We Must Start With Love

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Dear GYOPO Community,

Can we talk about love in a time that is especially heightened by a sense of lovelessness? Our society is pretty cynical about love as a transformative force; we believe that “true, attainable” love cannot be found, even though we have no shared definition of it. We rarely think of love as a humble, responsible choice, a practice that we can cultivate and teach everyone. In her treatise on the subject, All About Love, bell hooks defines love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth. Love is an act of will—namely, both an intention and an action.” Love is a doing, rather than a possessing.

GYOPO is an organization that centers a generative ethic of love, the most vital practice for social relations. To endeavor to build a community where so many of us come from a legacy of struggle, conflicted identity, and class, gender, and racial discrimination is an act of love which must be at the core for the health of any society. We can come together with our differences and likenesses, but ultimately when we alchemically rinse our joy and suffering collectively, somehow the Self just washes away. In those moments, there exists little difference between you and me. We have tapped into reality on a deeper level, one where we are all interconnected—biologically, cosmologically, and consciously. We are simply one.

When I was growing up, there was no safe space, no forum for reflecting on the dissonance of living between cultures and expectations. I barely had any language for being caught between worlds. Through my work, both artistic and personal, I have come to know that belonging is not a singular static construct, but an evolving dialogue between self and the world. Since GYOPO began its work in 2016, it has formed new relationships and enriched existing ones between brilliant, inventive people within the Korean diaspora and beyond. Together, we are capable of facing uncertainty and fears of radical change by creating small links that create a vast network of community healing and endurance.

Through the organization of educational programs on the arts and events that offer new experiences of belonging, GYOPO breaks entrenched ways of relating to one another and offers a space to renegotiate our relationships to family, community, and power. It is this kind of expansive, educational, and intersectional work—such as their breakthrough virtual program series, Racism Is a Public Health Issue, co-presented by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 2020, in which I participated alongside Jeff Chang, Bowen Yang, Cathy Park Hong, Ava DuVernay, Rashid Johnson, Dolores Huerta, among others—that is vital to diasporic Korean and other communities. In addition to contributing Shigenobu Twilight, the annual GYOPO artist edition I designed in 2019, I have been a proud member of GYOPO’s board of directors since 2022.

Recently, I opened my most comprehensive museum exhibition in Asia, at the Leeum Samsung Museum of Art, titled There Exists Another Evolution, But In This One, and last year I launched a nomadic research initiative called Metaspore. We incubated the first chapter titled “The Networked Sensorium” in the Bay Area, culminating in a sensorial, interdisciplinary symposium. These recent activities draw a circle around the Pacific Rim, connecting my place of upbringing, California, to my place of birth, Korea. While in Korea, I learned about jeong, a concept which describes a complex bond of love and affection between people and things who have deep affinities for one another. It seemed that there were many signs of love’s multi-dimensional, directional potential everywhere I went in Korea. I find this ethos carries over to the Americas, where GYOPO’s work flourishes.

We are now awakening to the need for a paradigm shift in our society, where interconnectedness, interdependence, and collectivity eclipse self-centered individualism. Economists have been calling the 21st century the “Pacific Century,” where cultural and economic influence will be heavily concentrated in the Asia Pacific region. It is up to us and organizations such as GYOPO to develop new models of community building. GYOPO uplifts and collaborates with some of the most renowned, established artists as well as emerging, experimental creative thinkers and practitioners. As opposed to engendering competition and promoting individual success, GYOPO is dedicated to generative and emancipatory practices of reciprocity and exchange.

We must start with love, even in the realm of scientific inquiry. Science can point to phenomena, but it cannot teach you how to live it. Love can function like the underground fungal networks that enable a whole forest ecosystem to thrive. With your support, GYOPO will continue to be a space of learning, experimentation, belonging, and empowerment from which ideas are incubated and disseminated to audiences. We are in need of more such practices of abundant love.

In community with love,

Anicka Yi
Artist, GYOPO Board of Directors

Image: Na Mira, Anicka Yi, and EJ Hill at GYOPO’s 2019 Chuseok Benefit
Photo: Sara Pooley