These paintings, usually priced at hundreds of thousands of dollars, capture creatures — both imagined and real — in excited strokes of color.  For Nava, the creatures that his work conjures are a product of the intentional and the nonsensical — a tension that he said is reflected in today’s world. 

“I’ve never seen a shark made out of wind before, but it could be,” said Nava. “I think imagination has the chance, and artists in general have the chance, to go to pretend places. They work in the realm of impossibility, where newness and absurdities can come out … We live in a misinformation age, as much as we live in an information age. Sometimes, I think like, yeah, if I see a shark and a frying pan and somehow it works, my mind is like, ‘Yeah, I kinda get that in this world.’ Like the bending of reality.” 

Nava’s stint as a steel-bender at a Queens metal shop was short-lived, lasting eight to nine months. Nava spent the next six years as a truck driver for a moving company, where he would work straight through the first and last ten days of the month, while dedicating one week in the center of the month to painting.

Initially, Nava was worried that his work as a truck driver would hinder his art career and lead to others viewing him as “not a serious artist.” He would dislike working in Chelsea because he was afraid of art collectors seeing him moving boxes, he said. 

Then, he stopped caring, said Nava.

“I think that’s when things got better,” said Nava. “The paintings got better. My mood and the job was a lot better. I had better leadership with the moving crew and running the crews. I was dubbed with a nickname, ‘The Wolf,’ like from Pulp Fiction … I think it’s funny that there were times when I really cared and was careful and cautious about that whole word ‘career’ and wanting things to happen. And the time that I actually didn’t give a fuck about that no more, everything lightened up.” 

According to Nava, this change in approach to his art and career showed in his work. 

While it’s difficult for him to compare the “betterness” of his works, Nava said that his 2012 creatures would “absolutely get eaten alive” by his 2017 creatures.

“If those paintings fought each other, those paintings will smoke the early paintings,” he said. “I can see the nervousness in them. I could see the, ‘You trying to do something,’ and then these other ones are just — they have a different level of confidence and different mysticism going on.” 

While these mythological creatures in Nava’s works have received wide attention, it has also attracted critiques of Nava’s art as “unserious” or “immature,” according to former School of Art Dean Peter Halley ’75.

Halley said that such negative feedback may come from the way Nava’s art attracted likes on Instagram before turning heads in the art establishment, rather than the other way around. For Halley, however, Nava’s explosive success can be seen as an example of the “democratic possibilities” of trends and taste-making on social media. 

“I think the delay between his high level of professional success and … his popularity has had something to do with how he paints,” he said. “You might almost say that people might have been distrustful, because these paintings had such a wide appeal, and that if they did so well on Instagram, could he really be a good artist? And again, when the dam finally burst, I found that delightful.” 

Behind the bold and urgent strokes of Nava’s work, one can find a certain intentionality and a history of formal instruction, said Halley. In describing his own art, Nava recalled an art professor who jokingly told him that Nava was a “backdoor formalist,” a secret lover of formal techniques, as much as he is a lover of rule-breaking.

While some might find Nava’s work “crude,” Nava’s form is what Halley considers a strength. In particular, he compared Nava’s misfit lexicon of sharks, dragons and planes to that of Jean-Michel Basquiat. 

“It’s action painting in that way, reflecting the movement of the body, his use of his tools, the way he’ll sort of let go and let it happen,” said Halley. “I find that a really strong part of his work … A person could also say that Basquiat paintings or drawings were crude, in some sense of the word,  so I think people will be better off thinking twice. And he’s created this self imposed world, that is a little like Basquiat.”

In terms of his critics, Nava remains rather level-headed. Some people like his work, and others don’t. And that’s “okay,” he said.

Differentiating between “good” and “bad” works of art is a tricky task, Nava said. Yet, if there’s one thing that Nava hopes to accomplish in his works, it is to convey a sense of sincerity and offer a “portal” to his viewers.

“It’s hard for paintings to lie and you can see those sincerities, from [the art’s] confidence to nervousness,” said Nava. “To me, making a painting or a piece, that’s the mirror, that’s the portal. So whatever my intentions or my feelings are, whoever comes to that piece down the road in years will have their own collective backpack of experience that they bring to the table and close out the other side of the portal with their viewership.”

Along with sincerity, Nava hopes that his work emanates “badassness.” When asked about this “badassness,” he said that it came from pieces that are “energetically charged”.

He referred to Vincent Van Gogh’s “Wheat Field with Cypresses” as a work imbued with “badass” energy. According to Nava, there is a hardened, yet delicate intensity within the landscape. 

“There’s just certain art that I personally love,” Nava said. “Even though it’s like flowers or something. Like those flowers will beat your ass, you know? They’re badass.”

While there is a heavy spotlight on ‘Robert Nava the artist,’ ‘Robert Nava the person’ remains largely enigmatic and hard to understand — a feature of his that has not changed from his time at the School of Art, said Halley and Sam Messer ART ’82, both professors who taught Nava.

Messer recalled Nava’s time as a graduate student, when he would submit works that did not seem to relate to his assignments; figuring out the connection was “invariably hard,” Messer said. 

“He was always kind of just doing his own thing,” said Messer. “He was always an enigmatic figure, I mean, in a really nice way … And I think a lot of the faculty and other students really didn’t know what to make of him. And you can probably say the same still about him, which is quite a good characteristic for an artist.” 

To eager-eyed spectators of the art market, Robert Nava is a rising blue-chip contemporary artist with  immense capital potential. To his professors, Robert Nava is remembered as an enigmatic, action painter who has created a radical mythology through sharks, airplanes and dragons. 

On paper, much has changed for Nava over the past decade. At his core, however, Nava has retained and remembered earlier parts of his career: his nickname of ‘The Wolf’, his favorite ’80s movies that continue to influence his work and his secret love for the compositional techniques that he learned as a graduate student. 

“It’s a different kind of speed now, than how it was in the trucks,” said Nava. “My dad would remind me like, ‘Remember, when you got tipped an extra like $200 in cash, and how happy you were about that because it would give you the time on the weekend to work more in the studio?’ And so I just keep telling myself, just keep things humble and hungry at the same time. Not forgetting where you come from, but also, you gotta be a dragon.” 

Nava was born in 1985

The post Robert Nava ’11 and his radical, ‘badass’ mythological creatures appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Written by Caryl Churchill and directed by Liz Diamond, “Escaped Alone” will premiere on March 8 and run until March 30 at the Yale Repertory Theater. According to Diamond, the play explores the complexities of female friendships, alongside the mundane truths that lurk in everyday conversations. 

“I think that what’s so brilliant about this play is the way Churchill asks us or invites us to appreciate the way we function in simultaneous parallel universes of conversation with contemplation, subconscious yearnings, suppressed grief, fears that percolate up in us and apocalyptic visions,” Diamond said.

The play unravels in a backyard in suburban London, in which a trio of friends — Sally, Vi and Lena — is joined by Mrs. Jarrett, a less-acquainted individual, who appears at the door of the fence. As these four characters chat, the conversation is interrupted by Mrs. Jarrett’s startling monologues that deliver apocalyptic visions of the future. 

Mrs. Jarrett’s rants are more than panic-inducing soliloquy; Embedded within these words is a concerning, yet deeply necessary truth, said Diamond. 

“She’s a kind of Cassandra figure,” she said. “During the monologues that are spoken by Mrs. Jarrett, she punches through the membrane of the universe within which the women live a kind of domestic, contemporary, middle class working class, English existence into another dimension to report back to us what happened to the world … She’s not necessarily telling us what we want to hear. We might prefer to think, within her words, there is a kind of madness. We might want to console ourselves with that, but in fact, there’s a kind of terrible, terrible truth in her speeches.” 

LaTonya Borsay, who plays Mrs. Jarrett in the play, described her character as not just a soothsayer but as someone whose prophetic visions seek to inspire action. For Borsay, the play is largely “preventative” in nature and provides clues to evade future catastrophe — before it is too late.  

These clues lie in the power of community, according to Borsay. 

“Even though we’re individuals, we’re not living completely isolated lives,” Borsay said. “We are on the planet existing, breathing the same air, seeing the same sun and watching the moon rise … Getting people to act in whatever ways we can consciously act to keep everything sustainable for all life is her charge.” 

Rita Wolf, who plays the role of ‘Lena,’ characterized the play’s commentary on the future as somewhat characteristic of Churchill’s other works.

Wolf pointed to “A Number,” a 2002 play that centered around the ethical questions raised by human cloning, particularly the concept of  “nature versus nurture.” Her work “Far Away,” published in 2000, creates a world permeated by fear and authoritarianism. 

“Caryl Churchill is a writer who is very prescient,” said Wolf. “If you know anything about the history of her writing, she’s always kind of one step ahead in terms of her concerns about the wider world … particularly Western society.  Certainly in her recent work, she’s looking into the crystal ball a little bit in terms of anticipating the next possible iteration of humanity.” 

Diamond described Churchill’s writing as “a complicated geometry,” as the play’s dialogue is self-referential and self-interrupting. As a director of the play and resident director of the Yale Rep overall, Diamond said that she had long been attracted to plays with language that require the “unpacking” of the playwright’s “poetic strategies.”

She called the play’s writing “virtuosic,” similar to the ways a great contemporary jazz piece is interspersed with repetitions and revisions. 

“One of the delicious opportunities of directing this play is to, much the way, say, an orchestra conductor would be required to do, open up the score of the writing,”  Diamond said. “The conversations are sort of interleaved. In the way that when you sit around with a big family or a bunch of old friends, and you know, nobody is playing the role of conversational referee. The conversations interleave break off, are picked up again later on.” 

The Yale Rep’s production of “Escaped Alone” holds personal significance for Diamond, as the show marks her first show since the start of the pandemic. Diamond said that her return to the stage was a “marvelous” feeling. 

Diamond described the process of working with stage and lighting designers as one full of “play.” After all, theater is all about grown-ups “playing make-believe,” she said. According to Diamond, the collaboration between sound, lighting and set design teams played an important role in bringing her conceptualization of the lush, verdant backyard to life. 

“An image that came to me when I was thinking a lot about this was the image of terrariums,” Diamond said. “People create these strange little ideal worlds that exist within a much bigger and quite chaotic world, the world we live in … This garden, it’s a refuge, as people’s private outdoor spaces are, but it sits in a rather vast and unaccommodating space. The universe, which is hurtling us toward we don’t know what, perhaps the end or the apocalypse or the strange outcome that awaits us, is in no small measure, part of our own making.”  

In a story that prophesies about the future, the central voices are the voices of women who are “at least seventy,” the script specifies. While she does not know the exact reasoning behind Churchill’s decision, this detail of the characters seems to be an intentional one, said Diamond. 

Churchill herself is in her mid-eighties and continues to be an “absolute powerhouse,” she said. The older age of the characters is an attractive facet of the play, Diamond said, as it offers tremendous roles for women of a certain age and highlights the beauty and resilience within aging. 

“These women who have lived so long contain universes of feeling, lived experience, unresolved conflicts, buried angers. They are great continents of lived experience and I think that they thus give Carol an opportunity to talk about our human condition and our relationship to mortality, to the world in which we live in and its mortality, and the role we seem to be playing in destroying life on Earth.” 

“Escaped Alone” is Caryl Churchill’s 43rd play to be produced and was published 58 years after her first play — “Downstairs” — in 1958. 

The post Hard truths in a cup of tea: Yale Rep’s ‘Escaped Alone’ to open on March 8 appeared first on Yale Daily News.

At Yale, the show — which doubles as a campus production and senior thesis project — will run from Feb. 28 to March 2. Though this play largely lives in the social and historical context of the ’80s, a large undertaking of the cast has been to draw parallels between the play’s reality and today, said Claire Donnellan ’24, the show’s director.  

“This play has a lot to say about contemporary American society,” Donnellan said. “There’s a monologue that the character Martin Heller gives, where he talks about U.S. politics, and how he’s envisioning things becoming a lot more conservative over the coming years. A lot of those things have actually come to pass, which is really scary … I think this play still has a lot to say about what it means to live in America and what it means to live in this country that claims to be a place of equality and freedom for all people, but really has yet to achieve those goals.”  

There are clear differences between the America of the 1980s and the America of today, said Carson White ’25, who is the dramaturg of the show. When audiences were watching the 1991 premiere of the play, most, if not all, would have known someone whose life had been “irrevocably altered” by the AIDS/HIV epidemic, said White. 

The AIDS/HIV epidemic is no longer the “plight of the white gay man,” she said. 

However, the heart of the play is deeply political, in ways that may resonate with today’s political landscape. 

“This play is a gay fantasia on national themes,” said White. “The play is about a moment of profound crisis in American politics, and we are amidst many of our own profound political crises today. Whether that is drag bans, intersecting the sum of the themes of the play, or the U.S. aid of genocide in Palestine or the recent news from Florida of students having to get a permission slip signed to read a book by a Black author … [“Angels in America”] is a deeply, deeply political play. The heart of that remains very active today.”

Since its debut,  Kushner’s original “Angels in America” has garnered critical acclaim and cemented its legacy as one of the most iconic plays of the 21st century. The play was adapted into an HBO miniseries in 2003, and its revival opened at the West End and Broadway in 2018. 

Among some of the play’s unchanging elements seem to be an ability to deeply relate to and resonate with queer bodies. The play was one of the few instances of “fulfilling” queer media, said Jordi Bertrán Ramírez ’24, who knew from his sophomore year that he would want to produce this play for his thesis.

Similarly, Donnellan’s first encounter with the play can be traced back to her high school years, when she chose to read this play for an independent reading project and was immediately “blown away” by it. “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” has been a long time coming for both Donnellan and Bertrán Ramírez. For the duo, the production also serves as a thesis project in directing and acting, respectively. 

“I mean, this is one of the greatest plays ever written,” Donnellan said. “Especially as … a young, queer person in high school, I hadn’t come across a lot of media that actually dealt with what it meant to be queer in the U.S. and exploring that history in a serious and meaningful way. With the same sort of consequences and depth that straight relationships are normally treated with. That was something that was really powerful for me, and that was something that has fed my love for this play.” 

From weekly dramaturgy sessions to painstaking research on various aspects of production, the cast has worked to honor the historical and political intentions of the original, said White. 

The Yale rendition, however, also reflects the cast’s own relationship to the material, as well as their understanding of the play’s stakes and characters. 

For Victoria Pekel ’25, who plays The Angel, the show echoes images of illness she has seen in her own family. In his interpretation of Louis Ironson — a character that implicitly represents Tony Kushner’s own experiences, Dean Farella ’25 incorporated his own queerness and experiences in comedy, as a co-director of the sketch comedy group The Fifth Humour.

“In every iteration of the play or also in the HBO series, there’s kind of been like a false dichotomy, I think, set up between Louis and Prior, where Prior is this effeminate gay man and Louis kinda exists more on the masculine side of things. In the original Broadway version, the original actor, I think, definitely leaned into femininity in a way that more recent ones haven’t,” Farella said. “I’ve made this character my own in that although he is a deeply sad and insecure person, I think he also is extremely funny and finds the humor in such a dire situation that I then as a comedic actor try to incorporate into the role more.”

Experiencing homophobia as a queer person, Bertrán Ramírez said that he was used to changing — for reasons of safety, comfort or palatability. He had long viewed Prior as an “unabashed, untethered version” of a queer person — in ways that Bertrán Ramírez himself was not, said Bertrán Ramírez. 

Throughout the production process, Bertrán Ramírez said that his understanding of the character of Prior had shifted. It was not that the character of Prior was unaffected or had never experienced homophobia; Prior is a character who “amplifies himself in the face of adversity,” he said. 

“The difference between Prior and someone like me growing up was that Prior uses that and pushes against it,” Bertrán Ramírez said. “And his queerness, and the way that he presents it, is a form of rebellion against a community in a society that is telling him that the way he is is wrong … As someone who has experienced my fair share of homophobia and has been called slurs on the street for just being myself, it’s nice to embody someone that takes that in and throws it back by doubling down on their majesty.” 

While each cast member has a different relationship to the play, Pekel said that the cast felt a collective desire to handle the show with care, given the emotional weight of the story.  She also pointed to the additional “layer of dedication and care” given to the show, as it is a thesis project that required much dramaturgical and historical research.  

Adrien Rolet ’24 also described the show as  “extremely emotionally dense,” as an endeavor that required intense focus and attention to detail. Playing the role of Joseph, a closeted Mormon who struggles with his sexuality, Rolet had to learn to conserve his energy and take care of himself outside of emotionally intense scenes. 

“I have to draw on everything inside of me to travel the arc of a performance, so finding ways to maintain high energy and attention for each run is a personal learning experience that I am trying to tackle,” Rolet said. “I have also found the depths of Joe’s catastrophic breakdowns extremely challenging to recover from — it is mentally taxing to live through those experiences, which, if left unaddressed, can bleed into my life outside of the theater.” 

As cast members noted in their interviews, the production isn’t an easy feat to accomplish. The show is longer than the average production, with a runtime of three and a half hours. Additionally, while “Angels in America: Millennium Approaches” centers around eight central characters, the play intentionally calls on actors to play minor roles, with some actors playing up to four different characters. 

As the title denotes, the play also introduces characters who are supernatural beings, such as angels or ghosts. The production relies on sound and lighting design to bring these fantastical elements of the story to life, said Donnellan. Lighting designer Emiliano Caceres Manzano ’26 said that collaboration between the sound and lighting team was important to highlight the tensions between the ordinariness of human life and the “spectacle” of supernatural beings. 

Sound designer James Han ’24 found inspiration in language and sound pertaining to the early Industrial Revolution — at the time, the novelty of big steam machinery and other inventions welcomed more magical, surrealist interpretations from the community. Han’s design choices attempted to “blur” the boundaries between the industrial idea of progress and the world of the supernatural. 

“Progress feels like … breaking the natural boundaries,” said Han. “The hope is that when we think about modern America, there’s a huge sense of technological and economic progress. And we are kind of these infinitesimally small agents in it, kind of passengers who are unwillingly and unwittingly participating in a progress that might move beyond us. I really hope the sound design, in particular, makes you feel the sense of scale of the world, and also your somewhat small place in it, and kind of forces you to reckon with that.”

While these multiple costume changes and paranormal elements may make “Angels in America” a daunting endeavor, the large scale of this play was an attractive feat for Bertrán Ramírez. It offered him a chance to “go big or go home” on the stage, something that isn’t always encouraged or possible in the world of Yale theater.

When Bertrán Ramírez first read “Angels in America,” the play made him feel “seen” in a way that he hadn’t felt before. In describing the play, Bertrán Ramírez ironically noted that the play was about the characters’ inability to see each other in a time that was “horrifically difficult” to be seen. Even amid the large scale of the production, Bertrán Ramírez said that the play ultimately emphasizes the simple, human desire for attention. 

“Everybody in this play is fighting for attention, right? In one way or another, this play is about fighting to be seen,” Bertrán Ramírez said. “Our play feels alive and active because we’re not wallowing in self-pity. We’re constantly pushing and fighting for something.”

As both White and Farrella have questioned, perhaps America has not progressed as much as it thinks. Yet, the production seems to suggest that there are certain things to be gained when looking back at the past. 

Donnellan hopes that audiences will not only recognize the political parallels of the play and today’s world, but will also identify with moments of hope and resistance of this era. 

“There’s a really beautiful moment at the end of the play where Prior, one of the characters, is terrified about the impending arrival of this Angel. And he yells, ‘No fear, find the anger.’ And he leans on his identity as a gay man in America, and having been able to live and thrive as a gay man in America,” Donnellan said.  “And [he says] if I can do that, I can resist whatever impending insanity is about to crash through my ceiling. I think that is just a really beautiful moment of resistance, that I think is at the heart of this play. It’s not just about tragedy, but it’s about the way in which we continue to live and fight in the face of that tragedy.”

“Angels in America” is set to be performed at the Theater, Dance and Performance Studies Black Box.

Correction, March 2: In a previous version of this article, Jordi Bertrán Ramírez’s name was spelled incorrectly. The article has been updated with the correct spelling.

The post ‘Angels in America: Millennium Approaches’ delivers lessons of resilience and queer visibility from the past appeared first on Yale Daily News.

Kang is a New York City-based singer-songwriter whose discography is full of gentle R&B and dreamy jazz-pop melodies. Her most recognizable song, “Summer is for Falling in Love,” went viral on TikTok, where it has currently amassed over 79,000 uses, and has been featured in Nespresso and LG commercials. 

“When you’re 18, you have this wide-eyed innocence, and you’re naive about the world,” said Kang. “Then post-grad, real life hit, and I became a hopeless cynic. The past five years of my life, I’ve been re-learning what it means to be a hopeless romantic. The whole point of the album that I was writing, and that song in particular, is supposed to follow this journey of feeling jaded about life, but still holding on to hope. And holding on to the people and the moments that remind you that there’s still beauty and there’s still goodness in the world, despite everything else.”

Born in South Korea, Kang moved to the U.S. and grew up in L.A., Chicago and Dallas. She recalled having a sheltered childhood and viewing college as an opportunity to be independent, a chance for “newness,” she said. 

College, however, was far different than Kang’s expectations –– for a variety of reasons. Upon arrival, Kang said that she felt imposter syndrome, as she “definitely felt that everyone was smarter than (her).” Further, her college romance did not resemble the whirlwind, fiery love depicted in the books and movies. For one, when she met Andrew Kang ’13, the man whom she would eventually marry, sparks did not fly.

When Kang was introduced to him during her first Sunday worship at Yale, she said that “it wasn’t like a love at first sight thing” at all. They weren’t even each other’s ideal types. Much like her other realizations about college, Kang has learned that the romance of life is not always grand; more often than not, romance may come in smaller waves of mundane happenings. 

“I think I’m more and more convinced that, yeah, I’m glad I didn’t look for the kind of fiery, immediate attraction type of love?” said Kang. “Which is a perfectly legitimate way to fall in love, too. It just wasn’t for me and Andrew. Because I’m just learning over time, even if we had started out that way, it probably wouldn’t have stayed that way. And what really remains is like our friendship, and it sounds really … not sexy? But our relationship has been friendship and partnering in life.”  

Throughout their relationship, the two have come to resemble each other. In being with Kang, she said that she has learned to be more “outspoken,” while he has become more gentle and aware of his surroundings. Despite these differences, Kang said that they are both “sappy and sentimental” individuals, a dynamic that is playfully highlighted in Kang’s song, “cheezy,” from her first album. 

Their college romance is the backdrop of Kang’s song “about time,” which details a series of their firsts: first encounters, first dates and first kisses. Now entering its 13th year, this relationship, said Kang, has shaped the way she looks back at the past and faces the future. 

“We often have moments like it could just be sitting on a couch at home and we’re watching a movie, where we’ll stop and talk about, like, ‘Ah, this moment is passing. And one day, we’re going to look back on it,’” said Kang. “And Andrew has shaped my perspective of nostalgia and trying to remember moments by reminding me like, ‘Yeah, because this moment is so fleeting, we can be really grateful for it. So let’s just really be present and enjoy it, rather than feel sad about it already.” 

Kang’s music is a fitting soundtrack for student Anh Nguyen ’26 and the current season of love she finds herself in. Nguyen, who has recently entered a relationship, said that Kang’s music stirs up memories of love she has shared with her partner. 

There is a warmth and lightness to her music, Nguyen said, one that inspires listeners to stare out the window while sipping on their coffee. In particular, Nguyen named “Maybe the World is a Beautiful Place” as a song that reminded her of the beauties of the world that continue to exist.

“It’s peaceful, and it’s a much-needed reminder that there are good things in the world, and we should always seek them out,” said Nguyen. “I used to call myself a realist, albeit leaning pessimistic, but this song being my favorite of hers is an indicator of just how much more optimistic I’ve gotten as I’ve gotten older.”

In addition to her pursuit of change, Kang said she also sought to leave behind her Christian upbringing when she came to Yale. 

For many Korean Americans, the church is both a place of spiritual gathering and cultural community. 

Kang’s experiences of growing up in a Korean American church also meant seeing the complications of this intricate interlinking of faith and community. While Kang said she was cautious not to overgeneralize these communities, she said that these spaces frequently exhibited a pattern of “spiritual unhealth,” one that she saw up close as the daughter of a pastor. 

“People are seeking community because they’re immigrants,” said Kang. “But then, somehow, it brews a lot of gossip and politics. My dad was a pastor, and so I just saw some really ugly things up close, and I think that’s really what led to my spiritual trauma. I just couldn’t believe in a God who was good when all of these people who claim that they love God, I just saw them do awful things… ”  

Grappling with these experiences, Kang said she was ready to leave behind her Christian upbringing. Throughout her first year, she would continue to attend church on Sundays –– just in case her mom called and asked –– but she was determined to stay out of spiritual communities. 

Kang’s plan was rather short-lived, however, as she got “really involved” in Yale’s Christian scene, she said. She joined the United Church of Westville, a student-led, on-campus church and became the musical director of the Christian a cappella group, Living Water, during her four years at Yale. Her religious experiences with her peers helped her heal from her previous spiritual trauma, said Kang. 

“For me, there wasn’t a singular, big moment where I felt like my life was changed, but it was a lot of small things that added up,” said Kang. “I found a lot of healing and experiencing real community … At the very least, I felt like I was around people who were honest about their faith and the questions that they had.” 

As the church heavily influenced her upbringing, Kang’s relationship with her Korean American identity was also one that was riddled with contradictions and complications. While Kang grew up avidly consuming Korean music and television, she said that “to put it bluntly,” she “didn’t really like [the] Korean people” she encountered in her childhood.   

A lot of it, she said, had to do with the hierarchical, Confucian values reflected in her relationships with other Korean people, much of them occurring in the setting of the church. Reclaiming her Korean American identity and processing childhood traumas took time, she said.  

Writing and singing her lyrics in the Korean language, her first language, was a step towards this reclamation, according to Kang. The first words of love she received, Kang said, were Korean words. In telling the stories of her childhood and family, it “just made sense” to write the lyrics in Korean, said Kang.  

“There are certain things that you can say in Korean that just don’t come across in English and for me, personally, don’t evoke the same emotional response,” said Kang. “In ‘goodnight,’ the phrase 수고했어, like you can’t really say that in English. Like, what do you say, ‘you worked hard’? It just doesn’t mean the same thing. For me, it was really important to convey that exact feeling, even though it means a lot of people won’t understand it. But I know that for the people who do understand it, it would mean that much more.” 

Ten years have passed since Kang graduated from Yale. 

When Kang was a sophomore, she approached Shelly Kim ’15 during the summer before Kim’s first year on behalf of a student organization. Kim said she knew immediately that she wanted to befriend Kang. In the 13th year of their friendship, Kim said that Kang’s gentleness and warmth are an unchanged fixture of Kang’s character. 

In fact, not very much has changed. In her time knowing Kang, Kim has “loved” watching her explore new genres, collaborate with different artists and deepen a connection with her fans. Despite these changes, Kim said that there is “no difference between Sarah the friend and Sarah the musician.” Kang is continually truthful, sincere and tender, she said. 

“The way she sings about love, nostalgia, home, and hope is how she sounds when she holds space for her loved ones,” wrote Kim in an email to the News. “One of the greatest blessings in my life is that the same voice that has guided, encouraged, and comforted me all these years is the same voice I hear randomly when I’m at a coffee shop or when I’m driving. Even though we have been living on opposite coasts for the past six years, it feels like my best friend is always near.”

The memories of first kisses on York Street, dances in empty parking lots and the youthfulness that only exists at 18 may be well behind Kang. 

If Kang has learned one thing over the years, however, it’s that romance exists in the world beyond the years of her bright-eyed adolescence. This romance does not have to be grandiose for it to be real and beautiful, said Kang. 

“As a Yalie, there’s this narrative, you’re at one of the best schools in the world, which is a fact,” said Kang. “But two, because of that, you have to become this great person with big dreams, and you’re going to change the world. I wish more people had told me while I was at Yale like, yes, it was a privilege and a blessing to be at such an amazing school, getting the kind of education that you are, but this is not it. It will be better. I wish I wasn’t afraid of graduating and letting go of that part of my life. I treasure it as a really beautiful part of my life, but there’s just so much more to experience afterward.” 

Sarah Kang’s most recent single, “loml” with HOHYUN, was released on Feb. 8. 

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Since then, the theme of memory has been recurrent in her strikingly vibrant watercolors. The News sat down with Park to discuss her upbringing, recent works and goals as an artist. Before coming to the School of Art, Park had worked extensively as an editorial illustrator, creating watercolor illustrations for the New York Times and Vice News. Now, as a first-year master’s student, Park said she hopes to renegotiate the terms of memory, seeking to remember moments of personal trauma and excavate moments of the past –– even those that no longer exist. In particular, Park remembers Munhwa-dong, a village where she lived with her grandparents until age five. 

“This mind palace is where I’m from,” Park said. “Now, that village is gone. Like the whole village is gone. It’s getting redeveloped, where most of the land will become apartments. I don’t have a photo of it. My mom went there, and she also decided to not take a photo of it because it wasn’t what we remember. But it stays in my memory, in a mind palace.” 

“Mom don’t leave” 

Park recalled her childhood growing up in what she described as a poor, rural neighborhood in Cheonan, a city 50 miles south of Seoul. To seek better economic prospects, both of Park’s parents worked in Seoul –– traveling for an hour and a half from their home. While they worked and lived in the city during the weekdays, Park stayed at her grandparents’ house who looked after her.  

At times, Park was separated from her parents for at least seven, and sometimes up to 14 days. The memory of her parents saying goodbye and leaving for work at the end of every weekend has lingered as a form of trauma for Park, she said. 

“The scene that I’m telling you is like, I’m in the doorway and she’s leaving. She’s saying ‘Bye, I’ll be back.’” said Park. “My dad has already left, he leaves first and he’s a couple steps away from the door.” 

Recently showcased in the Yale School of Art’s first-year thesis exhibition, Park’s work “엄마 가지마 (Mom Don’t Go)” depicts this memory of her mother’s departure through a multi-faceted installation that involves a water-color painting, painted blue tapes, a pedestal and a door. 

A thin string is tied to the handle of the door and draws out to the surface a white rectangle — which, according to Park, is supposed to invoke the imagery of an outstretched arm. Whenever someone enters or leaves through the door, the string is pulled out of the hole on the rectangular pedestal and drags across the floor.

Caption: “엄마 가지마” (Mom Don’t Go).” Watercolor on paper, door, pedestal, painted blue tapes / Courtesy of Pat Garcia ART ’24. 

When Park turned five years old, her family, along with her newly-born brother, finally reunited and collectively moved to Seoul. 

“Teddy Bear Hospitals: Season 6, Episode 1” 

Park, as well as her family, is no stranger to goodbyes. Throughout her early childhood and adolescence, Park’s family moved more than 20 times. At the heart of these relocations was money: the family moved when they did not have enough money or when they suddenly had more.

Then, when Park was 15, she moved across the Pacific Ocean, with her mother and brother, to Los Angeles. There, she confronted the difficulties of adjusting to an American school system, while facing interruptions in her education due to visa-related issues. 

On the eve of her senior prom, after recently being accepted into Rhode Island School of Design, Park experienced a psychotic break, she said. She said the exact cause of the breakdown is still unknown. Perhaps it was the rift with her best friend, high levels of stress running in her family or the huge shifts caused by the move to America, she said. 

Regardless of the cause, the memories of this psychotic breakdown have prominently influenced and motivated Park’s work. In particular, the three weeks following the incident have served as the backdrop to her book, which was also displayed at the thesis exhibition, “Teddy Bear Hospitals, Season 6, Episode 1.”

“I found myself returning to the memories in mental illness, in what happened during that three weeks of intense breakdown,” Park said. “The book is about what happened on the first day. That’s when I, again, separated with my mom, because I’m in the hospital, and my mom is at home. And I’m here, but she can only visit me for like an hour, and she has to leave.” 

Caption: Book with the cover of “Teddy Bear Hospital”. Watercolor on paper, string, painted blue tapes / Courtesy of Pat Garcia ART ’24. 

Cute and spooky: Haejin’s colorful world

When there were no children’s books at her grandparents’ house or when high-schooler Park was still learning to adjust to the English language, she turned to color. However, Park’s relationship with hues and shades is a bit more complicated than that of other artists. 

Park said that her therapist had diagnosed her with synesthesia: a perceptual phenomenon that causes sensory crossovers, according to Cleveland Clinic. In some instances, people with synesthesia see shapes when smelling certain scents or perceive tastes when looking at words. In Park’s case, she can see colors at the thought of certain individuals and memories. 

As a person walked past during the interview, Park said that the person emanated a pale shade of blue. 

“For me, color is a mother,” said Park. “We all drink water and we produce color. I am a watercolor, on paper. I draw with my tears. I drink water, I paint with water, I make blood when I make period art. And I am told always that this is never enough because I’m not painting on oil on canvas.”  

It is not merely incidental that Park describes color in gendered terms. While Park’s work centers around memories and events that are specific to her personal history, she aims to tell a much larger story about, and for, Korean women. 

Park addressed the intergenerational struggles of Korean women. In particular, she pointed to the internalization of misogyny, the Korean War’s legacy of mental illness among women and the invisibility and silencing of Korean women throughout history. 

“I asked my mother, ‘Why didn’t you like me more than my brother?’ or ‘Why did my grandmother cry when I was born?’” Park said. “When I asked her why, she said that it’s because her mother also favored her brothers over her. There was a lot of mental illness because of the war. I also studied East Asian art history last semester [and] I learned about what it meant to be a Korean woman when there is no record. That made me think about motherhood, in the sense of mother country or mother language.” 

Even though Park’s art carries weighty ghosts, her work is marked by vibrant drips of pink and orange, images of smiling faces hidden in flowers and huge “anime-inspired” eyes that return the viewer’s curious gaze. These jubilant and almost youthful elements may seem jarring to the viewer, considering the darker source material that has inspired the piece. 

Yet, the simultaneity of cuteness and spookiness is one that Park associates with the experiences of being a Korean woman in America. 

“(The anime-inspired eyes) are not just cute,” Park said. “It’s cute but a little scary. There’s something behind the eyes. There are a lot of scary, spooky things that happened in real life to me, that didn’t happen to other people.”  

Caption: The back and front cover of“Teddy Bear Hospital”. Watercolor on paper, string, painted blue tapes / Courtesy of Pat Garcia ART ’24. 

For Taína Cruz ART ’25, the merit of Park’s work comes from this very complexity and mystery. According to Cruz, she has found excitement in uncovering the multiple layers of Park’s work, which she does not always fully understand or know how it was created. The complexity of Park’s work is especially apparent in her use of color, said Cruz. 

“It’s just really wonderful how Haejin is using color and the vibrancy to display womanhood, to display emotions, to display aboutness, our beings and what it means to be just like consciously alive in this world,” said Cruz. “Haejin has really found a wonderful language to communicate all these questions that we’re pondering ourselves, in a way that is fun. And as someone who is just constantly seeking out play, I have fun playing and exploring within Haejin’s work.” 

According to Ryan Brooks, Park’s partner, her current work centers her identity and emotions, in ways her past commissioned pieces did not. Incorporating her personal narrative in her art has been the key to “unlocking so much growth,” said Brooks. 

Park noted the intense emotional attachment she feels for her works. Following the performance of the door opening in “Mom don’t go,” she said she “could not stop crying.”

“Her work is about this relationship with color to paper,” said Brooks. “A lot of her work, I think, is using these mediums to talk about her experience, both externally as a Korean woman and internally in processing complex trauma. This process is almost like a gradual uncovering, if you will. By exploring more into the work, she can use this process as a way to unpack things that have maybe been packed away in her memory.”

Considering the many times Park has moved around and begun anew, it may come as no surprise that Park envisions herself taking on new challenges around the world.

Particularly, she said, she wants to attend the Venice Biennale — an annual international cultural exhibition — 10 years from now. 

“I would invite all my family from Korea and show Italy to them and eat tomato spaghetti with some red pepper flakes on top and strawberry wine with the bubble water,” Park said. “Probably feeling happy but planning what’s next.” 

In 2021, Haejin was selected as a finalist in the Bologna Children’s Book Fair.

The post PROFILE: Haejin Park explores childhood memories and womanhood through watercolor appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The News spoke with students and faculty across the political spectrum to gauge their reactions to the news. The majority were not surprised by DeSantis’ decision to withdraw from the race, with many attributing his downfall to a lack of charisma and a refusal to differentiate himself from Trump. Students and faculty said the path is charted for a Trump versus Biden rematch in November.

“The premise of the DeSantis campaign was that he was a more palatable Trump, but that didn’t work,” Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology, said. “Something I heard that captures this pretty well is, like, ‘why would you go see a Rolling Stones cover band if the Rolling Stones are still out on tour? I think that there is a plurality in the Republican base that is more interested in performance than policy. They’re more devoted to a person than to an ideology at this point.”

Gorski, who studies the role of conservative religion in American politics, said that DeSantis predicated his campaign on the premise that Republicans wanted someone who could translate Trumpism into a clear policy agenda. But DeSantis was mistaken, Gorski argues; they wanted Trump himself.

Why DeSantis fell short

Students and faculty members gave the News different hypotheses for DeSantis’ lackluster performance. Some pointed to his unpopular political stances and others argued that he should have focused on his achievements as Governor of Florida instead. 

Most consistently, University members felt that DeSantis lacked the charisma of Trump and the marketability of Nikki Haley.

William Wang ’26 is a registered Democrat who told the News that his choice Republican candidate would be Haley. He expressed disappointment with the lack of overt GOP pushback to Trumpism and said that DeSantis is missing the “courage” to challenge someone popular within the party.

“Chris Christie was the most formidable critic of President Trump, but he dropped out,” said Wang. “But none of the other Republicans, it seems to me, dare to challenge this fringe candidate and say what he does is not what America can stand for. But Haley is ramping up her attack after New Hampshire — so we’ll see.”

Wang was referring to Wednesday’s primary in New Hampshire, in which Trump defeated Haley by taking 12 delegates to her 9.

Trevor McKay ’25, who described his political stance as that of a conservative who does not identify with “any modern political party,” also said that he was “disappointed” but not surprised at DeSantis’ exit from the race. 

While DeSantis’ initial appeal was that he offered Trump’s far-right policies without his “brusque personality,” McKay believes that DeSantis should not have run with Trump in the race

David Bromwich ’73 GRD ’77, a professor of English, agreed, saying that by casting himself as a Trump alternative, DeSantis failed to focus on his accomplishments as Florida governor.

“He started to lose early because he made a wrong decision to run to the right of Trump on culture-war issues, instead of running on his record as a successful governor with a demonstrated executive ability that Trump lacked,” Bromwich wrote. 

Both Gorski and Viktor Kagan ’24, a liberal democrat, also pointed to the Florida governor’s glaring unpopularity with young, Gen-Z voters.

Kagan said that he believes DeSantis alienated many young voters by focusing on the culture war and positioning himself far right on many social issues. Namely, Kagan referred to DeSantis’ positions on public schools and abortion access as “simply unpopular” among most Americans. 

On the campaign trail, DeSantis said that he would support a 15-week abortion ban, with exceptions for instances of rape, incest and the life-endangering situations for the mother. In 2022, DeSantis endorsed the Individual Freedom Act – which limited the way gender and race are spoken about in classrooms and workplaces. 

“Americans, including myself, really want new faces running and that’ll happen in 2028 — it’ll be important that they are younger, listen to and work for Gen Z as they do for other generations, and run on issues that invest in public resources, not outsource them,” Kagan said. “Hearing future candidates wanting to raise the retirement age, send public school funds to private schools, and obnoxious rhetoric about civil rights does not inspire any member of Gen Z to vote for them.”

Haley, Trump and Biden: the future of the 2024 presidential race 

With DeSantis officially out of the running for the Republican nomination, students and faculty also weighed in on Donald Trump and Nikki Haley, the two dominant candidates still on the ticket.

All of the individuals with whom the News spoke predicted that Trump would easily take the Republican nomination and that Haley would drop out of the race in the near future.

Daniel Romoser ’26, who described himself as a “Burkean conservative” does not see a hopeful future for Haley in the upcoming South Carolina primary, especially with her loss in New Hampshire given the support she received from the governor of New Hampshire. 

As a voter, Romoser would prefer to have as many options as possible, though he predicts an inevitable showdown between Trump and Biden.  

For Nikki Haley to prove herself as a formidable opponent, she must confront Trump’s media presence. 

“Trump does have this aura around him that’s hard for any other candidate to replicate,” Wang told the News. “I think Trump has internalized this idea that there’s no such thing as bad press. Any press is press, and his supporters see bad press and turn Trump into a martyr. I don’t think Haley can play Trump’s game better than him. I think to win, both her and the eventual Democratic nominee have to anchor to the better angels of our nature.” 

Gorski attributed Haley’s relative success thus far less to an embodiment of Trumpism than to her political savvy and well-managed campaign. She is the best “retail politician,” he said, and is someone who embodies the old Republican establishment.

The legacy of Ron DeSantis

Gorski describes DeSantis, by contrast, as a “very bad” retail politician. He added that he does not foresee a future in which DeSantis appears on another national ballot, or is a figure in national politics at all beyond his post as Florida governor.

“The perception of him, rightly or wrongly, is that he lacks charisma and people skills,” Gorski said. “I don’t know how true that is. But, I think anybody who burns through $150 million and doesn’t make it past Iowa is going to have a very hard time relaunching another national political campaign. I think he’ll suffer a similar fate as people like Scott Walker and Jeb Bush.”

Throughout his campaign for president, DeSantis said that his Yale education was marked by “unadulterated leftism.” Earlier this year, the News examined these claims in an investigative profile piece. 

In all, DeSantis’ drop-out has churned the Republican party toward an imminent Trump nomination, Gorski said.

“Trump’s hostile takeover of the Republican Party is basically complete at this point,” Gorski told the News. “These first two primaries really write the epitaph on the Reagan revolution version of the GOP. It really is stunning how much money was spent trying to stop Trump and how ineffective those efforts were. There will, of course, be a post Trump GOP some day, but I think it’s far too early to know what that will look like. The only thing that we really can know for certain at this point is that we’re in the post-Reagan GOP.”

The next presidential primary will happen in South Carolina on Feb. 24. 

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The Black Student Alliance at Yale will present “The HY-light,” a Black Harvard-Yale student showcase at the O.C. Marsh Lecture Hall — featuring a line-up of groups, including acapella group Shades of Yale and East African dance group DESTA. 

Sketch comedy group “The Fifth Humour” will join improv group “The Purple Crayon” in their annual collaboration with Harvard improv group “On Thin Ice” on the eve of the game. On that same night, Yale and Harvard Glee Clubs and the Radcliffe Choral Society will perform at Woolsey Hall. 

HYLight: Harvard-Yale Black Arts Showcase 

“The HY-light” showcase has been a decade-long tradition, according to William Romain ’26, who said that Afro-American Cultural Center Dean Timeica E. Bethel ’11 had participated in this showcase when she was an undergraduate. This collaboration began when Yale Gospel Choir and the Kuumba Singers of Harvard, a Black music choir group, performed together to “create solidarity” and “uplift Black voices across the diaspora,” said Romain.

Romain said that he was eager to see the “fun, respectful showdown” between Yale and Harvard groups. The showcase’s line-up consists of Yale organizations such as Steppin’ Out, Sabrosura, Shades of Yale, Rhythmic Blue, DZANA, Desta and Yale Gospel Choir, and Harvard groups such as Nigerian dance group Omo Naija, Eritrean and Ethiopian dance troupe Dankira and choir group Kuumba. 

“I am personally excited about watching the active community engagement between both Harvard and Yale dance teams and singing groups,” said Romain. “A lot of Yale groups have a Harvard equivalent, so it will be a fun respectful showdown, which will hopefully bring a lot of people together.” 

“The HYLight”’ showcase is a part of BSAY’s larger Harvard-Yale weekend festivities. 

On Friday night, BSAY will host “The Pre-Gate” at the Afro-American Cultural Center, where students can eat food, listen to music, play games and purchase merchandise. The next morning, before the game, the Afro-American Cultural Center, along with Black sororities and fraternities such as the Zeta Chapter of Alpha Phi Fraternity and the Xi Omicron Chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority will be hosting “The Tailgate” event at Lot D of the Yale Bowl.   

If there’s anything the Yale and Harvard students can expect, Romain said, it’s a “lot of cheering, a lot of fun and a plethora of Black culture.” Through these collaborations, he hopes that this showcase will offer cultural connection to students. 

“I hope that this stage offers students the chance to connect with one another, especially in a cultural sense as we will be hosting groups that pretty much cover the full African diaspora,” Romain said. 

A Comedic Feast hosted by Purple Crayon, Fifth Humor and On Thin Ice

Yale comedy groups The Purple Crayon and The Fifth Humor and Harvard group On Thin Ice have teamed up for their annual collaboration to deliver laughs to the Harvard-Yale audiences. Tickets for this performance have already sold out, and the event will take place at Dunham Laboratory Auditorium.

For The Purple Crayon member Amara Neal ’26, this year’s comedy event is different from the joint performance at Harvard in the previous year. She will now stand in front of a mostly-familiar audience, as a sophomore who has had a year’s worth of experience under her belt.  

“I think the Harvard audience [at last year’s Harvard-Yale game] was the first time I’ve ever had to perform for an audience that I really had to earn their laughs, which was a little nerve-racking,” said Neal. “Now performing at Yale, one, I’ll feel more comfortable because I’m a sophomore and I’ve done this before. And two, I’m performing with my friends and peers who I have a rapport with.” 

While The Purple Crayon and On Thin Ice have collaborated in years past, this year will mark the first time The Fifth Humor will join their show. As a sketch comedy group, The Fifth Humor performs written skits and scripts — unlike the more on-the-fly jokes of The Purple Crayon and On Thin Ice. 

According to co-president of On Thin Ice Raina Hofstede, Harvard’s sketch comedy group — called “Sketch!” — does not have a consistent presence on Harvard campus, as it reappears “every couple of years,” she said. Hofstede said that she is excited to learn from collaboration with The Fifth Humor. 

“I want to see more of [sketch comedy] at Harvard,” said Hofstede. “I’m excited to see what Fifth Humor brings. If I can talk to them and learn from them after the show that weekend, it would be really great. I’d love to learn more.” 

As the Harvard-Yale game attracts a larger audience of parents, alumni and visitors from outside of Yale, one challenge that emerges for The Fifth Humor is writing jokes that will resonate and engage this new audience, says The Fifth Humor president Betty Kubovy-Weiss ’25. 

While the group takes this shift in audience demographics into consideration, Kubovy-Weiss said that the group “works very hard” to preserve their voice and identity as a college sketch comedy group. As group members often incorporate “socially relevant themes” into their jokes, Kubovy-Weiss said that she hopes the performance will use comedy to create humor even when “the world is awful.” 

“Because this show is coming as a part of a weekend that is so celebratory and joyful, I think that makes it all the more important to focus on the ways in which we can add to the joy of this weekend,” said Kubovy-Weiss. “It can feel frivolous sometimes, to be like ‘Our world is so awful. Why are we all getting so excited about a stupid fucking football game?’ But I think at the end of the day, the world is gonna be awful either way, but we might as well find these moments in which we can have laughter together.”  

Harvard, Yale Glee Club and the Radcliffe Choral Society:        

The Harvard and Yale Glee Clubs and Radcliffe Choral Society — Harvard’s treble chorus — will have their Harvard-Yale Choral Concert at Woolsey Hall at 7:30 p.m. on Friday. 

This concert will premiere several new compositions, including works by Shruthi Rajasekar that will feature dancers from Yale Rangeela and Kalaa, Ismael Huerta, the winner of Yale’s annual Emerging Composers Competition and John Raskopf ’27, the winner of the annual Fenno Heath Award — an award given to Yale student composers.

According to Yale Glee Club musical director Jeffrey Douma, the concert has been a “cherished annual tradition” for more than a century. 

“It’s one of our favorite concerts of the year — the friendly rivalry is always overshadowed by our mutual respect and love of making music together,” wrote Douma in an email to the News. “The concert ends with the choirs singing our alma maters together.”  

According to Yale Glee Club president Awuor Onguru ’24, the concert will also be a “great pep rally” for the game, where the choral groups will sing football medleys and engage in “pranks, joint performances and general merrymaking.”

The Yale-Harvard festivities and performances will begin on Thursday and last all the way until Saturday evening after the iconic sports showdown.

Dating back to 1875, the Harvard-Yale football rivalry is 148 years old.

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This all changed when Chung took Michael Roemer’s class, Film as Art, during his senior year. The class opened Chung’s eyes to the very real possibility of pursuing film, Chung said. 

Twenty-two years later, Chung returned to campus to speak to a tightly packed group of Yale students at the Leitner House, in an event sponsored by Pierson College and the Yale Film Archive. He spoke about the production process of his first feature film, his upbringing in Arkansas and how his highly-acclaimed film, “Minari,” came to life. Later in the evening, Chung attended a screening of “Minari,” which was presented on 35mm film print — the only film print of it made. 

“It’s great to see a filmmaker, especially one that was so shaped by Yale, come back and talk about his time here,” said Joji Baratelli ’24, who facilitated the conversation. “In many ways it puts things into perspective: a career in film is a long and difficult journey, but also I think exciting for a student body looking out into the future and in the possible ways of being. He offers that very hope, I think, of a life in art as a possibility — and for students, I think that’s a really exciting thing to see.”

Time would fly by during Chung’s all-nighter editing sessions for Roemer’s class, more quickly than it did in his stop-watch timed work at the genetics lab, according to Chung. 

That was when, Chung said, he first considered a career as a filmmaker. 

“I’m sure you guys have felt this, where you just entered this flow and you just realize, time exists somewhere else and you’re just in this space of creative work,” Chung said. “I just thought to myself that year, what if I could live life like this? What if I could just enter into a life in which I do this?”  

Roemer’s influence, and his films, brought Chung back to Yale decades later. Chung reached out to the University for Roemer’s contact when the Yale Film Archive presented screenings of two of Roemer’s films last fall. 

When film archivist Brian Meacham sent Roemer’s information to Chung, Meacham told Chung of the film archive’s plan to make a 35mm print of “Minari.”

Meacham asked Chung if he would be interested in attending the screening, to which Chung enthusiastically agreed, said Meacham. Though it took an entire year, the event was organized smoothly, as Chung and a densely packed audience watched “Minari” on film on Friday night.  

“In the digital age, I still feel it’s important to create, when possible, a tangible, physical copy of a film like this, which will remain in Yale’s collection and be a resource for students, faculty, and the community for many years to come,” Meacham wrote in an email to the News. 

Chung started dreaming of leaving the east coast when his own older sister left Lincoln, Arkansas to attend Yale. From then on, Yale became his “escape,” Chung said. 

Upon his arrival, however, Chung felt as if he were a “fish out of water”. 

“I couldn’t place this into words until later in life,” Chung said. “That I felt maybe more of a culture shock here than I did in Arkansas, as a child of Korean immigrants [growing up] in a very rural place that was obviously very different from my parents’ culture. It was just the level of education, the lingo, the way that people from the coast would talk. All these different things that I just wasn’t used to.” 

Chung eventually revisited his Arkansas upbringing in what he intended to be his final script. With the birth of his daughter, Chung said he was considering stepping away from filmmaking and accepted a teaching position at University of Utah’s Asia campus in Korea. 

Before Chung left for Korea, he sat down to write one last script. In his writing process, Chung said he was greatly inspired by writer Willa Cather, who wrote stories about life on the Great Plains, and whom Chung could see parts of himself in. 

“There was a quote that she gave that always stood out to me,” Chung said. “She said that her life really began when she stopped admiring, and she started remembering. She stopped admiring all of these people who she thought she needed to emulate, and instead, she turned to her own experiences and she started to remember.”  

Chung spent the entire afternoon that day “just writing down memories,” he said. Among them, he remembered the dust rising from the carpet of his mobile home. As he organized and shifted around these memories on his document, Chung began to see “a story take shape.” 

While Chung remembered his memories from the perspective of the child, in recalling stories from this time, he was able to better understand his family, he said. In particular, he resonated with his father’s struggles, as Chung was now a father himself. 

“I felt like I had grown enough, I’d become a parent, and now I could see the perspective of everyone else in a better way,” Chung said. “In that film, when you watch it, it’s definitely based on a lot of life experiences, but there’s a bit of me in every single person in that film.”  

Calling “Minari” the “most personal film [he] ever made,” Chung recalled being “scared” to see his parents’ reactions to the film. Chung and his wife Valerie Chu ’01 organized a screening with Chu’s aunt and uncle because he knew “they wouldn’t flip out in front of other people,” Chung joked. 

To Chung’s surprise, his parents responded very positively and were “moved.” Afterward, Chung recalled how his parents told him that they could not fall asleep later that night, as “they were picturing the movie.” 

Chung and Chu met in their first year at Yale, at the first-year formal. After their marriage, Chung followed Chu to Rwanda, where she helped train counselors in Kigali. There, Chu asked Chung to “figure out something that [he] could do to help people.” 

He offered to teach classes on filmmaking, what he considered at the time — 2006 — to be a “low priority need.” To his surprise, many individuals signed up for his class and with a $30,000 budget, Chung and his students would create a film over a course of 11 days. Emerging as the final product of this class was Chung’s directorial debut, “Munyurangabo,” which told the tale of friendship in the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide. 

“In retrospect, for me, when I look back on it, it was such a pure filmmaking process,” Chung said. “It was all about the creative energy of all of us, coming together and doing something together. We had no idea that this would get recognized the way that it did as well.” 

“Munyurangabo” was an official selection at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival and the winner of the grand prize at the 2007 American Film Institute Festival. It was the first narrative feature film in the Kinyarwanda language, and Chung said that he directed the entire film with somebody whispering and translating in his ear. 

When Baratelli asked about what is lost and gained in translation, Chung likened language to a form of exploration, even while translation may overlook the nuances of language at times. 

Through this project, Chung was able to appreciate the beauty of language, he said, a value that would eventually carry on to future works. “Minari,” for instance, was mostly written in Korean. 

 “When you make a movie, you just get to explore something in such a deep and profound way,” Chung said. “You go and live with people, you go into their homes, you learn their stories, you tell him you know that there’s something so beautiful in walking across those bridges. The art … itself becomes a way to explore things and to see the world and understand it a little bit more. And I tried to treat that with a lot of respect. I don’t feel like I’m entitled to that, but there’s some humility that has to go into that. And I think that’s the part with language.” 

When asked about future projects and the films he hoped to make, Chung said that he wanted to make “timeless” pieces that will “hold up in years to come.” As he glanced over at his daughter, who was fidgeting with the bookcase in the Leitner Room, Chung also said that he made ‘Minari’ in hopes that she will see the film when she was older. 

Chung acknowledged the significance of his work for the audience of Koreans and diasporic Korean-Americans. While Chung accepted the “communal aspect” of his films, he said that he tried not to feel “burdened” by it.  

“From there, I do feel some responsibility [as a Korean-American director],” said Chung. “I understand my work has a communal aspect to it, in terms of how it’s received … but I try not to either oppose it or run to it too much,” he said. “I still try to operate with some freedom. You can’t be doing work that is meant to simply hold up a cause or anything like that. There’s got to be some honesty in it.”

Chung’s next directorial project, “Twisters,” is a sequel to Jant de Bon’s 1966 disaster film “Twister,” and is slated to be released in July 2024. 

The post ‘Minari’ Director Lee Isaac Chung ’01 talks growing up, filmmaking appeared first on Yale Daily News.

The last slide listed a Venmo handle — which, as of Monday night, appears to no longer exist — and also tags another Instagram account called @abolishtheusa. That account features a handful of posts from this month showing support for Fauda, a self-described “anarchist movement in Palestine” that the account says associates itself with Hamas, which the United States recognizes as a terrorist group. According to the account, a Fauda member in an interview described the organization as one of “15 anti-Zionist resistance groups in Palestine” — specifically including Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Kitab al-Aqsa — that are “all together” and “follow the same goal.” 

In an email sent to Ballet Folklórico members yesterday at 4:14 p.m., the co-presidents wrote that they made the decision to include the QR code hours before the first show “without consulting the board or membership,” which they called a “substantial oversight.” They apologized to members who were “unwillingly and unknowingly aligned” with the statements.

“We realize this post brought considerable damage to the Jewish community,” Ballet Folklórico’s four co-presidents wrote in the email. “We should have been more prudent with our choice of platform and should have looked beyond the resources provided on the second slide and noted the damaging material on the third. We would also like to emphasize that we condemn antisemitism as well as any form of violence committed against any community. Our rash decision did not appropriately reflect the values we wish to represent. Although we stand behind efforts to aid and bring attention to this crisis, linking this post was a grave error.”

In the Monday email, the presidents cautioned members to make their personal social media accounts private and untag Yale Folklórico in any posts, as part of “preventive measures” aimed at supporting members’ safety.

The “Floreciendo” fall showcase took place in the Morse/Stiles Crescent Theatre and aimed to celebrate Mexican culture through the art of dance, according to the event’s YaleConnect page. One show took place on Friday, Nov. 10 and the other two on Saturday, Nov. 11, with 210 people registered to attend across all three shows. 

The dance group is a Yale student organization that strives to preserve traditional Mexican dances, according to its listing on the Yale College Arts website. 

The News reached out to five Ballet Folklorico members and 16 registered attendees on Monday night. One individual declined to comment and 18 did not immediately respond. 

The co-presidents held an emergency meeting on Monday night with all Ballet Folklórico members. The News, seeking to attend the meeting, reached out to the co-presidents; the presidents stressed that the meeting was not open to the public and meant for Ballet Folklórico members only.

This comes as the ongoing Israel-Hamas war has led to increasing tensions and student fears of personal safety on college campuses. 

On Oct. 7, Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel, killing at least 1,200 people in Israel and taking more than 230 hostages, according to Israel’s Foreign Ministry as reported by the Washington Post. Israel responded with a formal declaration of war, airstrikes and a ground invasion of Gaza, killing more than 11,180 people in Gaza from Oct. 7 to Nov. 10 and displacing more than two-thirds of the population, the Post reported according to figures from the Hamas-run Health Ministry in Gaza and from the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. United Nations officials have called Israel’s attacks “horrific crimes” and “collective punishment” in violation of international law. 

Gavin Guerrette ’25, an attendee at the Saturday 6 p.m. show and co-editor-in-chief of the Yale Daily News Magazine, said that an individual came out before the show to promote “direct relief to Palestinian families” and describe the post linked in the QR code. 

Guerrette said that he thought a “key part” of this presentation was a call to audiences to be informed about the Israel-Hamas war, “independently of their request for funding.” 

Guerette believed these actions to be “an earnest attempt” to support Palestinian families and civilians. 

“All I’d be willing to say here is that it was an attempt to provide information to people and an attempt to provide a means of supporting people who they view to be in a humanitarian crisis,” said Guerrette. “If incidentally, they linked to something which is, quote unquote, ‘loosely affiliated’ with Hamas, I don’t think it’s by any direct malicious effort.”

In their Monday email, the Ballet Folklórico co-presidents said they had removed the portion of the YouTube livestream that included the QR code and are in conversation with La Casa Cultural administration to navigate through the situation. They also said that they will seek input from the board and membership before making public statements in the future. 

Morse College is located at 304 York St.

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