We are pleased to announce that Eva Lu (Art History and Visual Culture) is the 2020 recipient of the Young-Rahn Woo Memorial Graduate Award. Eva is a second-year doctoral student who holds a BA in Visual Arts and Philosophy from the University of Western Ontario, and an MA in Modern Art from Columbia University. Eva is researching new media art by contemporary East Asian diasporic artists and how their use of emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality are an opportunity for media explorations that serve to evoke transcultural narratives. Her dissertation, The Asian Technobody: Diasporic Figurations of Hybrid Identity and Culture Through New Media, will use a feminist and postcolonial conceptualization to unpack new media art creation, display and experience.

The Young-Rahn Woo Award will support Eva’s fieldwork in Taiwan and Korea, where she plans to conduct archival research at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum Archives and attend both the Taipei Biennial and the Gwangju Biennale to study curatorial practices in Asia.

This award is open to graduate students conducting research in Korean language or culture studies or whose research may require them to travel to Korea. Preference will be given to students in visual arts. In the event that there are no such candidates available, consideration will be extended to graduate students studying a topic in the humanities or fine arts (especially visual arts) elsewhere in Asia.

YCAR offers 11 graduate student awards/funding opportunities. Full details can be found here or email us at ycar@yorku.ca. The next deadline for all opportunities is February 2021.