Joyce Chung: Performance, Gender, and Erotic Aesthetics (Tuition Free)
Adult Tuition-Free Class | Available
This lecture series examines how contemporary performance art shapes and challenges gender identities and notions of sexuality in global contexts, with a particular focus on artists of Asian ancestry. Through video footage, performance documentation, and collective discussion, the course explores how artists engage desire in relation to technology, drag, sex work, and gendered social scripts. The course will foreground how Asian bodies have been historically fetishized or rendered illegible, as well as how cultural traditions have shaped or regulated desire. Performance is approached as a critical space where artists negotiate visibility, fantasy, and power and where agency and reimagination become possible. Erotic expression is considered not simply as sexuality or provocation, but as a complex site of social negotiation and aesthetic strategy.
1. Robots & Synthetic Desire: Explore desire and fantasy in relation to machines, artificial bodies, and technological mediation, foregrounding questions of control and projection
2. Drag: Examine drag as an erotic and political strategy through which gender, identity, and spectatorship are destabilized
3. Gender Roles: Focus on how everyday gestures become sites of erotic tension, revealing how gendered norms are embodied and disrupted
4. Sex work & Gaze: Consider how visibility, consent, and erotic labor are negotiated through self-representation and the politics of spectatorship
5. Staged Performance in Photography: Investigate power dynamics through staged photography, attending to authorship and the politics of looking
Joyce Chung
Joyce Chung is the Curator at Asian Arts Initiative in Philadelphia, where she oversees the exhibition and performance program. Her curatorial projects focus on the complexity of identity and representation through the lens of the politics of place. Chung is also interested in artistic exploration of struggles and hardships that are often overlooked, such as those of ethnic and gender minorities, women, and immigrants. She previously worked at a number of museums and galleries both in Korea and the USA, including the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, Hyundai Card, Kukje Gallery, as well as for the Gwangju Biennale and Performa, New York. Chung holds an MA in the Humanities with a concentration in Art History from the University of Chicago and a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University.