Join Southern Exposure for a reading by Bay Area author Ingrid Rojas Contreras and a panel discussion with Moving Clouds artists Heesoo Kwon and Rochelle Youk. Rojas Contreras’ The Man Who Could Move Clouds inspired the title of Southern Exposure’s current exhibition and draws on many of the same themes and ideas about memory, the presence of those who have passed, and the precarity of life for many diasporic and BIPOC communities. The beloved writer and 2023 Pulitzer Prize Finalist will read an excerpt from her novel followed by a conversation with Moving Clouds artists. Books will be available for purchase at Southern Exposure from Medicine for Nightmares Bookstore.

INGRID ROJAS CONTRERAS was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia. Her memoir, The Man Who Could Move Clouds, was a 2023 finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It tells the story of the author's lineage of curanderos and shamans, and her mother, the first woman in her family to become a curandera. The book won a Medal in Nonfiction from the California Book Awards, was a National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and was long-listed for a Carnegie Medal in Excellence in Nonfiction. It was named a “Best Book of the Year” by TIME, People, NPR, Vanity Fair, Boston Globe, among others. Her first novel Fruit of the Drunken Tree was the silver medal winner in First Fiction from the California Book Awards, and a New York Times editor’s choice. Her essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, The Cut, and Zyzzyva, among others. She lives in California.

Heesoo Kwon (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist based in San Francisco. Positioning herself as an artist, activist, archivist, anthropologist, and religious figure, Kwon builds feminist utopias in the digital realm that liberate one from personal, familial, and historical trauma rooted in patriarchy. Central to her practice and substantial bodies of work is Leymusoom, an autobiographical feminist religion she initiated in 2017 as a form of personal resistance against misogyny and an ever-evolving framework for investigating her family histories. Kwon utilizes technologies such as digital archiving, 3D scanning, and animation as her ritualistic and shamanistic tools to regenerate her woman ancestors’ lives without constraints of time and space, and to queer her past, present, and utopian dreams.

Rochelle Youk works across media to craft objects informed by her heritage as the American daughter of immigrants from Japan and Korea. Labor intensive paintings, drawings, and sculptures examine the history between Asia and the United States through the lens of cultural traditions, especially folk crafts. She uses non-traditional materials like plexiglass, and cigarettes, to examine how visual traditions are shared, exchanged, and used to form identity. Her work has been shown widely across the San Francisco Bay area including at The Berkeley Art Center, where she is also a member of the Program Committee. After receiving an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2010, Youk completed a bookbinding apprenticeship at letterpress publisher, The Arion Press, where she currently manages the bindery. She also works as a freelance bookbinder for local artists and publishers, and serves on the steering committee of the Korean American Artist Collective.