Soomi Kim

"Soomi Kim is a nationally recognized performing artist who is most famous for spearheading a trilogy of plays, inspired by the lifeworks of Bruce Lee, artist Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, and performance artist & political activist Kathy Change. These cultural icons are connected not only by their performance practice, and not only by their deaths at young ages; in performance Lee, Cha, and Change are also connected through Soomi Kim’s body, conjuring their legacy for us as present matter. Kim's performance work asserts Asian American representation and politics as fundamental to the understanding and practices of U.S. citizenship and belonging including concerns of labor, immigration, and empire. Through these iconic figures' stories, Kim weaves her own autobiographical narrative into a genealogy of resistance through aesthetic practice. Her work inspires questions about history and repertoire, using the body and its movement as forms of writing history, made all the more urgent for the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, imperialism, and nation entangled and reformulated through her work."--Professor Vivian Huang, Harvard