Animating Sites of Becoming

This is an Archive of a Past Event

Join the Digital Aesthetics workshop for the first event of spring quarter. Poyen Wang and Heesoo Kwon will present a joint talk entitled, "Animating Sites of Becoming." Refreshments will be served.

About the Speakers

Poyen Wang | Cultvating Chora: CGI, Interiority, and Queer Presence

Through recent practice, Wang situates CGI world-building within the discursive terrains of psychoanalysis and queer theory, proposing a parallel mode of thinking in which digital environments function as both mental architectures and sites of becoming. Wang approaches CGI not simply as a representational tool but as a method of inquiry—one that constructs, destabilizes, and reconfigures interior worlds. Drawing on the concept of Chora as an ambiguous, unnamable, and unstable spatial condition, Wang treats CGI image-making as a form of writing through which narrative emerges not as a linear structure but as emotional accumulation, positioning queerness not as identity but as a condition of continual becoming. The work asks: how might digital image-making rearticulate interiority, and what forms of presence emerge when it is staged as a performative, psychological scene?

Poyen Wang is an artist and filmmaker born and raised in Taiwan, currently based in New York City. His work approaches the moving image as a theatrical, performative medium, staging psychologically charged scenes that explore intimacy, vulnerability, and power. Through cinematic tropes, spoken word, and atmospheric composition, he constructs a poetics of queer presence—fleeting, fractured, and unresolved—while interrogating the power dynamics of image-making. In his work, viewing becomes a charged exchange where gaze and presence interweave, dissolving the boundaries between spectator and subject.

Wang’s work has recently been included in Greater New York 2026 at the MoMA PS1. He has presented work at institutions and venues including Asia Art Archive in America; 99 Canal, New York; Essex Flowers, New York; Kunstmuseum Bonn, Bonn; Kasseler Kunstverein and Kasseler Dokfest, Kassel; Wassaic Project, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Taipei Digital Art Center, Taipei; and 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, among others. He teaches in the Department of Film and Media at Hunter College in New York City.

Heesoo Kwon | Between Body and Code

Heesoo Kwon’s practice unfolds through Leymusoom, an ongoing autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017. Her work brings together personal life, family histories, Korean mythology, and ritual practices to explore how memory, identity, and relationships evolve over time. Working across video, installation, photography, and digital media, Kwon uses CGI and AI to build interconnected worlds. Through projects such as Leymusoom Firefly and Premolt, she creates an evolving archive linking personal and ancestral memory, often reimagining her female ancestors as digital bodies. Her work reconsiders family, lineage, and time, exploring how digital and spiritual frameworks can reshape memory, the body, and collective experience.

Heesoo Kwon is a Korean multimedia artist whose work engages in ritualistic, autoethnographic, and archival practices. Employing 3D animation, modeling and artificial intelligence technologies as procreant tools to forge and traverse realms, Kwon engages in the rewriting of mythic matrilineal histories, the queering of familial relations, and the envisioning of decentralized communities and memoryscapes, notably through the self-referential, feminist religion Leymusoom, and the Firefly series which takes as its genesis AI-augmented family photographs from the artist’s childhood. In Kwon’s heterotopic hyperspaces, she abstracts concepts of time and memory, transcending the legacies of sacrifice, trauma and patriarchal violence to offer instead transformative modes of existence, liberation and community.

Kwon received a Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, Berkeley, and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Animation department at the California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Cantor Arts Center at Stanford University, Stanford; Orange County Museum of Art, Costa Mesa; Buk Seoul Museum of Arts, Seoul; Huis Marseille, Amsterdam; V&A Museum, London; Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam; West Den Haag, The Hague; Centre Wallonie Bruxelles, Paris; M+, Hong Kong; and WMA Space, Hong Kong. Kwon is the recipient of the 2025 New & Experimental Works (NEW) Program Grant from the Kenneth Rainin Foundation, the 2025 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the 2024 Trellis Art Fund Stepping Stone Grant, the 2023 Artadia Award, and the 2022 Hewlett 50 Arts Commission. Her work is in the permanent collections of KADIST, Cantor Arts Center, and Huis Marseille.

This event is generously co-sponsored by the Asian American Research Center at Stanford and Asian American Art Initiative.