Jay Koh originates from South East Asia and since 1999 has been an EU citizen. He is an artist who takes on multifaceted roles in order to negotiate with social-political structures on site and conceives of appropriate actions in response to local needs and contexts. These actions emerge from an artistic practice that includes creating art works; curating and organizing exhibitions, seminars, workshops and learning programs; community capacity-building, advocacy, writing, publishing, and other necessary activities. His main collaborator since 2000 is Malaysian/Singaporean artist Chu Yuan.
He is presently in Dublin curating the 3 year Ni Hao – Dia Duit (Chinese and Irish for Hello – Hello) cross community and intercultural project and carrying out mentorship and project evaluation activities for the art community.
In Asia he manages the “Open Academy”, a resource development program in Mongolia, Myanmar and Vietnam.
Some of his recent activities include the participation in the grounding of an international network “freeDimensional” in Toronto for international social justice to facilitate residencies for intellectuals at risk. Lectures for ARCADE (Awareness Raising on Culture and Development in Europe) to present his paper “Mediating across Divides and in between Layers“ at the “Culture and Conflict Prevention” seminar in Barcelona and “Performances in Everyday Public: Engaged Art Practice” for Centre for Art, Design, Research and Experimentation (CADRE), University of Wolverhampton. Speaker in the specialist panel on “Working in Public” in the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. Organized by Gray’s School of Art in the Faculty of Design and Technology of the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen.
He is also doing his doctoral studies in “Open Research in collaborative and participative art practice” in artistic research at the Finnish Academy of Fine Art, Helsinki. His writings have been published in several languages such as Chinese, Danish, French, Polish, Vietnamese, in addition to English.
For details please see http://ifima.net/IFIMA/personal/jaybio.htm.
