Flesh Witness: Militarism, Memory, and the Pacific Archive

Reckoning With Militarised Landscapes Across the Pacific

REDCAT in Los Angeles presents Flesh Witness, running from 12 September to 13 December 2026. The group show interrogates how armed conflict and imperial control have physically marked territories, populations, and historical records throughout the Asia-Pacific region. Attention centres on the Korean Peninsula, Okinawa, the Philippines, Hawai'i, and Samoa. Works range from pieces dating back to the 1970s to freshly commissioned commissions, utilising moving image, sculptural forms, photographic prints, hybrid materials, and spatial arrangements. The selection deliberately avoids chronological linearity, instead organising itself around thematic resonances that connect disparate geographies through shared experiences of displacement and surveillance.

Archival Interventions and Embodied Histories

The roster features Bernice Akamine, Lani Asunció n, Pelenakeke Brown, Crystal Z Campbell, Jisoo Chung, Sean Connelly, Kyuri Jeon, Jane Jin Kaisen, Mao Ishikawa, Slow Futures Laboratory, and Stephanie Syjuco. The exhibition derives its name from Jeon's film The Flesh-Witness, which re-examines declassified United States footage documenting Korean War detainees branded with ideological ink. Rather than accepting institutional narratives at face value, the participating creators reconstruct these traces of authority found within periodicals, botanical specimens, cartographic boundaries, and official registries. Their practices expose how colonial administration and permanent base infrastructure reshaped local ecosystems and social fabrics. Several contributors employ forensic methodologies to map contamination zones or trace the migration routes of displaced families, while others utilise textile and ceramic techniques to memorialise silenced voices. By foregrounding intergenerational memory, the presentation challenges dominant historiography and elevates Indigenous epistemologies that operate outside state-sanctioned repositories.

Symposium and Civic Engagement

Situated in a metropolitan area shaped by transpacific movement and defence networks, the project imagines collaborative trajectories for Oceanic communities and migrant populations navigating post-conflict realities. A companion academic gathering titled As Ocean People: Symposium, Screenings, and Performance unfolds over two days on 24 and 25 October. This programme combines scholarly debates, film projections, auditory compositions, and live acts. Participants include researchers and practitioners whose backgrounds span Asian and Pacific Islander diasporas, focusing their investigations upon the enduring impacts of American warfare, native resilience strategies, and habitat preservation efforts. The symposium functions as an extension of the gallery floor, transforming passive viewing into active dialogue.

Curation falls to guest specialists GYOPO and Amy Kahng, assisted by Katy Dammers, who serves as Deputy Director and Chief Curator, alongside Getty Marrow intern Kyla Kim. REDCAT operates within the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex, established by the California Institute of the Arts to foster cross-disciplinary innovation and public debate. The institution remains committed to challenging conventional formats while nurturing critical civic conversation. In an era where cultural institutions increasingly grapple with their own complicity in geopolitical structures, this presentation offers a necessary recalibration of how museums and independent spaces can engage with difficult legacies.