Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed by K-women artists
Minsun Kim
Last year, I visited Simple Acts of Listening at West, an exhibition with work by Korean artists with immigrant experiences, aiming to redefine 'Listening' as a socio-political act. The show received a commendable response, prompting a follow-up exhibition that is on view this year: Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed. This new show expands the previously explored acts of listening further into feminism, with work by eight Korean female artists. I visit the opening of the current exhibition with curiosity, wondering how it might explore the potential for women's emancipation while not confining women solely within the label of 'woman'. During the opening talk, the curators explained that their focus was directed beyond conventional boundaries, exploring and bringing together diverse topics such as feminism, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, and their expansive intersections. These overarching themes formed the crux of Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed. It explores Hex, emphasizing women's potent yet unconventional power that challenges patriarchy, Vex, breaking boundaries beyond class and race, and Sex, signifying total emancipation through a societal shift in human sexuality.
The show is the result of a collaboration between Baruch Gottlieb, a regular curator at West in The Hague, and Ji Yoon Yang, director of Alternative Space LOOP: an art institution in Seoul. In South Korea’s capital, LOOP has emerged as a rare, responsive space offering an alternative perspective toward the conventional white cube spaces in the city. It aims to foster diverse international discourse beyond domestic discussions. With Yang's leadership, LOOP not only challenges established institutional viewpoints but also amplifies a female perspective within the predominantly patriarchal art scene. Recent initiatives like the 'Earthsea Study' program stand out for emphasizing solidarity among Asian female practitioners.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
Mackerel Safranski, Paul, Acrylic on canvas, 130.3x193.9cm, 2022
In line with LOOP’s ambitions, the exhibition Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed features eight female Korean artists in a wide generational range: from Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, born in the fifties, to Eunsae Lee, an artist born in the eighties and who is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The small country of Korea is a place where modernization has occurred faster than anywhere else. The various ways in which different generations of women capture these constant changes from their own distinct perspectives is an important aspect of the exhibition.
The spatial arrangement of the current show is different from last year's. In the previous exhibition, each artwork was displayed in a row in West's significant corridor, recalling enough of the building's former use as the US embassy. This current exhibition extends across parts of the 1st-floor corridor and the ground floor, leading to the auditorium room. Audiences might easily overlook some of the works due to the exhibition spanning relatively sporadically. It continues from the inner space to the outer garden, where an installation by the artist Ye Eun Min is displayed using items collected while wandering around The Hague.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
Ye Eun Min, Connecting the Unconnected, Items Collected from the Streets, Paint, Variable Size, 2023
Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ (Breaking Wheel)
In the exhibition, there's an evident exploration beyond one's own identity across all the artistic practices, seeking new expansions rather than being confined by gender boundaries. Among them lies a work most directly related to the emancipatory power of women, capable of subverting patriarchal society: Chang Jia's Beautiful Instruments 3: Breaking Wheel.
With her series Beautiful Instruments, Chang recreates scenes of historical torture into new instruments, based on the artist's imagination. Upon entering her exhibition space, visitors will be drawn to the singing of women from a video. This video documents a performance, featuring 12 large wheels adorned with flowers and feathers. In the performance that is represented in the video, 12 performers seated on the saddle of the instrument rotate each wheel by moving their legs, causing the feathers to graze by the female performers’ genitalia. To exert force in spinning the heavy wheel, women sing the labor song, 디딜 방아 타령 (Didil Banga Taryeong).
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
(left) Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ-12 collages- cycle: complex symbolic relationships of the seasonal signal, collaged cyanotypes, 193x120cm, 2023
(right) Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ-12 collages - convict: monologue, collaged cyanotypes, 193x120cm, 2023
These songs utilize the forbidden Phrygian scales from Western medieval religious music. While turning the wheel is strenuous, the more it turns, the more it intensifies their sexual pleasure. Crystalized words adorn the saddles on which performers sit, but audiences cannot read the words inscribed on the saddles, which exceed 2 meters. Additionally, any marks left on their buttocks as they spin the wheel disappear after the performance ends. The eroticism of women enjoying pleasure through feathers on the wheel, rather than the productivity enforced by labor through the wheel, transcends the conventional constellation that labor songs and religious music were supposed to provoke. The 12 engraved words on the saddle are selected by the artist, considering them as crucial elements that revolve around the artist's perception of the world. Those 12 words are assembled into 12 collages, and currently, four of them are exhibited at West. By freely traversing the dichotomous concepts of societal taboos, such as labor(pain) and play(pleasure), religious sanctity (purity), and sexual gratification, ultimately place women in the position of subjectivity in Chang’s practice.
Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ (Breaking Wheel) - Video, FHD video, 11min 56sec, 2014
Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix / Mouth to Mouth
From the ground floor where three works are situated, including Chang's work, and ascending the stairs to the first floor, one encounters six different rooms by three artists in a corridor. Among them, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work relates to my curiosity that came to this opening, the inevitability of generalization and categorization through language, and the curiosity about exploring beyond language's impossibility. Teresa Hak Kyung Cha is a Korean-American artist whose work is more widely recognized and exhibited overseas than in South Korea. She was born during the Korean War while her family was evacuating from Seoul to Busan. Afterward, Cha and her family emigrated to escape South Korea’s post-war dictatorship and settled in the U.S., this continued immigrant experience deeply affected her practice.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix, Performance Image, 1975
In this show, two of her works are displayed in separate rooms. Upon entering the first room, viewers are faced with AVEUGLE VOIX (Blind Voice), a performance image. These images serve as documentation of a performance Cha presented in 1975. Reminded by the fact that people from the Joseon Dynasty that existed on the Korean Peninsula, were referred to as ‘White cloth ethnos’, we see her dressed completely in white, her long, flowing black hair sharply standing out against it. She obscures her eyes and mouth with long white fabric containing the French words ‘Voix (Voice)’ and ‘Aveugle (blind)’ in black letters. Then she continues to unfold a white fabric roll, revealing the words 'geste/ aveugle / voix / sans / mot / sans / me (gesture/ blind / voice / without / word / without / me)’ and 'words / fail / me', with their interpretation changing depending how much of the fabric roll she unfolds and the order in which they are read.
To delve deeper into her highly theoretical yet poetic work, we should pay attention to how she experimented with the contradictions within language and the cracks between language and existence. Observing her attempts to scatter and experiment with these contradictions, is particularly evident in a piece that is on view in the next room called Mouth to Mouth (1975): a single-channel videotape with sound, where natural sounds are synthesized instead of the sounds of the language her mouth is representing—Korean vowels. Viewers unfamiliar with Korean might interpret the shapes of her mouth into their familiar language, offering a fascinating perspective on experiencing her work. Especially intriguing are the different possibilities evoked by this work presented in The Hague, where there might be fewer Korean speakers.
Overturning inside and outside
During the opening Q&A, someone from the audience asks why the exhibition features Korean women artists had to be situated abroad, rather than within the country. Gottlieb notes that with the rising popularity of K-culture internationally, the media often portrays Korean women through a limited lens. He says that while the media showcases certain images of Korean women, there’s a need to represent the diverse spectrum of Korean females beyond these narrow depictions.
On the one hand, you could say that this exhibition succeeds in presenting that variety. On the other hand, however, the show still holds onto the artist's overarching ‘Korean women’. This is a label imposed by external perspectives; we wouldn't put the name tags on ourselves. Marginalized beings in society, such as women and people of color, are easily at risk of recognizing their existence through the gaze of others rather than their own subjectivity. And those external gazes, when deeply internalized, become a cruel tool to judge those who fall under the same category as them, fostering misogyny within women and intra-racial discrimination by the embedded external perspective. However, paradoxically, we also find a necessity in these categories, as they offer visibility and a platform for recognition. This duality prompts us to adopt these labels for acknowledgment while simultaneously challenging and transcending their limitations.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Artist Talk
Curators: Baruch Gottlieb, Ji Yoon Yang with Artists: Chang Jia, Eunsae Lee
I pondered whether the true emancipation sought by Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed should disrupt the boundaries of ‘we’, constantly overturning inside and outside, suggesting that empowerment doesn't wait only from the outside but also potentially begins from within. I asked the curator, Baruch, why, in his talks about the exhibition concepts, he chose the word ‘emancipation’ instead of ‘liberation’. He shared his view that ‘collectivity’ is emphasized more within the term ‘emancipation’. And I found out that the notion of collectivity resonated in response to the audience’s question. True emancipation might occur when change vibrates simultaneously inside and outside, or when the boundaries blur, unable to distinctly separate inside and outside — this notion of inside and outside can be metaphorical, representing the individual’s internal and external and also the borders within and outside of nations.
This show at West questions how artists, as individuals, can explore, each in their personal yet collective ways together, the fixation force of the language and rational thinking deeply entrenched by the mechanistic worldview of capitalism and patriarchal epistemology to investigate the complexity of ecology, class, race, and gender issues. Furthermore, it allows the audience, as other individuals, to expand inquiries, withholding hasty judgments and categorizations, permitting an inefficient time for exploration within the premises of this place of exhibition as the other half of the whole collectivity.
The Willow is Back Reading Performance from Artist Hong Lee Hyunsook
Performers: Carry Kremer, Elisa Dubbelman, Rimke Lammerinkm, Sun Mi Lee, Seohyun Lee (from left side)
2024.2. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. February. 2024, Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.
Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed by K-women artists
Minsun Kim
Last year, I visited Simple Acts of Listening at West, an exhibition with work by Korean artists with immigrant experiences, aiming to redefine 'Listening' as a socio-political act. The show received a commendable response, prompting a follow-up exhibition that is on view this year: Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed. This new show expands the previously explored acts of listening further into feminism, with work by eight Korean female artists. I visit the opening of the current exhibition with curiosity, wondering how it might explore the potential for women's emancipation while not confining women solely within the label of 'woman'. During the opening talk, the curators explained that their focus was directed beyond conventional boundaries, exploring and bringing together diverse topics such as feminism, eco-feminism, eco-socialism, and their expansive intersections. These overarching themes formed the crux of Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed. It explores Hex, emphasizing women's potent yet unconventional power that challenges patriarchy, Vex, breaking boundaries beyond class and race, and Sex, signifying total emancipation through a societal shift in human sexuality.
The show is the result of a collaboration between Baruch Gottlieb, a regular curator at West in The Hague, and Ji Yoon Yang, director of Alternative Space LOOP: an art institution in Seoul. In South Korea’s capital, LOOP has emerged as a rare, responsive space offering an alternative perspective toward the conventional white cube spaces in the city. It aims to foster diverse international discourse beyond domestic discussions. With Yang's leadership, LOOP not only challenges established institutional viewpoints but also amplifies a female perspective within the predominantly patriarchal art scene. Recent initiatives like the 'Earthsea Study' program stand out for emphasizing solidarity among Asian female practitioners.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
Mackerel Safranski, Paul, Acrylic on canvas, 130.3x193.9cm, 2022
In line with LOOP’s ambitions, the exhibition Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed features eight female Korean artists in a wide generational range: from Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, born in the fifties, to Eunsae Lee, an artist born in the eighties and who is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. The small country of Korea is a place where modernization has occurred faster than anywhere else. The various ways in which different generations of women capture these constant changes from their own distinct perspectives is an important aspect of the exhibition.
The spatial arrangement of the current show is different from last year's. In the previous exhibition, each artwork was displayed in a row in West's significant corridor, recalling enough of the building's former use as the US embassy. This current exhibition extends across parts of the 1st-floor corridor and the ground floor, leading to the auditorium room. Audiences might easily overlook some of the works due to the exhibition spanning relatively sporadically. It continues from the inner space to the outer garden, where an installation by the artist Ye Eun Min is displayed using items collected while wandering around The Hague.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
Ye Eun Min, Connecting the Unconnected, Items Collected from the Streets, Paint, Variable Size, 2023
Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ (Breaking Wheel)
In the exhibition, there's an evident exploration beyond one's own identity across all the artistic practices, seeking new expansions rather than being confined by gender boundaries. Among them lies a work most directly related to the emancipatory power of women, capable of subverting patriarchal society: Chang Jia's Beautiful Instruments 3: Breaking Wheel.
With her series Beautiful Instruments, Chang recreates scenes of historical torture into new instruments, based on the artist's imagination. Upon entering her exhibition space, visitors will be drawn to the singing of women from a video. This video documents a performance, featuring 12 large wheels adorned with flowers and feathers. In the performance that is represented in the video, 12 performers seated on the saddle of the instrument rotate each wheel by moving their legs, causing the feathers to graze by the female performers’ genitalia. To exert force in spinning the heavy wheel, women sing the labor song, 디딜 방아 타령 (Didil Banga Taryeong).
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
(left) Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ-12 collages- cycle: complex symbolic relationships of the seasonal signal, collaged cyanotypes, 193x120cm, 2023
(right) Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ-12 collages - convict: monologue, collaged cyanotypes, 193x120cm, 2023
These songs utilize the forbidden Phrygian scales from Western medieval religious music. While turning the wheel is strenuous, the more it turns, the more it intensifies their sexual pleasure. Crystalized words adorn the saddles on which performers sit, but audiences cannot read the words inscribed on the saddles, which exceed 2 meters. Additionally, any marks left on their buttocks as they spin the wheel disappear after the performance ends. The eroticism of women enjoying pleasure through feathers on the wheel, rather than the productivity enforced by labor through the wheel, transcends the conventional constellation that labor songs and religious music were supposed to provoke. The 12 engraved words on the saddle are selected by the artist, considering them as crucial elements that revolve around the artist's perception of the world. Those 12 words are assembled into 12 collages, and currently, four of them are exhibited at West. By freely traversing the dichotomous concepts of societal taboos, such as labor(pain) and play(pleasure), religious sanctity (purity), and sexual gratification, ultimately place women in the position of subjectivity in Chang’s practice.
Chang Jia, Beautiful Instruments Ⅲ (Breaking Wheel) - Video, FHD video, 11min 56sec, 2014
Teresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix / Mouth to Mouth
From the ground floor where three works are situated, including Chang's work, and ascending the stairs to the first floor, one encounters six different rooms by three artists in a corridor. Among them, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's work relates to my curiosity that came to this opening, the inevitability of generalization and categorization through language, and the curiosity about exploring beyond language's impossibility. Teresa Hak Kyung Cha is a Korean-American artist whose work is more widely recognized and exhibited overseas than in South Korea. She was born during the Korean War while her family was evacuating from Seoul to Busan. Afterward, Cha and her family emigrated to escape South Korea’s post-war dictatorship and settled in the U.S., this continued immigrant experience deeply affected her practice.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Exhibition View
Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Aveugle Voix, Performance Image, 1975
In this show, two of her works are displayed in separate rooms. Upon entering the first room, viewers are faced with AVEUGLE VOIX (Blind Voice), a performance image. These images serve as documentation of a performance Cha presented in 1975. Reminded by the fact that people from the Joseon Dynasty that existed on the Korean Peninsula, were referred to as ‘White cloth ethnos’, we see her dressed completely in white, her long, flowing black hair sharply standing out against it. She obscures her eyes and mouth with long white fabric containing the French words ‘Voix (Voice)’ and ‘Aveugle (blind)’ in black letters. Then she continues to unfold a white fabric roll, revealing the words 'geste/ aveugle / voix / sans / mot / sans / me (gesture/ blind / voice / without / word / without / me)’ and 'words / fail / me', with their interpretation changing depending how much of the fabric roll she unfolds and the order in which they are read.
To delve deeper into her highly theoretical yet poetic work, we should pay attention to how she experimented with the contradictions within language and the cracks between language and existence. Observing her attempts to scatter and experiment with these contradictions, is particularly evident in a piece that is on view in the next room called Mouth to Mouth (1975): a single-channel videotape with sound, where natural sounds are synthesized instead of the sounds of the language her mouth is representing—Korean vowels. Viewers unfamiliar with Korean might interpret the shapes of her mouth into their familiar language, offering a fascinating perspective on experiencing her work. Especially intriguing are the different possibilities evoked by this work presented in The Hague, where there might be fewer Korean speakers.
Overturning inside and outside
During the opening Q&A, someone from the audience asks why the exhibition features Korean women artists had to be situated abroad, rather than within the country. Gottlieb notes that with the rising popularity of K-culture internationally, the media often portrays Korean women through a limited lens. He says that while the media showcases certain images of Korean women, there’s a need to represent the diverse spectrum of Korean females beyond these narrow depictions.
On the one hand, you could say that this exhibition succeeds in presenting that variety. On the other hand, however, the show still holds onto the artist's overarching ‘Korean women’. This is a label imposed by external perspectives; we wouldn't put the name tags on ourselves. Marginalized beings in society, such as women and people of color, are easily at risk of recognizing their existence through the gaze of others rather than their own subjectivity. And those external gazes, when deeply internalized, become a cruel tool to judge those who fall under the same category as them, fostering misogyny within women and intra-racial discrimination by the embedded external perspective. However, paradoxically, we also find a necessity in these categories, as they offer visibility and a platform for recognition. This duality prompts us to adopt these labels for acknowledgment while simultaneously challenging and transcending their limitations.
Hexed, Vexed and Sexed: 8 Women Artists from Korea Artist Talk
Curators: Baruch Gottlieb, Ji Yoon Yang with Artists: Chang Jia, Eunsae Lee
I pondered whether the true emancipation sought by Hexed, Vexed, and Sexed should disrupt the boundaries of ‘we’, constantly overturning inside and outside, suggesting that empowerment doesn't wait only from the outside but also potentially begins from within. I asked the curator, Baruch, why, in his talks about the exhibition concepts, he chose the word ‘emancipation’ instead of ‘liberation’. He shared his view that ‘collectivity’ is emphasized more within the term ‘emancipation’. And I found out that the notion of collectivity resonated in response to the audience’s question. True emancipation might occur when change vibrates simultaneously inside and outside, or when the boundaries blur, unable to distinctly separate inside and outside — this notion of inside and outside can be metaphorical, representing the individual’s internal and external and also the borders within and outside of nations.
This show at West questions how artists, as individuals, can explore, each in their personal yet collective ways together, the fixation force of the language and rational thinking deeply entrenched by the mechanistic worldview of capitalism and patriarchal epistemology to investigate the complexity of ecology, class, race, and gender issues. Furthermore, it allows the audience, as other individuals, to expand inquiries, withholding hasty judgments and categorizations, permitting an inefficient time for exploration within the premises of this place of exhibition as the other half of the whole collectivity.
The Willow is Back Reading Performance from Artist Hong Lee Hyunsook
Performers: Carry Kremer, Elisa Dubbelman, Rimke Lammerinkm, Sun Mi Lee, Seohyun Lee (from left side)
2024.2. ACK 발행. ACK (artcritickorea) 글의 저작권은 필자에게 있습니다. February. 2024, Published by ACK. The copyright of the article published by ACK is owned by its author.