Kuan Hwa

Bio

Kuan Hwa is a contemporary artist and PhD candidate.  His MFA thesis used multiple taxonomies of video sequences to investigate muscle memory as socio-cultural memory across various communities of practice, from salsa dance to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.  Currently, he is working on intellectual histories of embodiment primarily between Western Europe and Japan.  His current thesis in writing includes an archeology of sensory knowledge at the intersections of sociocultural anthropology and philosophy of mind from the early modern period to the present in the Western tradition.  The latter half of his project articulates the relationship that these discursive theories have to concrete forms of material culture, aesthetic objects, and somatic repertoire.  In the contemporary period, he is primarily focused on Japanese tea ceremony schools, and interested in the production of subjectivity and varieties of conviviality established through commensality.