"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 was the 2020-21 Artist in Residence at the Smart Museum. She creates 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 performances inspired by Bingyi Huang's Cascade (2011), 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), Lust, Love, and Loss in Renaissance Europe (2021), Yeesookyung's Translated Vase (2022), and Antony Gormley's Infinite Cube(2025). She has also created performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Krannert Art Museum, Heritage Museum of Asian Art, 21c, EXPO Chicago, and more. She is currently in residence at Hyde Park Art Center.

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. Read his essay on Translated Vase in the Chicago Maroon here. 

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