June Pak

JUNE PAK (she/her) was born in Seoul, South Korea, and currently lives in Toronto, Canada. As a Korean-Canadian living in Canada, her personal experience has informed her creative research investigating non-binary processes and methods that can represent the complexity of the lives of the marginalized and racialized. Stemming from her Ph.D. (practice-based) research on the representation of ethnicity, she is critical of "being visible" within the dichotomy of visibility and invisibility. In response to the visual representation of persons of colour within stereotypical and one-dimensional realms, she searches for more comprehensive and diverse means of demonstrating the complicated lives of the marginalized and the racialized. In her current work, Name Project, she collects stories on names from various groups of people that tell the intersection between a nation's history and personal lives, assimilation and resistance, and presence and absence. Her work often duplicates, erases, masks, and performs images to manifest the complex interconnectivity between the visibility and invisibility of ethnic representation. She utilizes dialogue, performative (small) acts, and non-conventional presentation methods and venues to re-establish the exchange between the art/artist and the viewer.

Her interdisciplinary works have been shown in Canada and abroad. She has received numerous grants for her projects from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ontario Arts Council, and the Toronto Arts Council. She was awarded the K.M. Hunter Artist Award in Visual Arts (2004) and the Chalmers Arts Fellowship for her research in Korea (2017). Recently, she was selected for the Canada-Korea Connections Fund in 2023, a special project initiated by the Arts Council Korea in collaboration with the Canada Council for the Arts. She is collaborating with several Korean artists to research ways to retell significant yet unwanted stories from the modern history of Korea by visiting various regions in Korea.