Lisa PARK SoYoung is a Hong Kong-based media artist, scholar, producer/curator, and educator, who works with art and technologies with critical focus on the cultural elements at play. Her multi-modal approach to art-tech-culture triad is supplemented by nomadic life experiences and cultural insights, as well as a fascination with Human-Computer technogenesis. Hybridities and interdisciplinarity are thus critical entry points for her art-driven research and research-driven happenings, which advocates for decentralization and ontological expansion of the contemporary media art-world. Lisa has a BFA in Visual Arts from York University in Toronto (2006), and an MFA (2015) and PhD (2022) from School of Creative Media, at City University of Hong Kong.
Art-making + exprimentation + theory
Having critically unpacked the issue of cultural imperialism in the field of New media arts in PhD dissertation, my current research seeks to decentralize and expand the discursive grounds of media art-world towards enhanced ontological plurality. My nomadic past living across Korea, Malaysia, Canada, Singapore, and Hong Kong, revealed cultural liminalities and hybridities that are now central to my praxis, which enables cross-cultural reflections as a lifestyle rather than as professional research undertaken from an external perspective.These autoethnographic approach to real-life observations fuel my academic research that then leads to the creation of happenings and processes wherein artists may incorporate the expanded array of philosophies and epistemologies from regions that have long been “Othered,” through empathic dialogues and global community building. The wide range of reflections that emerge from organizing such happenings often become the basis of my academic writing & theorization. These reflections also feed back into subsequent engagements, forming the basis of a reflexive action research.
In terms of practice, I am a media scholar/artist/curator/producer/designer with experiences in both academia and the industry. “Wearing multiple hats” enables a thicker approach to interdisciplinary research, which enriches the width and breadth of reflections that emerge through Action Research. As a medium-agnostic artist, I have experimented with consumer technologies such as mobile applications, the web, EEG devices, videos, animations, and physical computing, and have experimented with diverse canvases such as skyscraper facades, large-scale domes, or more recently, the world wide web, which I believe is the most critical site requiring artistic interventions today in view of Web3.
Technologies such as mobile applications, the web, or physical computing are valuable tools for my art practice, given their enhanced capacities for experimentation as well as proximity to our lifeworld. These affordances enable artistic interventions to be better entangled with real-life socio-cultural processes, and are interfaces through which our pre-conscious ontological grounds and biases can be glimpsed. This is vital for me, whose hybridized cultural identity presents a site through which disparate cultural logic and value systems are examined as the locus of my academic and artistic inquiry.
I am grateful that my efforts have led to a nominated position in the Board of ISEA-International (International Symposium of Electronic Arts) wherein I chair the Development sub-committee entrusted with subtantializing an expanded vision of ISEA international towards a more inclusive and diversified future; I am an invited member of East-Meets-East Research Group spearheaded by Art Centre Nabi in Seoul, Korea, wherein we study East Asian philosophies in view of the Media-Art world and beyond; and I have recently become co-Chair of LEONARDO LASER Hong Kong (Leonardo Art-Science Evening Rendezvous), which is hosted by School of Creative Media, at City University of Hong Kong. Working in collaboration with the LASER HK Chair Dr. Hector Rodriguez, LASER HK is envisioned as a fun discursive framework to generate and advocate for fresh arts-tech research emerging from the region and beyond. Based on my firm belief that arts-tech research in the arts must dialogue with the everyday realities of the very people it represents, I am infinitely grateful for these empowering acknowledgements to progress these important discussions forward.
Academic
Academic research, publication, and teaching are therefore indispensable aspects of this reflexive practice. The reflexive methodology began with self-reflection on recurring tendencies that emerge in my own art practices, with which other artists/scholars showing similar inclinations are identified. These autoethnographic dialogues also feed into the Action research, with each iteration helping to fine-tune the approach while building necessary alliances for future collaborations.Publication record includes Leonardo journal, the Technoetic Arts journal, International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA), Consciousness Reframed (Beijing, China), RIXC Open Fields (Riga, Latvia), Ars Electronica 2021 Garden Hong Kong symposium on Post-human Art, Open Systems PhD Salon at Art Machines: International Symposium on Machine Learning and Art 2020 (Hong Kong), as well as East-Meets-East conference (London) in 2022. Other venues for research presentation include the New Vision Arts Festival at the Asia Society (Hong Kong), and a recent panel on AI and the Arts at the Asia Society (Southern California). For a full list of presentations, please refer to my CV
Event-making
My early-career industry experiences in marketing and IT sectors presented tacit knowledge and professionalism, which is applicable not only for teaching and curriculum building, but for producing and managing various media art events. During this period, I have managed a variety of interactive web-based projects, co-created a K-pop generating mobile application (aesthetic & process design + project management), as well as project managing experiential marketing campaign for Yahoo! in the Philippines (2009), amongst many others.Building on these experiences, I have since organized/facilitated a number of hybrid media-art events, such as Ars Electronica Garden Hong Kong (2020 as editor-in-chief & 2021 a co-curator & executive producer), the Open Sky Project(2014~16 as project manager++), HCI Hackathon:Future Interactions using Smart-glasses and related wearable devices, at the National University of Singapore (2022) and Zhejiang University (2022) (Hybrid Interface facilitation & research). Most recently, I was very fortunate to co-curate the FOUNDATIONS: A Web3 Media Art Festival organized by Videotage HK(2022-3) through which I was able to more broadly apply my working methods into form.
see event-making page
lisaparksoyoung@gmail.com
Academia.edu
CV