Exhibitions & Events

Curating LOVE

About The Event

UPDATE: This event will be on Zoom rather than in person and Jorge Ariel Escobar is participating. The Zoom webinar link is below.

Join Jorge Ariel Escobar and Kalen Wing Ki Lee for an artist and curator conversation on artwork and exhibitions about love and community. This online conversation is moderated by Asha Iman Veal, MoCP’s Associate Curator.  

Jorge Ariel Escobar is a queer Latinx image-maker who holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an Ed-GRS Graduate Fellow. He is one of the featured artists in LOVE: Still Not the Lesser.

Kalen Wing Ki Lee recently curated LOVE+: Awakening for Gay Games HK 2023. Lee is Associate Dean at the School of Creative Arts at Hong Kong Baptist University, and Associate Professor in Photography in the Academy of Visual Arts.

Asha Iman Veal curated LOVE: Still Not the Lesser, on view at MoCP through December 22, 2023.

Register in advance using this Zoom Webinar link: https://colum.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_cLOT4kHpQ7-wjt3ye8S5dA

Longer guest bios:

Jorge Ariel Escobar is a queer Latinx image-maker who holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he was an Ed-GRS Graduate Fellow. His work focuses on themes of intimacy, desires, and relationships between queer/gay men using his own experiences as the basis of his research. Primarily working with photography, his work crosses between digital, analog, and alternative processes to visualize these concepts. He has attended workshops at Penland School of Craft, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and has been an artist in residence at AZULE. As a solo artist, he has exhibited with VALET Gallery and the Jane Sandelin Gallery both in Richmond, VA. Other credits include group exhibitions at RI Center for Photographic Arts (Providence, RI), the Trout Museum of Art (Appleton, WI), the Photographic Arts Center (Denver, CO), Perspective Gallery (Evanston, IL) and the Center for Fine Art Photography (Fort Collins, CO), where his work received an Honorable Mention as part of their Center Forward 2022 exhibition. 

LEE Wing Ki is an artist-researcher born and based in Hong Kong. He read history of art at the University of Hong Kong and received postgraduate training in documentary photography and photojournalism at London College of Communication, University of the Arts London, supported by a British Chevening Scholarship. In 2020 and 2021, he is awarded Lee Hysan Foundation-Asian Cultural Council Fellowships and conducts research in arts and technology in the US.

Lee’s works have been exhibited in Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, Latvia, US, the UK and many others. His documentary photography project, titled Tsang’s Odyssey, is a finalist of the WMA Master Award (Mobility) in 2016-17. Whereas Faded, a conceptual image installation, is selected in KG+ SELECT, Kyotographie in 2019; and Katharsis, a photo-installation, is showcased at the satellite exhibition, Hong Kong International Photo Festival 2021.

Lee is an occasional curator and a writer. His curatorial projects include LOVE+: Awakening (for Gay Games HK 2023), Exile to the Red Planet by Caleb Fung, Unfolding Hong Kong: Photobooks Collection from Lumenvisum, Landing on the East by Yuen Nga Chi and Tang Kwong San and many others. His scholarly writings appear in Trans Asia Photography and edited volume published by Amsterdam University Press, Brill and Routledge; also in Chinese Photography and Voices of Photography in Chinese.

Lee is currently the Acting Director-Associate Professor in Photography at the Academy of Visual Arts and an Associate Dean (Research) at the School of Creative Arts, Hong Kong Baptist University.