Chosun Family
The Chosun Family was formed during a pandemic Zoom call with artists Kayla Tange, Chuck Hohng, Coffee Kang, and Luka Fisher as the four artists assembled to discuss how the virus had uprooted their lives and careers. The name evokes both the last and longest-lasting Korean imperial dynasty (1392-1910) and the radical potential for queer chosen families that transcend and transgress the barriers and boundaries between and among nations and peoples.
Their first official project was Q&A, otherwise known as Quarantined Queer and Asian Artist, a parafictional magazine dedicated to exploring the isolation that we have experienced at the intersection and departing points of our identities as queer and trans Asian and Caucasian citizens, sex workers, artists, and entertainers, visitors, and immigrants in America at a time of heightened animus towards the other.
The first article in Q&A was a socially distanced artist interview between Coffee Kang and Kayla Tange about how the pandemic has shifted their perceptions about safety and the precariousness of assimilation in contemporary America. This dialogue was conducted via placards, bullhorns, and binoculars off of Gallery Row. After learning more about Kang’s art and her precarious status as an O-1 Visa Seeker, Tange decided to meet Coffee for a back alley art sale where Tange handed cash from her job as a stripper for one of Kang’s abstract O-1 Paintings. The resulting documents, which feature Jerri Allyn's The Waitresses, were then turned into a faux magazine that was published first by Quarenzine and then the performance ephemera was embedded in the Los Angeles Contemporary Archives. Unable to secure funding to produce physical copies of Q&A magazine, the Chosun Family set their sights on holiday cards, which they are now mailing out quarterly. The first card featured the Chosun Family members Kayla Tange, Luka Fisher, and Chuck Hohng wearing masks and post-modern takes on traditional Korean formal wear that Hohng designed for the party while Coffee Kang and her camera were reflected in the mirror that the members held as an homage to self-reflexive strategies of lesbian-feminist photography from the 1970s.
Permanence Is Only a Word