Flesh Witness

Redcat Los Angeles · Downtown LA

Exhibition on view: Sep 12, 2026 - Dec 13, 2026

"Flesh Witness" at REDCAT brings together artists examining histories and legacies of militarism across Hawai‘i, Korea, Okinawa, the Philippines, and Samoa. Through video, sculpture, photography, and installation, it explores how military power is inscribed on bodies, landscapes, and archives, foregrounding Indigenous knowledge, memory, and resistance.

Bernice Akamine

Bernice Akamine (1949–2024) was a Native Hawaiian artist and Hawaiian rights activist born in Honolulu, of kānaka maoli and Japanese American heritage. Her visual art took many forms, including glass and featherwork, and she taught traditional Hawaiian techniques such as making kapa cloth and natural dyeing with Hawaiian plants. An advocate for Indigenous land rights, Akamine used her work to draw attention to the colonial invasion of Hawaiʻi and its continuing effects on the Native Hawaiian population.

Lani Asunción

Lani Asunción is a queer Filipinx multimedia and performance artist based in Boston, with a studio at Midway Artist Studios in the Fort Point Arts neighborhood. Informed by multimedia technologies and archival research, their socially conscious practice is rooted in public art and performance and centers environmental justice and community engagement through participatory performances, large-scale sculptural installations, and experimental video and sound in the form of transmedia ritual and storytelling. Their work explores identity and belonging and counter-narratives of communal resistance to settler colonial systems. Asunción was curator and public art manager of the 2024–2025 Un-monument initiative for Pao Arts Center in partnership with the City of Boston, and is a 2026 Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Their work appears in "Flesh Witness" at REDCAT in Los Angeles.

Lani Asunción. Photo by Erin Clark/Boston Globe Staff

Artworks in this exhibition

Jane Jin Kaisen - Burial of this Order. Courtesy Redcat

Pelenakeke Brown is a multidisciplinary New Zealand artist. At age nine she became a founding member and company dancer of Touch Compass, performing with the company from 1997 to 2000. She later studied at the University of Auckland, completing a BA in Pacific studies and English literature, and took part in the Be.Leadership program with the accessibility organization Be. Lab. In 2019 she received the Disability Dance Artistry Award from Dance/NYC, and in 2020 she was recognized with the Pacific Toa award at Creative New Zealand's Arts Pasifika Awards.

Crystal Z Campbell

Crystal Z Campbell (b. 1980, Prince George's County, Maryland) is an American filmmaker and artist raised in Oklahoma. They received a BFA in studio art from the University of Oklahoma, an MA in Africana Studies from the University at Albany, SUNY, and an MFA from the University of California. Their work engages themes of the "underloved" and "public secrets." A 2021 Guggenheim Fellow, Campbell won the Silver Hugo for Documentary Short Film at the 58th Chicago International Film Festival in 2022 for "Revolver."

Crystal Z Campbell. Photo by Brandon Watson, courtesy of the photographer

Sean Connelly

Sean Connelly is an artist and spatial practitioner from Hawaiʻi working across contemporary art, spatial practice and civic engagement. His practice integrates sculpture, moving image, cartography and site-based intervention to examine relationships between land, water, architecture and power. Grounded in archipelagic and oceanic ways of knowing, it treats place as an interconnected familial, ecological, cultural and political system rather than a fixed site, and his sculptural and moving-image works test how materials, maps and architectures can register historical erasure, environmental transformation and alternative futures. Extending his inquiry beyond the exhibition, he develops long-term projects through his civic practice After Oceanic and the grassroots nonprofit Hawaiʻi Nonlinear. His work appears in "Flesh Witness" at REDCAT in Los Angeles.

Sean Connelly. Photo by Ricardo Pinnock

Kyuri Jeon

Kyuri Jeon is a South Korean artist and filmmaker based in New York who works with video, essay, drawing and installation to explore time, vision and their implications for the future. Through the lens of intersectionality, she questions transnational discussions of identity, feminism, decolonization and cultural translation. Her work has been featured at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art in Berlin, MassArt Art Museum in Boston, Mimosa House in London, Konsthall C in Stockholm, the Artists' Moving Image Festival in Glasgow and the DMZ International Documentary Film Festival. She received a Contemporary Visual Art Award from the AHL-T&W Foundation and was a 2025 MacDowell Fellow. REDCAT's exhibition "Flesh Witness" takes its title from her video "The Flesh-Witness" (2021), which revisits American archival documentation of Korean War prisoners forcibly tattooed with anti-communist slogans.

Kyuri Jeon. Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey, courtesy of MacDowell

Jane Jin Kaisen

Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980) is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen. Born on Jeju Island, South Korea, and adopted to Denmark the same year, she centers much of her work on her birthplace, the site of a yearlong anticolonial uprising in 1948. Her practice spans video installation, experimental film, photography, performance and text, informed by interdisciplinary research and collaboration with diverse communities. She holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen and an MA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where she was a professor at the School of Media Arts from 2020 to 2026.

Jane Jin Kaisen. Photo by Shim Hyun-chul, The Korea Times

Mao Ishikawa

Mao Ishikawa (b. 1953, Ōgimi) is an Okinawan photographer and activist whose photographs largely feature bar girls, performers, soldiers and others on the margins of Okinawan and Japanese society. Her early work grew from immersion in her subjects' environments, living with them or working alongside them. Beginning in the 1990s, her images of soldiers and military bases addressed more directly the U.S. military presence in Okinawa and distrust of the Japanese government. Her ongoing series "Great Ryukyu Photo Scroll" (2014–) approaches these themes through satire and pop culture references.

Mao Ishikawa. Photo: JapanHistorian. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Mao_Ishikawa,_Okinawan_photographer.jpg), CC BY-SA 4.0.

Stephanie Syjuco

Stephanie Syjuco (b. 1974, Manila) is a Filipino-born American conceptual artist and educator who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1977. She received a BFA in sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned an MFA from Stanford University in 2005. Working in photography, sculpture and installation, she moves from handmade and craft-inspired media to digital editing and archival excavation to investigate economies and empire. She lives in Oakland and teaches at the University of California, Berkeley.

Stephanie Syjuco. Photo: Berkeley Center for New Media. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Stephanie_Syjuco_3.jpg), CC BY-SA 2.0.