Korean-American artist Misoo Bang’s solo exhibition “전미개오 轉迷開悟: Buddhist Teaching of Being Freed of Anguish and Reaching Nirvana” opens at the Alliance for the Visual Arts (AVA) Gallery in Lebanon on August 22. The show features works from her “Giantess” series, which depicts survivors of sexual violence, her “Giant Asian Girls” series, which challenges stereotypes of Asian-American women, and her “Lotus Flowers” series, which uses the traditional Buddhist painting technique Taenghwa to portray Buddhas and female Bodhisattvas. Bang, a Vermont-based lecturer at the University of Vermont, was named one of the 10 emerging artists of New England by Art New England in 2019 and a Vermont artist to watch by the Vermont Arts Council in 2020.
The exhibition matters because it brings together Bang’s personal and cultural exploration of trauma, identity, and empowerment, addressing urgent social issues such as sexual violence and the marginalization of Asian-American women. By reversing power dynamics in her work—depicting Asian women as large and dominant against smaller Western cultural imagery—Bang offers a counter-narrative to exoticization and invisibility. Her use of Taenghwa, a traditional Korean Buddhist technique, also highlights a reclamation of heritage in the face of Western cultural influence, making the show both a personal statement and a broader commentary on race, gender, and postcolonial identity.