Kenneth Tin-Kin Hung caught our attention at the 2016 Creative Time Summit in Washington, DC, where he presented on SHIT WARS, his interactive (and oft-NSFW) web-app project that mashes up pop-cultural imagery—from Breaking Bad, Star Wars, Game of Thrones, and others—with political figures and internet memes. The aim, he writes, is to “document how both [the] left wing and right wing uses populism to their advantages in 2016 presidential election, and to expose Donald Trump as the most dangerous demagogue.”
Born in Hong Kong and based in New York, his work has been exhibited around the world at venues including the New Museum; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts; the Berkeley Art Museum; Sundance Film Festival; and ZKM Karlsruhe, Germany, among many others. In addition to his work as an artist, Hung also freelances as an art director for clients including Facebook and Adult Swim. He co-founded a startup, FUNraiser.us, and co-owns a boutique wine store in Brooklyn called The Winey Neighbor with his wife, Young.
Here, as part of 2016: The Year According to, our annual series of artist-generated top-1o lists, he shares his perspective on the most noteworthy moments, experiences, events, and ideas from the year that was.
1.
Creative Time Summit
Held in Washington, DC this year, the Creative Time Summit is the leading international conference exploring the intersection of the arts and social change. It expanded my mind tremendously and made me think about how little I’ve done compared to many other activists, artists, and creative thinkers out there. I strongly recommend that anyone who cares about our world attend the next Creative Time Summit. It will move you, it will motivate you, it will make you roll up your sleeves and work to make our world better! Let’s “occupy the future” together!
2.
#NoDAPL
I was ecstatic when I heard that the Army Corps of Engineers denied Energy Transfer Partnership’s easement to cross Lake Oahe with the Dakota Access Pipeline. To the Water Protectors and every person who took a stand with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, I salute you! The fight is not over: #StandwithStandingRock!
3.
DIY Fake News
Remember last year’s Face2Face technology about “real-time face capture and reenactment”? Now, you can pair that with Adobe’s new VoCo (voice-conversion technology)—a way to to create “Photoshop voice-overs”—to make your own 100-percent fake news. I hope artists will use these technologies to create artworks that reflect our time and create social changes.
4.
Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop
One of my highlights of the year is meeting with the poets Faloon Branham, Carlos Tyler, and co-founder Tara Libert from the Free Minds Book Club & Writing Workshop!
“Free Minds uses books and creative writing to empower young inmates to transform their lives. By mentoring and connecting them to supportive services throughout their entire incarceration into reentry, Free Minds inspires these youths to see their potential and achieve new educational and career goals. Free Minds serves 16 and 17 year old youths who have been charged and incarcerated as adults at the DC Jail. Free Minds serves more than 500 youths each year across three successive phases: DC Jail Book Club, Federal Prison Book Club, and Reentry Book Club.”
It is amazing what they’re doing to help incarcerated youth. Please go to their website to read some of their powerful poems and give them support!
5.
Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy
A brilliant idea with excellent execution! Pedro Reyes’s political haunted house at the Brooklyn Army Terminal was my favorite art installation of 2016. It touches everything I deeply cared about—corruption and government, environmental justice, Wall Street and the financial industry, gun control, women’s rights and abortion, the fast-food industry, institutional racism and marginalization, art and money, xenophobia, terrorism, drone warfare, climate change, and Big Pharma. Now that Donald Trump has been elected, I really feel that Doomocracy is what we are living in now.
6.
Yang Youngliang 杨泳梁
I discovered Yang Youngliang‘s work earlier this year. He created these absolutely beautiful and intricate videos and photographs based on Chinese Shui-Mo (水墨) landscape brush painting that question urbanization and it’s impact on the environment.
7.
The National Museum of African American History and Culture
2016 was perceived as at the start of a new civil rights movement. Under the backdrop of the #BlackLivesMatter movement and politicians shifting our country towards xenophobia due to fear of terrorism and immigration, the opening of NMAAHC could not have been better timed. Two hundred years of African American history are not only an American story, but everybody’s story. Slavery and racial oppression shaped the world we live in today. Please visit.
8.
The Centennial of Dada’s Birth
Dada is the only art movement that really influenced me because it is subversive, revolutionary, and it challenges the conformity of culture and questions the status quo. Dada, according to the poet Hugo Ball, is to “get rid of everything that smacks of journalism, worms, everything nice and right, blinkered, moralistic, Europeanised, enervated.” Dada emerged amid the brutality of World War I and the nationalism that had led to the war. Sound familiar? We need more “anti-art” now.
9.
For Freedoms
For Freedoms is an artist-run super PAC founded by Hank Willis Thomas and Eric Gottesman that empowers artists to create art that comments on timely political matters. Great examples are A Man Was Lynched by Police Yesterday by Dread Scott and the Make American Great Again billboard at Pearl, Mississippi. I believe the arts can impact social change and they are doing it within the system.
10.
Donald Fucking Trump
I really don’t want to put Donald Fucking Trump here, but I have to. It’s like I am trying really hard to hold my projectile vomit. I spent a huge chunk of my time this year making the #ShitWars—the Shit Awakens project, and on November 8, as my friend said: “Your art project turned into reality overnight.” I can tell you, on the day Donald Trump got elected, the color of my vomit was red, white, and blue.
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