STATEMENTS
I play with languages, in their diverse forms and functions. By examining languages across times, cultures, and disciplines, I look for moments of linguistic slippages and cultural mistranslations. I use these opportunities to generate and articulate alternate voices, writings, and imaginations.

In one body of work titled La Monte Young Projects, prosthetics and live animals (e.g. live butterflies, a Clydesdale horse) facilitate the performing of a non-verbal language that speaks to interspecies and interracial relations. This language – neither written nor spoken, or perhaps at once both – is a response to conditions of beauty and violence that are at once linguistic and corporeal, cerebral and visceral. It is a search for embodied language more resonant and resilient than rational, articulate (human) speech.

Historic public speeches become departure points for a series of site-specific public projects titled Wrong Places Project. Seemingly disconnected, or “wrong” geopolitical places, sites, and events are butted together and narrated through iconic speeches (e.g. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech, or Salvador Allende’s speech broadcast live over Chilean radio moments before his death in 1973). These speeches are re-articulated in multiple languages while intentionally avoiding the dominant language (more often than not, English), thereby producing linguistically dissonant and culturally divergent receptions.

In my most recent body of works, Militant Monarch and Camouflage, I bring together culturally contradictory signifiers: a signifier of classic beauty of the monarch butterfly, with signifiers of war (military fatigue, guns, and a tank), By juxtaposing these together, I militate against the easy partitioning of aesthetics from politics, and against the formalist rhetoric of purity prevalent in art discourses.

Through these projects, my intention is to facilitate experiences that can open up wider cultural context for critical discourse in contemporary art that properly reflects the complexity of our cosmopolitan realities, and to ignite the poetic and political potentials of art.


BIO

David Khang's interdisciplinary practice is informed by education in psychology, theology, dentistry, law, and art. Khang selectively imbeds these disciplinary codes into his work, to compose interdisciplinary languages that are communicated in visual, textual, and spoken forms. By integrating performance into his time-based installations, Khang embodies these languages to interrogate socially constructed and intersecting categories of gender, race, class, and species (ie. what it means to be human). By strategically deploying non-native languages and code switching, Khang produces divergent and dissonant readings that aim to re-imagine poetics and politics.

Khang received his BSc and DDS from the University of Toronto, BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design, and MFA from UC Irvine, where he was the recipient of the University of California Chancellor’s Fellowship. Khang concurrently completed UC Irvine’s Critical Theory Emphasis, for which he studied with Jacques Derrida, Etienne Balibar, and Fred Moten. In 2004, Khang’s thesis was chosen to represent UC Irvine at the Distinguished Master’s Thesis Writing Competition (USA). Khang was a 2007 recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award (Brooklyn, NY).

Khang has taught at Emily Carr University of Art & Design (2005-2016) and Goddard College (2009-2010), and has served on the Board of Directors at LIVE Performance Biennial, Access Gallery, and grunt gallery. Khang recently completed his JD with dual Specializations in Aboriginal Law and Environmental Law at the University of British Columbia, and then articled with Access Pro Bono Everyone Legal Clinic (Vancouver).  Khang was born in Seoul, grew up in Tkaronto (Toronto), and currently is an uninvited guest and settler on the ancestral, unceded and unsurrendered Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh Territories (Vancouver), where he divides his time between art, dentistry, and legal advocacy.