Faith Johnson has an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts through Tufts University, Boston Massachusetts where she received the Rose Hill Performance Award. Johnson has shown in galleries and festivals throughout the United States and abroad. She has performed internationally at the Open Festival in China, Navinki Festival in Belarus, Tactile Bosch Gallery in Wales England, and is a member of the International Performance Association of Hildesheim, Germany. Johnson has worked as an artist in residence at the Newton School of Theology where she researched spiritual forms and gestures. Currently Johnson manages an art studio for adults with psychiatric disabilities and has recently taught performance art at the School of the Museum of Fine Art.

Johnson is interested in working with the invisible and internal as visualized and experienced through metaphor. She explores these intangible spaces by creating surreal and haunting human poetics through the re-contextualization of everyday objects, actions/interactions and places.

Many of my friends are in prison, far away and inaccessible. There are over 2000 political prisoners in Burma. Some have been sentenced to 56 years of imprisonment, some 65, some 102. All are committed to their fight for freedom and justice in Burma, and for our people. I am lucky because I am not in prison like them. But I always think of them: how they spend their time in the prison, and how they have sacrificed. I cannot help them to be free. So I am doing this performance as a tribute to them and what they have done for us. In this performance, I explore the “poun-zan”: a form of torture common in Burmese prisons, in which prisoners must hold a physically excruciating and psychologically humiliating position for a long period of time. 
My performance is their real performance in those prisons. I hope you can feel it.

Sometimes (most times), I act on irrational impulses. Several nights ago as I was driving home from my studio in Culver City to my apartment in Koreatown, I realized that I had never counted out loud to 1,000. As soon as the thought occurred, I began counting: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 . . . 246, 247, 248, 249 . . . I had parked my car somewhere between 487 and 518. It was then that I decided I would either continue counting until I reached 1,000 or until I lost count. I ended up losing count around 860-something. I got out of my car, locked the doors, and crossed the street into my apartment building. The action had come and gone with no one around to witness or document. The very act of counting is measuring time as it passes, examining moment by moment, the fleeting nature of all things earthly. Did I just make a new performance or am I simply losing my mind? 

Rafael Sanchez (b.Newark, New Jersey, 1978) is a performance artist who often takes his work to the streets and other unconventional spaces. In his performances, Sanchez frequently subjects his body to extreme stress and pain to materialize ideas of memory, spirituality and endurance. In an early work titled Back to Africa (2000), Sanchez wandered around New Jersey in white face, carrying a suitcase and waiting for a bus that never arrived. In a more recent work, Calienté/Frio (2007) the artist traced the migration process of two women from Cuba to America during the 1960s. The artist, dressed in a light colored suit and hat and carrying a packed suitcase, submerged himself in a tub of water that alternated between near boiling and below freezing as interviews with the two Cuban women played in the background.

From his early practice, starting as a street photographer tracking Shanghai prostitutes to the development of a pseudo-transvestite web celebrity, Miao Jiaxin has evolved an edgy and protean practice. Beginning in Shanghai, Miao then immigrated to New York, expanding his view of urban streets towards a more conceptual public stage, where his works travel across different media. He often documents his performances and installations, then converting the documentation into photographs and videos that stand on their own as works. Initiated from universal themes of existentialism, Miao's works tend to be politically participating in contemporary events, yet still expressing the universal theme of urban angst. Among his performative practices, he has blended his naked body into the bleak streets of a midnight New York City, traveled inside a suitcase hauled by his mother through urban crowds, did live-feed erotic performances on an interactive pornographic broadcasting website, and dressed as a Chinese businessman for a year when working towards his MFA at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Miao's works often express the ambivalent and sometimes antagonistic tension that always exists between the individual and governing or cultural authorities, questioning assumptions about power in relation to individual identity, race, gender, sexuality and social class. He posits the artist's nature as one who transgresses boundaries, challenges consensus, and stays distance from authorities.


Heeran Lee creates performative sculpture, solo body-based installations, time-based durational performances, and sculptural endurance events. In her body-centered work, she explores the private and public manifestations of the female Asian body where isolated actions transform into symbol, metaphor, metonym and formal structures within the larger context of socio-cultural power relations, particularly as they pertain to imbalance, inequality, and injustice in Korean and American society. As a woman growing up in the patriarchal power structure of South Korea, her personal experiences have incited an active engagement with feminist discourse; moreover, as an alien, living an extended period away from home, her awareness as “the other” has provoked further research into the subject of cultural marginalization.