"Conversation Pieces" is a programming series that invites UChicago scholars and/or creatives and their surprise guests to enter into dialogue with artworks in Expanding the 50th: Shared Stories. For the last in the series this academic year, join dancer, writer, and multidisciplinary artist Irene Hsiao and fourth-year student and Smart alum Julian Stern for a screening, reading, and discussion about Yeesookyung's Translated Vase (2007).

Irene Hsiao first created site-specific and object-focused work as a choreographer for Landscape in Metamorphosis, directed by composer Yao Chen, in response to Bingyi Huang's monumental ink painting Cascade, installed in the Smart Museum lobby in 2011. Since that time, she has continued to develop dances with visual art in museums and public spaces, a practice that includes interaction with visual artworks and experimental engagement with artists, institutions, and the public. Her work at the Smart includes site-specific durational improvisation, solo theatrical dances, video studies, and virtual performances inspired by exhibitions and artworks including Monster Roster: Existentialist Art in Postwar Chicago (2016), Emmanuel Pratt's Radical (Re)Constructions (2018), Virginio Ferrari's Dialogo (2018), Tang Chang: The Painting That Is Painted With Poetry Is Profoundly Beautiful (2018), The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China (2020), and Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe (2021).

Julian Stern is a fourth-year student in the college studying Fundamentals: Issues/Texts, for which his research focuses on pretentiousness and the act of reading as a site of subject formation. He recently completed his junior thesis entitled “A Redemptive Reading of American Psycho.” He has long been involved with contemporary art on campus, serving variously as a gallery assistant at the Smart Museum of Art, as a research intern for the art program at the Rubenstein Forum, as an arts writer and associate arts editor for the Chicago Maroon, and as a member of the Student Committee at the Renaissance Society. 

IMAGE: Yeesookyung, Translated Vase, 2007, Ceramic fragments, epoxy, and gold leaf. The Smart Museum of Art, University of Chicago, Purchase, Gift of Gay-Young Cho and Christopher Chiu in honor of Richard A. Born, 2010.4 © 2013 Yeesookyung