CRAFTING THE FIX

Crafting The Fix
Christian Amaya Garcia, Jesse Chun, Sidian Liu, and Kenneth Tam
Screening and Lecture Performance
Thursday, November 20, 6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Protocinema at FAR–NEAR
244 Canal Street, Floor 4, New York
Free, limited seating, please RSVP

Protocinema is happy to announce Dylan Seh-Jin Kim, Protocinema Emerging Curator for 2025-2026, who has been working with Head Mentor Mari Spirito, Executive Director and Curator of Protocinema, New York, with additional mentorship from Jessica Kwok, Associate Curator, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Christopher Y. Lew, Founder, C/O: Curatorial Office, New York. Kim’s exhibition will be presented in New York, Spring 2026, with an accompanying edition of Protozine, and will explore alternative forms of representation that resist reductive protocols through which racial or national identities are fixed.

On the occasion of this announcement, Protocinema partners with FAR-NEAR to present a public program titled Crafting The Fix. Kim’s program brings together Christian Amaya Garcia (1 closer to one-hundred, 2025), Jesse Chun (O dust, 2023), Sidian Liu (Are you from China?, 2025) and Kenneth Tam (The Founding of the World, 2023), whose works meditate on how we are codified, racialized, and historicized, unraveling the logics that sustain these conditions. In Crafting The Fix, these ongoing investigations come about through the ways in which racial or national identity becomes bound with the stakes of institutionalization and categorization. In confronting the tyranny of representation, logics to capture, and aesthetic categories, this program will address how essentialist positions perpetuate fixity and how we may collectively face identity-making.

Launched in 2015, the Protocinema Emerging Curator Series (PECS) is a mentorship program that provides professional training, first-hand experience, and network and camaraderie building, utilizing the exhibition-making process as a teaching tool. Protocinema Emerging Curator Series is an incubator for emerging curators to gain hands-on experience through the process of realizing an exhibition from inception to deinstallation, including fundraising, developing concepts, building artist lists, writing critical text for Protozine, securing an exhibition space, installation, documentation, communication, promotion, press, opening events, and public programs. This program offers tailored mentorship and guidance to nurture experimental curatorial work and time working closely with Mari Spirito and invited mentor curators. Protocinema Emerging Curator Series serves as a valuable platform for the emerging curator to present their vision and create further professional opportunities. See previous Protocinema Emerging Curator Series exhibitions here.

Dylan Seh-Jin Kim is an independent curator who lives in Brooklyn and is the Curatorial Research Assistant at Independent Curators International (ICI). He was a participant in ICI’s New York Curatorial Seminar, a Bandung Resident at Asian American Arts Alliance (A4) & Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA), and a Curatorial Fellow at NARS Foundation. He has organized and worked on exhibitions and programs at MoMA PS1, Protocinema, Unclebrother, Gavin Brown's enterprise, Tutu Gallery, NARS Foundation, a Columbia University studio, brownstones, restaurants, and elsewhere. He was a guest speaker for Pratt Institute’s Arts and Cultural Management, MPS program. He was a participant in the Interdisciplinary Art and Theory Program for 2024-25. He received a BA in Philosophy and Film and Media Studies from Columbia University.

Jessica Kwok is a curator and researcher based in New York. Her curatorial interests are driven by the effects of spatial politics on both the social body and the individual body, using feminist perspectives to fracture governing frameworks that influence cultural production, labor, and performance. Jessica founded and directed domesti.city, a project space in Lower Manhattan that ran from 2018–2020. She has written for various arts and culture platforms such as frieze, Flash Art, Topical Cream, and Viscose, among others, and has contributed essays to project catalogues and research publications. Jessica is a graduate of The New School’s School of Constructed Environments where she received a Master of Architecture. She currently works as Associate Curator at Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York.

Christopher Y. Lew, is the founder of C/O: Curatorial Office. He has over 15 years of experience working at American museums and arts nonprofits. He was the founding Chief Artistic Director at Horizon Art Foundation and Outland Art and is a former curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art, where he oversaw the emerging artist program and was co-curator of the 2017 Whitney Biennial. Prior to joining the Whitney, he was assistant curator at MoMA PS1 and organized many exhibitions there. Lew has contributed to several publications including Art AsiaPacific, Art in America, Art Journal, Bomb, Huffington Post, and Mousse.

FAR–NEAR is an artist-run cross-cultural book series and platform that broadens perspectives of Asia through image, person, idea, and history to unlearn inherent dominative modes. The Asian continent and its people have often been seen through a foreign eye—painted as “the other” to a Western audience. Extending beyond the Far East, FAR–NEAR features voices from Japan to Iran and just about everywhere in between. Far-near.media

Protocinema is a non-profit arts organization that collaborates with artists and institutions to create artworks exploring the shared human experiences that connect us all. We build relationships across local and international contexts, bringing together individuals with diverse perspectives and backgrounds. With a presence in both the US and Turkey since 2011, Protocinema advances this urgent and nuanced work through commissions, exhibitions, public programs, the Protocinema Emerging Curator Series (PECS) mentorship program, and Protozine exhibition texts. These initiatives are rooted in our belief in the common ground where we live, gather, and grow. Protocinema.org

Press Inquiries: Dylan Seh-Jin Kim, dylan@protocinema.org, or Mari Spirito mari@protocinema.org +1 917 660 7332

Supporters: The Jenni Crain Foundation, an initiative dedicated to preserving the legacy of the esteemed artist and curator; Cowles Charitable Trust, New Jersey; Miyoung Lee; Michael Ito Edmonson; including Board of Trustees: Defne Ayas, Dillon Cohen, David Howe, Jane Lombard, Ari Meşulam, Jason Heard, Sheldon La Pierre; International Commissioning Committee: Haro Cümbüşyan and Bilge Öğüt; Adnan Yerebakan; SANATORIUM; Independent Curators International (ICI) through Dylan Seh-Jin Kim’s participation in the 2025 New York Curatorial Seminar.

Special Thanks: Hamid Amini, Morgan Becker, Gavin Brown, William Chan, Howie Chen, Jungmin Cho, Qingyuan Deng, Naz Cuguoğlu, Tamara Khasanova, Justine Lee, Matthew Lyons, Gervais Marsh, Serubiri Moses, Lila Nazemian, Liz Park, Maneula Paz, Philip Poon, Renaud Proch, Judy Reissmann, jess saldaña, Jon Santos, Christian Stone, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Alper Turan, Danie Wu, Simon Wu, Sarah Zhu.