Joe Kye
Love and Lineage
Blurring History and Identity
Love and Lineage will be a deeply personal multimedia performance by Portland-based musician and storyteller Joe Kye. Using looping violin, vocals, Korean instruments, and spoken word, Joe weaves together the story of his grandfather – a refugee who fled North Korea after the country’s division in 1948 and who later fought in the Korean War – to explore themes of love, survival, and generational trauma. Joe Kye will be joined by Qi You, a visual artist who will be creating live, improvised visuals and collages through-out the piece.
The piece combines traditional Korean rituals with modern music and technology to become both a concert and a healing ritual; Joe blurs the lines between past and present, history and identity, and invites the audience to collectively hold onto and consider the brutality of empire and our intimate place within it.
According to Joe, Love and Lineage pushed Joe to experiment with scripted storytelling and ritual-making – forms he hadn’t fully explored before. This marks an important step for Joe as he moves beyond his work as a musician and leans into a hybrid form of performance art authentic to his multifaceted artistic identity. In that spirit of boundary-pushing art, Risk/Reward is over-joyed to bring Love and Lineage to the stage.
More about the artists:
Portland-based musician and storyteller Joe Kye discharges worlds of emotion with his lush string loops and eclectic style. Born in Korea and raised in the United States, Joe shares his multifaceted identity with humor and vulnerability. Kye has performed for Carnegie Hall’s Migrations festival, recorded a Tedx Talk, and been featured on PRI’s The World .
His recent project, Love & Lineage, is a deeply felt narrative ritual, a migration through multiple generations and geographies of his Korean family. Looping violin, vocals, and traditional Korean instruments, Joe’s improvisations swirl with stories and deep ancestral connection as he invites the spirit of his grandfather into the performance space. Joe will be joined by Portland visual artist Qi You, who will augment the piece through live altar-building and ritualmaking.
Qi You is an American visual artist, designer, and dreamer based in Portland, Oregon. Qi explores the languages ranging from two-dimensional to time-based media. She uses design as the tool of care and wholeness, breaking down the barriers, to rediscover and reconnect, from herself to the rest of the world around.
Qi holds an MFA in Expanded Media from the School of Art and Design, New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and a BFA in Design from China Central Academy of Fine Arts. Qi You’s work has been shown and screened at Anthology Film Archives, New York; Oregon Contemporary, Portland Chinatown Museum and the Lumber Room in Portland, Oregon. Qi is currently working on the future memorial of altar design at Block 14 in Lone Fir Cemetery. https://www.oregonmetro.gov/public-projects/honoring-untold-stories-lone-fir-cemetery