Curated by
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May 29, 2026
Friday, May 29, 6–7 PM
NARS Main Gallery
As part of our Art in Dialogue and the NARS Artists Present: An Offering for the Public series, NARS Foundation is pleased to present Our Oily and Lush Vitality, a public program with Jisoo Chung, an Season II, 2026 artist-in-residence, organized by NARS Curatorial Fellow Vu Thien An (Thea) Nguyen.
Our Oily and Lush Vitality is a site-specific installation activated through a participatory performance in which the artist and audience collectively engage with the work through the gesture of “cheers.” Using wine glasses, magnetic filings, and cooking oil, the performance visualizes a codependent connection between each vessel. Emphasizing proximity and collective presence, “Our Oily and Lush Vitality” imagines connectivity and community as a kind of gravitational power, a force that binds bodies, objects, and social relations together through moments of gathering and exchange.
About the artist:
Jisoo Chung is a multimedia artist working across video, installation, drawing, and performance. As a Korean artist who relocated to the United States, she examines failures in language—mistranslations, autocorrections, and linguistic omissions—to trace the sociocultural power embedded in language and names. Her practice considers how identity is negotiated, distorted, or rendered invisible through systems of translation. Chung is a nominee for the United States Artists Fellowship, a fellow of the MacDowell Residency, and she has received grants from the LACE Lightning Fund (Andy Warhol Foundation), the Puffin Foundation, the Seoul Arts and Culture Foundation, and Jungwoon Prize at the Seoul International Experimental
Film and Video Festival, among others. Chung holds an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, and a BFA from Seoul National University. She served on the production committee at GYOPO, is a co-founder of an after school art program Drawwing Cabinet, and is currently an adjunct faculty member at Bakersfield College. She lives, works, and teaches in Los Angeles.
About the Curatorial Fellow:
Vu Thien An (Thea) Nguyen is an emerging curator and art researcher based between New York and Hanoi. Her research considers how translation and communication operate within studio practice, tracing how ideas move across languages and forms of making. Grounded in care, her practice nurtures and presents evolving voices. She works as a facilitator and bridge-builder to bring together people, concepts, while responding to cultural narratives.
Recently, Nguyen curated Leah Liu's solo exhibition susurrus at the Chinese American Arts Council | Gallery 456 (New York), and co-curated Womb of Fire, a traveling exhibition and publication project featuring 100 works by Vietnamese and diasporic Vietnamese women and non-binary artists. She is part of Parsons School of Design, Design History and Practice Program Class of 2026 and currently serves as Curatorial Assistant to guest curator Phil Zheng Cai for the 2026 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program at Residency Unlimited.
Support for NARS programs is generously provided by:
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