Photography by Alexis Ellers, copyright and courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Performance

YOKO ONO AND THE ART OF FLUXUS

1:00-2:30pm Saturday February 28, 2026
The Japan Foundation, Los Angeles
(5700 Wilshire Blvd, Ste 100, Los Angeles, CA 90028)

Admission FREE
Please register HERE

This program presents performance art and experimental music associated with the artist and peace activist Yoko Ono. Her participation in Fluxus art of the 1960s is illustrated through performances of historical works, as well as a recent work by composer Andrew Hansung Park that features Kaoru Kuribayashi as an electronically amplified tea ceremony practitioner. The program additionally features artist Gordon Fung and art historian Lidia Ferrara, who will provide educational commentary throughout the event. Yoko Ono and the Art of Fluxus tells a story about the destruction and eventual mending of a violin, and audience participation will be encouraged.

Photography by Alexis Ellers, copyright and courtesy of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago

Lidia FERRARA

Lidia Ferrara is a scholar, educator, and curator whose research and teaching span the fields of modern and contemporary art history, museum studies, and performance studies. She is a PhD candidate in the Department of Art History at the University of California, Los Angeles, where her research areas include global histories of performance art and its institutional circulation, critical legacies of postmodern discourse, and the intersections between contemporary art history and contemporary art conservation. Lidia’s dissertation is titled “Staging Strategies: Theatricality, Remaking, and the Museum Life of 1960s and 1970s Feminist Performance Art.” Her study traces how three American women artists returned to their historical performance works and appealed to theatrical techniques to remake them for museum display in the 1990s and early 2000s. Lidia is also a Research Assistant at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. She was formerly Curatorial Assistant, Collections, at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Lidia holds a MA in Art History from UCLA and a BA in Art History and French from Barnard College.

Gordon FUNG

Gordon Fung (b. 1988, San Francisco, CA; lives in Chicago, IL) is a transdisciplinary artist-curator, writer, performer, multi-instrumentalist, and runaway composer who works across a wide range of time-based media, including audiovisual performances, new media installations, experimental film/video, media archaeology, participatory works, performance arts, and Happenings, among others. Inspired by the unique Chicago video/media arts lineage and collectivity in Fluxus, he has founded and directed the neo-Fluxus theater troupe //sense to showcase large-scale experimental participatory theater, exhibitions, and screenings. By establishing a democratized and decentralized space, he initiates efficacious social changes through arts, media, technology, games, and life. As a firm believer in collectivism and synergy, his curations cultivate two maxims: “making good communities better” and “finding arts in all things.”

As a community builder and experimental theater-maker, Gordon emphasizes intercultural, interdisciplinary, and intergenerational conversations and collaborations to pursue peace-making, oneness, and interconnectedness in humanity. Expanding the traditional caretaking role of the curator, he applies stewardship to artworks, artists, history, culture, and the community at large to ensure constructive dialogue between them. Recognizing the cultural significance of media and technology, his curations bring equilibrium to art scenes where media arts are underrepresented. Serving as a mediator and facilitator, he builds a heteroglossic bridge to foster a more supportive environment that elevates both institutions and independent DIY scenes.

With extensive use of readymade objects and readily available media tools, his theaters fabricate an organic playground and brave space for participants to reimagine artmaking through deskilling and unlearning. He has presented experimental theaters at Black Mountain College Museum Arts Center (2025), Peoria Civic Center (2025), the historic Black Mountain College (2025), the International Museum of Surgical Science (2024), Glenwood Avenue Arts Festival (2024), No Nation Art Lab (2023), Comfort Station (2023), and MacLean Ballroom (2023).

Honing media’s ability to extend human bodies and expand consciousness, Gordon creates immersive audiovisual environments for audiences to contemplate. As a “break-maker,” his deliberate misuse of electronic equipment and software regain consumers’ agency through artistic means. Through media archeology, he strives to unearth the concealed potentials of obsolete audiovisual equipment and to revive them to artistic life. He performs with a wide range of gears: synthesizers (audio and video), mixers, camcorders, webcams, test signal generators, time base correctors, video projections, experimental films, CRT TVs, and Max/MSP/Jitter.

As an experimental audiovisual performer, he has presented in Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Black Mountain College Museum Arts Center, the International Museum of Surgical Science, Experimental Sound Studio, Links Hall, Agitator Gallery, Comfort Station, Elastic Arts, MacLean Ballroom, No Nation Art Lab, Archie’s Cafe, Non Plus Ultra (Los Angeles), NOT NOT, Tritriangle, the Red Museum, Mosswood Chapel, Cali Pink, Cafe Mustache, Asian Improv aRts Midwest, Lot 49, DADS (Digital Arts Demo Space), and beyond.

His video, film, and installation works have been shown in Angels Gate Cultural Center (Los Angeles), Charlotte Street Foundation (Kansas City), Chicago Art Department (Chicago), daybreak (Taiwan), Gene Siskel Film Center, Isabelle Percy West Gallery (Oakland), Mac Fine Arts Gallery (Oakland), Parallel Space (Hong Kong), PLAYsPACE Gallery (San Francisco), Ohklahomo (Chicago), Re–Fest (Virtual), Root Division (San Francisco), UMA Gallery Oakland, Wonder Valley Experimental, Santa Ana Noise Festival, not.gli.tc/H (Chicago), Norcal Noisefest (Sacramento), SAIC Galleries (Chicago), Elastic Arts (Chicago), etc.

As an award-winning but runaway composer, his compositions have been performed in Canada, China, Croatia, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Taiwan, and the United States.
 

Andrew Hansung PARK

Andrew Hansung Park is an art historian, composer, and violinist who researches the intersections between modern/contemporary art and histories of sound across North America and East Asia. He is currently a PhD candidate at UCLA as well as a 2025-26 Predoctoral Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. He has also been the recipient of fellowships from the Terasaki Center for Japanese Studies and the Chanel Culture Fund/Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, where he was recently commissioned to perform an original composition and Fluxus scores for the internationally traveling exhibition, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind.

Park’s musical practice incorporates improvisation, collage, extended technique, experimental sound, and traditional classical music. He studied composition with Anna Weesner and Ian Krouse, and his music has been performed by the Daedalus Quartet. He was a past apprentice violinist at the National Music Festival, in addition to being a drummer for the University of Pennsylvania’s marching band. Park has also worked in various roles at the Getty Research Institute (where he contributed to the exhibition Sensing the Future: Experiments in Art and Technology), UCLA’s PEER (Practice-based Experimental Epistemology Research) Lab, Glenstone, and the Walters Art Museum. He completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Pennsylvania as a Benjamin Franklin Scholar in 2018.

Photography by Ryo Kawano

Kaoru KURIBAYASHI

Kaoru Kuribayashi is an interdisciplinary artist whose work engages with traditional forms as living, evolving practices. She holds master’s degrees from Goldsmiths, University of London (2020), and UCLA (2024), where she researched how Japanese traditional culture articulates mindfulness, ritual, and transcendental experience in a global contemporary context.

Her practice spans tea, fabric, performance, and meditative installation, and is rooted in her training in Chanoyu (Japanese tea ceremony), which she began at age ten. She focuses on micro-gestures and sensory precision, exploring how traditional arts can prompt slowness, embodied attention, and cross-cultural resonance. Rather than preserving tradition in a fixed form, she approaches it as a porous system—open to reinterpretation and quiet intervention.