What Follows | Curated by Bo Young An
ID: Promotion graphic for What Follows exhibit. Text laid over image of artwork by DongKyu Kim. Text reads, “What Follows; curated by Bo Young An; Opening reception 24 April 6-8pm; Fresh Eye Gallery; 4.23-5.31; 4238 Nicollet Ave. S.” Artists are listed in the center of the graphic.
Featured Artists
Mubarak Al-Thani • Nancy Ariza • Martha Bird • Prima Jalichandra-Sakuntabhai • DongKyu Kim • Nicholas Lents • Elias Mendel • Alonzo Pantoja • Thea Lauren Piñeda • Mai Tran • Jammo Xu • Shun Yong
Guest curator:
Bo Young An
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Bo Young An is a Korean-born, Thailand-raised, third-culture curator and artist whose ritualistic practices move through layered inheritances shaped by migration and adaptation. Grounded in an interdisciplinary approach, she explores how memory, cultural continuation, and daily gestures of making become sites of stability within transience.
Her works considers the tension between nostalgia and progress, how tradition and culture is carried forward, adjusted, and made present through the body. Personal and collective memory anchors her work as her materials hold evidence of honoring tradition and carrying it forward. She examines how these themes play out on a personal scale, often drawing from her experience as a third-culture individual to reflect on how cultural hybridity shapes belonging and transformation as she leans into art’s capacity to hold space for contradictions and complexity.
She received her B.A. in Interdisciplinary Visual Arts from the University of Washington, Seattle, and her MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2022. Her work has been exhibited internationally in spaces in Korea, France, Spain, and the United States.
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Culture is not inherited intact. It arrives through observation and repetition, lived practices, fragments, and gestures learned without full explanation. Its values are embedded in process rather than instruction. For artists shaped by migration and cultural translation, inheritance is inseparable from change.
What Follows brings together artists who approach cultural preservation as continuation: the practice of creating as something lived forward. The works in this exhibition consider how culture moves across generations, how it is reshaped by migration while adapting to new contexts and ways of living. Inheriting culture, here, is about learning what should be held onto, what can shift, and what is reimagined.
Through cultural translation and speculative storytelling, these artists revisit interrupted histories not as fixed inheritances, but as living material, reshaped in the present and carried into the future through making.
Speculation becomes necessary where archives are incomplete or inaccessible, particularly within immigrant and diasporic contexts where displacement interrupts continuity. Through this process, memory is understood not only as inheritance, but as something continually negotiated while moving between languages and cultures.
The exhibition positions art as an alternative form of historiography, one that resists dominant and linear cultural narratives and reimagines how history can be structured and told. In doing so, it asks how remembering shifts when home is plural and when identity is shaped across borders. Storytelling becomes self-definition, a means of integration and survival.
Art emerges as a site of cultural transmission: a transformation enacted through making. What Follows considers how artists become vessels of cultural continuation, one shaped as much by adaptation as by inheritance.
Exhibition Dates: April 23 - May 31
Opening Reception: April 24, 6-8pm | Masks required hour: 5-6pm
If you have access needs or any questions please contact us at fresheyegallerympls@gmail.com
This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.