Sensing War: Conversation with Sunny Xiang and TJ Shin

Please join us for lunch and conversation with multidisciplinary artist and writer TJ Shin and scholar Profesossor Sunny Xiang.

TJ Shin (b. 1993, Seoul) is an artist and writer whose multimedia practice spans film, video, installation, and sculpture. Their work explores emergent temporalities and spatial systems of global migration, technological apparatus, and ecological networks. Shin has exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Queens Museum, Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Arts, Princeton University, Montclair State University Galleries, Doosan Gallery, Knockdown Center, and more. Their writing has been published in Active Cultures, Artforum, Asia Art Archive, the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. They have been invited as artist-in-residence at Princeton University, Indiana University, University at Buffalo, Recess, Wave Hill, Folly Tree Arboretum, Banff Centre, and more. Their works have been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ArtPapers, ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine, and the New York Times.

Sunny Xiang studies and teaches race, war, and empire through wide-ranging aesthetic, cultural, literary, and documentary materials. She is particularly interested in the methodological questions and perceptual challenges introduced by U.S. military empire in Asia and the Pacific during the mid-twentieth century. Her first book Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War was published by Columbia University Press in 2020. Her current project, Chemical Apophenia: Air Conspiracies and Skin Connections in the Toxic Tropics, explores how U.S. WWII military science in the Pacific theater generated new paradigms for detecting and combating toxicity in the air– and on the skin. In understanding war, empire, and science as not only structures of power but also regimes of perception and styles of knowing, Xiang's scholar.