing about our experiences as adoptees, trans, gender fluid or all and their intersections.
Please bring food and/or drink and your experiences and stories all to share with your community. Feel free to spread the word and invite others. Oh and don’t forget a blanket to sit in the grass 🙂
Date: Sunday, September 18, 2022, 11am – 1:30pm
Where: 5587 Village Green, LA CA 90016
Contact: nic@nicolerademacher.com
Umi Hsu (they/them) was born in Taipei and moved to Virginia at age twelve. Hsu is a trans nonbinary sound artist and writer whose practice is driven by inquiries about sound and migratory communities. Their long term project explores Taiwan’s street sound cultures in relation to the urban underclass experience of city development, mobility, and technology. Working to create social change through sound, Hsu leads two projects: LA Listens, a community engagement platform that reflects on LA’s changing sensory and social ecology; and mobile placemaking collective Movable Parts. They also write songs about the melancholic postcolony in ghost pop band Bitter Party.
Hsu’s sound practice has been featured in LA Weekly, KCET, MIT Arts, Giant Robot, KCHUNG Radio, and Dublab, and presented by the Rubin Museum, Japanese American National Museum, CTM Festival in Berlin, Tuesday Night Cafe, 18th Street Arts Center, ONE Archives at the USC Libraries, and MIT Community Innovators Lab. With a PhD in Critical and Comparative Studies in Music from the University of Virginia, they have received fellowships and awards from National Endowment for the Arts, American Council for Learned Society, Shuttleworth Foundation, and LA Metro. Hsu currently teaches as an adjunct faculty member in the MFA in Media Design Practices program at ArtCenter College of Design, serves on the Advisory Board for The Invisible Archive journal, and works as Director of Content Strategy at ONE Archives Foundation.
Kayla Tange (she/her) is a Los Angeles-based artist born in South Korea. She was adopted by a Japanese American couple whose family were interned during WWII. Informed by lived experiences and desire to both subvert cultural stereotypes and heal ancestral trauma, she explores psychic boundaries, emotional labor, and permanence as recurring themes in her work. Pendulating between literal and satirical, her practice utilizes performance and installation to navigate uncertainty and reclaim the body using cultural references and stories of shame as symbolic vehicles. She is the co-producer of Sacred Wounds, a show focused on ritual and community for Asian performers, as well as a co-organizer for Stripper Co-op, a series of erotic artist-run pop-up events. She has performed or exhibited at Human Resources, Highways Performance Space, REDCAT, Torrance Art Museum, Performance Studies International, Melbourne, OUTFEST, Asian Pacific Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Institute of Contemporary Art San Francisco.
Nicole Rademacher (she/her) is an artist mainly working in video and community engagement. The influence of her adoption and reunion (with her biological family) feature prominently in her studio practice where she explores concepts of intimacy, identity, and belonging. She held an artist residency at La Cité Nationale des Arts and has received an Artistic Community Engagement Grant from the Rema Hort Mann Foundation. Rademacher holds an MFA in Electronic Integrated Arts from Alfred University and a BFA in photography and video from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Additionally, Rademacher is an Associate Marriage & Family Therapist and Provisional Registered Art Therapist with an MA from Loyola Marymount University. She has collaborated and shown work widely both nationally & internationally including TEMPORAL at Centro de Arte Digital en Memoria de Juan Downey in Chile, End to End at Harvestworks in NYC, LOOP Video Art Festival in Barcelona, Transmediale in Berlin, and 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica.