From Jamie Ho as part of The Faraway Nearby 2024,
“Mom pouring a tea offering during the eve of Chinese New Year, Fort Myers, 2015.”
The Faraway Nearby (TFN) is a curatorial project that explores the dimensions of dialogue as a navigation tool – mapping the ways we converge, pass on, care and sympathize as Asian women and trans, non-binary artists living in New York City sharing the same present-time at different points in life.
To bring The Faraway Nearby to life, we commissioned four artists and asked each to invite a conversation partner for a five-month dialogue. These exchanges are asked to be carefully recorded, reflecting the depth and breadth of these interactions.
Artists discuss the demands of life and studio practice, tracing parallel histories and ways to center care in listening and responding.
For this third cycle, the project will take on the shape of zines and mail-art as well as holding an online presence. Abstractly focusing on the meanings of “building a collaborative future” at the thick of our current realities, partners will collaborate over the months to put language and shape to the uncanny inquiry. While embracing the looseness of the prompt, TFN asks to consider deliberate actions of care as we think about building a sustainable future together – such as listening, voicing, drawing, recording, teaching, and learning from each other.
The Faraway Nearby 2025:
Soeun Bae : Kai Oh
June Kitahara : Kana Motojima
Khanh Le Le : Aliza Katzman
Anjuli Rathod : Meena Hasan
Founded in March 2022 by Jiyeon Paik, the project was conceived in response to a period of heightened fear and tension, particularly affecting Asian women. In past cycles of TFN, artist dialogues and responses from our community collected into a culminating exhibition. Check out our past exhibitions here!
Currently, The Faraway Neraby is organized by Jean Chung, an independent curator, artist and writer.
About the Program
In Dialogue is the heart of TFN. In 2025, we will initiate a dialogue with a loose theme weaving Asian futurisms, collaborating on a collective imagination of a sustainable, alternative future that can house us all. Guided by conditions of care, over a 5-months long period, TFN will conspire to put language and shape to the uncanny inquiry.
In Response to our artists dialogues, we invite our community members to share their reflections on monthly conversations. These contributions extend the discourse and continue providing a mode of dialogue, a platform to speak, relate and build relationships.
The Faraway Nearby Zine is an effort to connect and engage with our community in-person, outside the confines of social media and digital space. Each month TFN will put out a low-cost stapled zine housing a month’s conversation between the artists along with responses and submissions from the community. Following the lineage of zine culture and DIY-ethos, the zines will be available to pick-up for free throughout NYC or mailed directly to subscribers each month for a fee. The subscription fee will be a one time, pay-what-you-can donation to our NYFA Project Sponsorship fund. Please fill out the subscription form using the button below!
TFN Open-Studio is a small community meeting for TFN artists, friends and family to come together and volunteer a few hours in zine-production. Taking place in a collaborative studio space in East Harlem every month, this gathering provides space and time for members of the community to come together. The objective is to facilitate exchange, mutual support, friendship and network while co-working and collaborating together.
The Faraway Nearby Anthology will be a printed and published anthology housing 5-months of dialogue from 4 artist pairs along with additional materials collected throughout the dialogue period.
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Past The Faraway Nearby Artists
Yasi Alipour : Kyoung eun Kang
Chang Sujung : Seung-Min Lee
Bonam Kim : Lu Zhang
Kyounglim Lee : Jahyun Seo
Lipika Bhargava : Naho Taruishi
Jamie Ho : Junli Song
sooim lee : Xinyi Liu
Kazumi Tanaka : Jayoung Yoon
Team
Jean Chung, Curator/Organizer
jean@thefarawaynearby.us
Jiyeon Paik, Founder
jpaik@thefarawaynearby.us
Donate
The Faraway Nearby is opperated 100% through donations, grants and volunteer work. TFN’s success is made possible by the generous support of our community.
We are fiscally sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). This makes online giving easy and tax deductible.
NYFA Fiscal Sponsorship is a program that enables emerging art organizations and project to access funding through charitable donations and grants using NYFA’s 501c3 status. NYFA was established in 1971. It serves individual artists and the arts community throughout the United States and internationally.