Seo Young Chang “Off”

Doosan Gallery

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DOOSAN Gallery New York presents Off, an exhibition of emerging artist Seo Young Chang, a participant of DOOSAN Residency New York in Spring 2019. In the exhibition, Chang’s five selected works including video and installation from the past five years (2013-2018) will be on view.

The precarious state of human existence has been a primary question in Seo Young Chang’s work. Narrated in an estranged voice, her work illuminates the incompleteness of a being who is destined to oscillate between life and death, beginning and end, and past and future. Not knowing where she/he belongs to, her/his feeling of anxiety and desolation is mediated through the loading time of a video. In an attempt to describe someone’s repetitively denied way of existing and its possible form, the artist sets up a situation by using repetitive movements, texts, rules, conditions, and narration as her main material.

Off implicates a state of waiting for something to be turned “on” again. Reflecting her interest in disease and death, Chang has developed her work around the relationship between body and time. The debilitated body goes into the individual spacetime of “off” as its pain cannot be shared with others because of the relativity of pain. A single-channel video work Circle (2017) and a two-channel video installation Nameless Disease (2016) represents the body in this state of “off,” being isolated from the external society. Running in a loop, both works present the perennially repeated movements of performers within orchestrated situations. For example, Circle shows an endless loop of a performer descending a spiral staircase; and Nameless Disease displays a man moving along the same circle over and over again while lifting his heels up. These limited situations in the videos maximize the sense of anxiety and unfamiliarity. At the same time, these endless looping videos build up a world, from which the subject cannot escape by its own will. While the performers in Circle and Nameless Disease continue repeating their movements in order to escape from their incomplete body. Cream (2018), Chang’s recent piece, confronts death with a neutral attitude. In Cream, a person’s nose and mouth are exposed outside of the body-bag that holds a corpse. Two hands are massaging skin/leather, which is unclear whether it belongs to a person who is alive. A person in the body-bag repetitively refers to ten adjectives that are frequently used for anti-aging cream advertisements. Cream refers to two different types of cream—one is an anti-aging facial cream for human skin and the other is a cream for managing leather products. The dual function of the single word cream corresponds to the transition between life and death.

Seo Young Chang’s Off explores an indeterminate condition of existence, body, and time, and brings the question of human existence into our own life.

Seo Young Chang (b. 1983) received her M.A in Art in Context from Berlin University of the Arts and M.F.A and B.F.A in Sculpture from Ewha Womans University. Chang has held solo exhibitions at CR Collective (2017, Seoul, Korea), Gyeongnam Art Museum (2012, Seoul, Korea), Space Zip (2010, Seoul, Korea). Her works in group exhibitions have been presented at venues including Arko Art Center (2018, Seoul, Korea), Seoul Museum of Art (2018, Seoul, Korea), Seoul Olympic Museum of Art (2018, Seoul, Korea), Art Space Pool (2018, Seoul, Korea), Wumin Art Center (2018, Cheongju, Korea), One and J. (2018, Seoul, Korea), Archive Bomm (2017, Seoul, Korea), Incheon Art Platform (2017, Incheon, Korea), Total Museum of Contemporary Art (2017, Seoul, Korea), Gallery 175 (2017, Seoul, Korea), Shinhan Gallery Yeoksam (2017, Seoul, Korea), DOOSAN Gallery (2015, Seoul, Korea). Chang has participated in artist-in-residency programs at Chapter II Residency (2018, Seoul, Korea), Incheon Art Platform (2017, Incheon, Korea), and MMCA Residency Goyang (2016, Goyang, Korea).
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