Haeny Yoon

Lalitha Vasudevan:
I'm Lalitha Vasudevan and I'm sitting here with my friend and colleague, Haeny Yoon, and we are inside of the Playing with Form exhibition. This is the section called Practices, and it's one of three sections that comprise this exhibition. One is about conditions, one is on activities, and this final one called Practices gives a glimpse into five different ways that each of us took this work and this practice of play. We are sitting here now in front of Haeny's part of the exhibition called The Art of Re/Vision, or The Art of Re/Vision. Why did you call your part of this work The Art of Re/Vision?

Haeny Yoon:
So there's a text that Kiese Laymon wrote, and so he talked about how he decided that he was going to buy back the rights to his book because he felt like he couldn't do it well the first time. But he talked about revision as this liberatory, revolutionary act of looking back at something that you've done or that you've written in the past and shifting or rethinking or just revisioning.

Lalitha Vasudevan:
I want to ask you a little bit about how this idea that you've been sitting with for a while found its way into our collective work.

Haeny Yoon:
It was on the one hand, the idea of revision. On the other hand, I was getting into the zine making thing where you put together a self-published book or booklet, a pamphlet that has to do with an idea that you want to put forward into the world. I revisited kids writing, and when I look at it right now, it actually makes me very happy to look at all these pieces because it was over a decade of time that I looked back on pieces of writing that have really resonated or stood out to me over the years and just the things that I learned from kids. And so it was a way to revisit the things that have been in the rearview mirror for a little while, and to come back to what it means right now.

Lalitha Vasudevan:
What was it that we either did or that you yourself experienced as a part of this broader project that allowed that kind of deepening and expanded playing for you?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. So one is you talked about having the activity section over there and the activity section to me were just experimental tryouts. You're trying something out, that that experimentation was going to actually be a necessary and worthwhile diversion. I think the second part of it is the built-in mechanism to get feedback and ideas from an interdisciplinary group where people have different commitments, whether it's a curricular commitment, whether it's an artistic commitment, whether it's a digital commitment, whether it's a multimodal research perspective. I felt like all of those perspectives push my work further just thinking about the connections or the adjacencies or the intersections of a lot of different ideas and thoughts that I haven't really thought of.

Lalitha Vasudevan:
Can you say a little bit about how and why it might be important for an institution to support this kind of work? What does it matter that this was an institutionally supported interdisciplinary effort?

Haeny Yoon:
Yeah. I think that's everything. I don't think I would've been able to do without it because I think about how, in a practical sense in our everydayness, we go to conferences that have to do with our specific discipline. We end up sharing research with other people who are in our wheelhouse or theoretical frames or methodological concepts. There's very few places where you can come together with an interdisciplinary group of people that you don't normally hang out with in a professional sense, and how that pushes your scholarly agenda and your thoughts.
And so I think that was everything to me. It's definitely impacted the way that I teach. And so I think the idea of art making and multimodal provocations and trying out some things that maybe people are scared to try out or didn't try out have made its way into my teaching. And then on the other part of it, there's my colleagues that are also already in academia that I've been very familiar with. It's changed the way that I present. I've been thinking about how to engage in audience that's different from the 15 PowerPoint slides that we all know and love in our research conferences. I think it's definitely made me think about the possibilities or given me permission to think about different ways of engaging audiences that I didn't actually think that I could do or didn't even think that I would be able to do.

Lalitha Vasudevan:
So Haeny, if people are listening to us and people come to this exhibition and one of the things that's raised for them is, "I'd like to do something like this with my colleagues, with my fellow students," what do you think contributes to creating this kind of space, this kind of group, this kind of opportunity?

Haeny Yoon:
Mm-hmm. That I think the simple and complicated answer is to cultivate a practice of play. And I think in the spirit of this exhibit, I think it could take on a lot of different forms. Finding a space or creating a space where people can do that and do that without this focus on efficiency and productivity. Those unproductive moments can actually open up a new way of thinking and open up something that could be really powerful and extend your work. And so I think cultivating spaces like that, whether it's playing with different forms in your research and in your scholarship, thinking about what public conversation you want to engender that isn't going to be the static paper form that it takes. Maybe it's going to take a different form because you want to engage different audiences. And then finding a space for experimentation that is less about judgment and more on the idea that we always say about dabbling, that's less about judgment and it's more about honoring the experimentations that people take.