Senseight__Koan_Jeff_Baysa__M.D.

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Press conference - Tuzla, Bosnia

Posted 1 year ago

physician • curator • writer • editor
medicine :: design :: cuisine :: scents

website: kjb-archive.tumblr.com/archive
email: senseight@gmail.com
Facebook: kjbaysa

Kóan Jeff Baysa is a physician, curator, designer, writer, critic, Whitney Museum Independent Study Program - Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow, and a member of AICA, the association of international art critics. He specialises in designing and producing projects and events that mash-up and contextualise seemingly disparate subjects (e.g. "d'Afrique d'Asie" at Ethan Cohen Fine Art, "Red Beans and Rice" at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center) and explores the overlapping areas of contemporary creative practice, medicine, design and technology (e.g. Seeing Ourselves, Divining Fragments, Seeing as Believing, and Cancer: One Cell's Search for Immortality. A contributing writer for the online publication ArtSlant, and contributing writer, art editor and editor-at-large for the lifestyle and contemporary culture periodical, aRude, he has written for Art Asia Pacific, Flavorpill, Ctrl+P Journal of Contemporary Art, and is the Pacific editor for d'Art International (Toronto). His writing will appear in the upcoming issue of Centerpoint Now, a globally distributed publication of the World Council of Peoples for the United Nations. Recently, he was invited as an international fashion journalist to Madrid Fashion Week.

As a medical scientist, his interests center around issues of the sensate body and in the ways that the physical self experiences and knows the world through the senses; as a cultural worker, his interests lie in examining the dynamics of subcultures nesting within larger cultures. As an artist, he is most interested in creating text-based works, experimenting in all media. Dr. Baysa initiated the SENSEight Series: experiential workshops on the senses and perception with curated audiences.

KJ Baysa has curated shows for the London Biennale, LA International Biennial, Chinese Biennial, Whitney Museum, Canon Corporation, The United Nations, and has organised and participated in art events throughout the US and in Paris, Cork, Trondheim, London, Bergen, Chiang Mai, Amsterdam, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Tuzla, Sarajevo, Beirut, Beijing, Bandung, Hong Kong, Manila, Santiago, Singapore, Cologne, Seoul, St. Petersburg, Leon, Mexico City, Lenzerheide, and Yokohama. Ex-officio board member of The Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School University and current board member of the Art Omi International Artist Colony, he has presented lectures at the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA in New York, the Phillips Collection in Washington DC, and the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Studies in Virginia.

Recently appointed as director of arts programming for The Institute for Art and Olfaction, he is a consultant to and associate of The Daily Brand, a multi-disciplinary communications agency based in Los Angeles headed by Colin Mangham, a fellow founding member of MOCA China. In addition, he is the Advisory Board Chair of Collectrium (NY) and advisor to Noosphere (NY), Art and Med (LA), Medical Avatar (NY). He is an organising committee member of MMVR/NextMed. The Curator Emeritus (2011) and Critic-in-Residence (2006) at Art Omi International Artist Colony in Ghent, New York, he received a 2007 Ford Foundation grant to lecture on contemporary curatorial practice at the Hanoi University of Culture in Vietnam after concluding a survey of contemporary art in south and north Vietnam. In 2009, he conducted curatorial workshops at Zayed University campuses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, and lectured at Sharjah University, United Arab Emirates.

Born and raised in Hawaii and completing his medical training at UCSF with a fellowship in allergy and clinical immunology, Dr. Baysa divides his time between New York and Los Angeles. He was an assistant clinical professor of pediatrics at the John A. Burns School of Medicine. With a special interest in the role of the sense of smell in health and aesthetics, he conceptualises projects with professional perfumers, is an advisor to A Lab on Fire, curates olfaction and gustation exhibitions, and collaborates in olfactory clinical research projects with scientists in Los Angeles and Berlin. He segued from a clinical practice in TriBeCa New York to focus on clinical research investigating olfactory stimuli and their potential beneficial effects on memory disorders.