kate-hers RHEE

kate-hers RHEE is an interdisciplinary artist, arts educator, and cultural worker. Orphaned in Seoul, South Korea and transnationally adopted to a white working class Detroit suburb, she was painfully aware of racial difference in a city where the imprint of the 1960s race riots and white flight was palpable in every corner; her experience of negotiating a position in-between, specifically Black and white identities, inform her artistic practice. The trauma of being a perpetual outsider galvanized the artist to focus on metamorphosis, while questioning how individual and collective suffering shapes an ethnic and national ethos. RHEE employs performance, installation, drawing, and participatory events to explore the concepts of home, kinship, cultural acquisition/ appropriation, and gendered violence. Her projects have shown in diverse galleries and institutions in Berlin and beyond; in Galerie Wedding, Galerie Irrgang, Galerie damdam in the Korean Cultural Center, in the Asian Art Museum and the Berlinische Galerie; at Incheon Art Platform and the British Museum. She has received numerous awards and prizes, among them a Fulbright scholarship, the first prize of the visual art competition and the first biannual art grant of the AHL Foundation, an Incheon Art Platform residency fellowship, Millay Colony for the Arts residency fellowship, MacDowell residency fellowship, the Berlin Senate working artist fellowship and support from the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. In 2018 she was a Goldrausch fellow. She is currently working between Germany, South Korea and the United States.