이번 지희 장의 레호보트 시립미술관에서의 "수용하고 부유하는 피부" 에서는 여성의 몸과 사회와 자신과의 관계에 대한 관심을 표현하였다. 이번 전시는 여성의 신체의 전체적인 환경 또는 피부의 표면의 연상시키는 설치작품을 보여준다. 동시에. 이러한 신체 그 자체는 세상을 떠다니며 수용하고, 끌어안고, 껴안는 제스쳐를 보여준다. (...) 이번 전시에서는 작가는 동양의 명상을 할 수 있는 텐트와 같은 인간의 신체의 공간을 펼쳐놓고, 삶속에서의 여행처럼 인간관계를 시작하는 장소이자 자발적으로 생성되는 세계의 출발점이 되는 공간으로 관객들을 데려간다. (...) 대형 설치작업들을 통하여, 작가는 모든 살아있는 유기체의 만남, 충돌, 조정, 생산하는 공간 그 자체에 초점을 맞추려고 시도하였다. (...) 그러므로, 지희장의 "수용하고 부유하는 피부"는 개인적인 경험에서 출발하지만 서울과 뉴욕에서 두 사회 정치적 집단 경험을 자신의 미러링으로 확장된다. ■ 정연심

지희장_자궁 Womb_스판 패브릭, 동전, 실, 고무줄, 못_300×590×511cm_2016

지희장_수용하고 부유하는 피부 Embracing and Floating Skin_영상설치_00:07:13_2016

지희장_Origin of Life_종이조각, 조명_60×60×60cm_2016

JeeHui Chang is a Seoul-based artist, who studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and Hongik University in Seoul; she wasrecentlyawarded a residency at the CitéInternationale des Arts — Paris and was offered aninvitationfrom the Gana Art Foundation in 2015. The artist employs multi-media art forms ranging from painting and three-dimensional installations to performance. Utilizing many different artistic mediums and forms, Chang has depended on the visual idioms of "physical body intersection with human desire" and the very "relationship" between two different opposing elements. This has been apparent from her early works through her recent exhibition in Paris. ● JeeHui Chang's initial individual exhibitions in 2008 were entitled "28 Sweet Struggle" and "Sparking Twinkling,"held respectively at Gallery Soop and Art Café Sam, both in Seoul. The theme of her early works corresponds to those created in New York, the so-called "Ock-Chun" series. "Ock-Chun"refers to traditional Korean sweets or candies. "Ock" is literally"beads" in Chinese characters, and "Chun" is spring or getting energy. The titles "Candy and Sweets" represent fluctuating human desire and decaying natural conditions of bodily effects. The title "Tongue" was also employed to represent the reality of ordinary life. ● In New York, Chang also used her own body as a site of performative effects to evoke her own existence in a foreign land. This also initiated her own inquiry on the interrelationship between her identity as a woman artist and an alien visual artist. While Chang's quest for her own identity in relation to "femininity" is easily recognizable in her performance pieces and "Sweet"series, her own interests after her return to Seoul began with a "Nature" series. ● During this period JeeHui Chang's paintingsexpressed, more directly, observation and meditation reflecting peace and "sublime" effects. Although these paintings are more traditionally two dimensional, Chang displayed these paintings with the effects of a screen. In this way, her works are more abstract, but the effects visually change, depending on where you are in relation to the work;the works change every moment, according to your own location in the gallery. Although New York was a choice she made to continue to nourish her life as an artist, returning home to Korea required adjustment. Throughout her period of adjustment, I think the artistencountered "nature"as a black hole absorbing her soul; in this black hole she learned to face objects and people in a calmer,more comfortable way. ● The current exhibition of JeeHui Chang's work, held at Rehovot Municipal Art Gallery, is entitled "Embracing and Floating Skin,"and combines her artistic interests in the female body and the relation of self with society. The exhibition evokes an entire environment of the female body or the surface of the skin. At the same time, the body itself is seen in the gestures of embracing, hugging, and cuddling while floating in the world. ● The sculptural installations are composed in three compartments; in the Gallery A Hall, Chang has installed textile pieces in the form of shelters, caves, or human wombs. The intangible and "formless" skin encircles the entire gallery while the surface of the textile is pinned and fixed to the wall of the gallery. The surface resembles her own peach skin color, very vulnerable and pervasive with natural light and shadow. In the form of wombs, or the interior female body, this gallery gives rise to a new engendering site, where a number of different audiences can meet in this closed tent-like space. This is somewhat similar to the way Mikhail Bakhtin described the operation of a new body in his Rabelais and His World.(Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984).) By explaining the form of the grotesque work in the changing formless body, more specifically in the female body, a new body can be generated in this cave-like human body. The grotesque in the form of deformations carries historical, theoretical, and critical meaning, and the discovery of Nero's DomusAurea (Golden House) in the fifteen century gave rise to the term "grotesque" from a new critical perspective, as documented by Nicole Dacos in La Découverte de la DomusAurea et la formation des grotesques à la Renaissance.(Nicole Dacos, La Découverte de la Domus Aurea Et la Formation Des Grotesques À la Renaissance (London: Warburg Institute, 1969).) Chang's womb-like fluid space reminds us the operation of the grotesque female body in which a new type of body is formed and experienced. Although Chang's work varies in each exhibition, the artist has attempted to embody her own body politics and identities by using sweets and vulnerable materials such as textiles etc. In other words, grotesque has an interpretative characteristic which informs a birth of a new body by Bakhtin and Dacos, an interpretative aspect that embraces all a female body, warmth of the worm and even architectural and its protective nature of house in the works of Jee Hui Chang. ● The formless interior space evokes both intimacy and fear of claustrophobia. But by opening up the space like a tent, the viewers can move freely within this installation, like a mediation room. At the same time, the tactile, physical, or sexual experiences seen in the idea of skin/surfaceofJeeHui Chang's work produce obsessive textural results as was foundwith Yayoi Kusama and artists who work with optical visual illusion in contemporary art in all media ● This installation only consists of a tension of elastic bands and spandex fabric; each coin is entangled by threads and tied to nails on the wall by the elastic bands. A tent-like curtain comes across the real and the ideal. The interior is warm and cozy holding everything as if it were in the worm or nestled in mothers' breast. Whereas, there are violent and cruel reals from which we try to avoid such as the logics of economics. The action which ties coins up suggests a formation of another encounter and relation and development into a story. Previously, the artist made similar installations which straddled the real and the ideal. In this exhibition, however, the artist brings such straddling into the human body and tried to incorporate the contemplation of the East thereby displaying the tent as an attitude takes life as a journey, a site of the commencement of human relations and the departure of the beginning of the world which has spontaneously been self-generating. ● The "formless" and the cave-like intimate effects take place in JeeHui Chang's installation works in the second, middle, section of this exhibition. The movement of the audience is almost the way a space journey could be meticulously designed by the artist. This middle room is a mediation of many different opposing elements. The middlegallery also functions as "mediation," creating the middle-ground of the world. TheIn-Between Space, following the artist's phrase, generates the interpenetrating coexistence of the Ideal with everyday life on one level and the instant meeting of alldifferent existences. The room reminds me of a meeting point where various identities embody new forms of life. This gallery also acts as a point where everything within this mediated gallery is "interdependent" and "interrelational."This effect tells us of the operation of Buddhist "emptiness," which is not meant to be "having nothing at all." Thinking of "Sunyata" the original word for "emptiness," the middle gallery brings us to imagine the room of "Sunyata,"denoting "openness and understanding coexistence." The metaphor for this subject matter is represented in the hanging objects and installation pieces. The ambience is poetic, flickering, floating, and intimate. The positive and negative forms represent two different opposing elements, producing the hybrid engendering body. ● A sperm departures from A-Hall and encounters an egg during its journey. This meeting is a tranquil space of the emergence of life and a new history. Although it seems to be empty and peaceful, it is a place in which establishes relations of existence by intense conflicts. Each exhibition space is to evoke the pattern and rhythm of our life explicitly. During an interview, the artist said that she had conferred the information of implantation and studied Chakra, which is the flow of energy in India, so as to produce mysterious patterns and forms of shadow for the story. The story of sperm and egg goes beyond its literal implication; rather, it implies a nature of convergence among conflicting and heteronomous elements. ● In Gallery C Hall, JeeHui Chang has installed interactive and moving images. In this gallery, viewers can experience the space itself as a site of the five senses in order to make a space of "absorption" and "immersion."It signifies a space of "Pratītyasamutpāda," in Sanskrit, literally meaning "dependent arising or dependent origination." Although this esotericterm sounds complicated, it is a crucial concept for the interrelation between human and objects/environments. Indeed, the artist does not appropriate this idea directly, but the term shows the 'relationship' which continually appears in the works of Jee Hui Chang. Objects and ourselves become a unity by becoming each other. This becoming is emphasized by allowing the viewer directly experiences interactive communication such as the sound art works. The encounter between us and objects is also can be found in the works of Korean contemporary artists, who emphasized existentiality and relationality (for instance, in the works of Ufan Lee, the Monochrome artists Park Seo-bo and Ha Chong-hyon), which was the main concept of Korean avant-gardian movement from the 1960s. The works of JeeHee Chang conspicuously reflect such tendency of Korean contemporary art. Of course, the works are quite different from the painterly style of Korean Monochrome, but her works include the contemporary interest of Korean art such as the objecthood and corporeality, a phenomenological meeting between the spectator and objects and feminism or femininity. Along with these interest, all objects or existences are coexistent and interrelated. By creating the site-specific installations, the artist has attempted to focus on the space itself, in which all living organisms meet, collide, and reconcile, producing a new body. ● Having passed through A and B rooms, the spectator enters the final room-C room. In the C room, the audience is welcomed by an interactive sound installation based on the sounds of the human body, which was produced by the artist and the finger-style guitarist Ziuk Hwang. The sounds resonate in the hall reminding us of the heart-beats of mother and giving stable comforts as if the room is the worm. Also, the room is decorated by large bed cushions as if it were ready to welcome visitors from the long-term journey. To Jee Hui Chang, such exhibition space is believed to be a moving space which directly allows the spectator experience the worm and implies a symbolic meaning of the formation of life. The artist appears to take a concept of intervention, spirituality and revelation of oppressed sensational things as imperatives. These come into being in a cozy house, the female body and the worm embracing everything within mobile exhibition space. In this space, different ideas, different ideas of our life and others are co-existent. ● Therefore, Chang's "embracing and floating skin"stems from her own personal experiences but expands to her own mirroring of sociopolitical collective experiences both in Seoul and in New York. ■ YeonShim Chung

Vol.20161230a | 지희장展 / JEEHUI CHANG / 張芝希 / installation.media art