Artist’s Statement

Most often my works take the form of performances, installations and photographs based on moving images. During the early years of my career as an artist, my interest concentrated on the happenings in which I explored my own female body. In other words, I thought that my interest in the individuals within the system, femininity, personal tastes, and social taboos was in structural accord with the attributes of the medium of video art. Since 2004 I have focused on the subjects of the holes in the human body and the slimy bodily fluids discharged from them. My artistic interest is well reflected on the following images tears of those with broken hearts compared to the saliva exchanged during a kiss; a woman with her menstrual blood on her clothing versus a man eating animal blood soup; a scene in which someone letting loose a dragonfly after sticking a flower on its tail. Every work shown in my two projects from Seoul and Chicago was built on the subject of urine. This human fluid secretions can be described as “abject” whose literal definition pertains to “something very humble or contemptibly mean”, but the word also has a connotative meansing of “disturbing one’s identity, the system, and the social order, and ignoring boundaries, statuses, and rules.”  The abject gushing out of the holes through which the body and the external world are connected such as the anus, genitals and the mouth represents the marginal elements that threaten stable social identities and epitomizes the things that the social system conceals and excludes in order to maintain itself. In my sixth project in 2011 where I interpreted the scenes of history of torture in terms of atonement, I delved into the possibility that the other side of pain resides within the realm of pleasure. Currently in 2013, I am still searching for what is wholly my own, rethinking and reexamining the area and context of my artistic interest. 

My works tends to make the viewers feel uncomfortable, for they concern with what people usually want to ignore or keep to themselves. This accounts for the presence of grotesque images in my works and the repellent nature of these images often embodies itself as abnormal sexual codes, violence and filth. I intend to force one to confront what is personally private rather than looking into the mechanism of public communication. They aim to facilitate one to reveal the nature of the existing social system by making individual to activate his or her own subtle and complicated senses. I believe this can be achieved by letting insignificant and subtle marginal senses penetrate into the solid and inflexible structure fortified by rationality and power through various channels so as to break socially fixed identities. My works questions, therefore, the hegemonies that control both society and its individuals, and the outcomes are given in the forms of individuals’ desires which are not sanctioned by society and are irrelevant to those codes that are acceptable or commonly used in society.