Masters of Disguise 

Chan-Hyo Bae / Jung S Kim / Youngho Kang

 

Curated by Hyewon Yi

 

Preview Open to the Public: June 5 – June 15

Private Showing by Appointment: July 6 – July 31

Opening Reception: Thursday, June 20, 2024, 6 PM – 8 PM

https://www.studioartego.com

 

Artego Gallery is pleased to announce Masters of Disguise, an exhibition featuring three contemporary Korean photographers whose practices revolve around masquerading in self-portraits: Chan-Hyo Bae, Jung S Kim, and Youngho Kang. These artists investigate hybridization of cultures in our age of globalization. Employing masquerade to explore their individual personas, they design props, costumes, make-up, and hairdos to create staged images. Fluidity and artificiality, as manifested by ever-changing appearances, draw attention to the superficiality of biological and cultural markers. By blurring the boundaries of gender and race, these artists challenge and destabilize conventional notions of culture, race, and gender as determinants of personal identity.

 

Working in London, New York, and Seoul respectively, each artist utilizes masquerading as a vehicle to examine the multiple identities that exist within the self. Chan-Hyo Bae presents Existing in Costume, a photographic series that consumed a decade of Bae’s life following his move to the UK in 2005. Cross-dressing as female British nobility and characters from European fairytales, Europe’s history of power struggles, and the era of witch-hunting was a means to escape cultural alienation and offer a corrective to the stereotypical view of the Asian male in Great Britain and Europe. Meticulously researched and orchestrated, each work required collaborative effort, from scouting locations to hiring actors. Selected works form Bae’s two sub-series, Existing in Costume (2005–07) and Punishment Project (2011–12) will be presented. 

 

Jung S Kim offers works from her Circle series. For Circle II (2010–2011), Kim transformed herself into characters from traditional Korean fairytales, largely inspired by an upbringing immersed in her Shaman maternal aunt’s life. Circle III (2016–2021), which appropriates the graphic format of the Korean gambling card Hwa-tu, is deeply personal, as the artist visualizes childhood memories that were the source of psychological trauma. Exhibited for the first time is her early 1997 reclining self-portrait taken during her pregnancy.

 

For his New York debut, Youngho Kang presents Portrait of Ouroboros–99 Variations (2008–09), theatrical self-portraits in which the artist masquerades as characters ranging from a drag queen to a hideous humanoid. Unlike Bae and Kim, who deploy static portraiture, Kang dramatizes his performativity through exaggerated facial expressions as he poses before a mirror utilizing prosthetics, props, and some rather messy materials. Kang’s project consists of poetry as much as photography, as he titles his works based on the chance occurrences of I Ching, combining words utilizing Surrealistic automatism that reveal the contradictions and absurdities of life, as in The King Who Grows the Chin and Courageous Betrayal.

 

Joining a long list of pioneering art photographers who have deployed masquerade in their conceptual practice, from Duchamp to Sherman, these Korean artists subvert the codes and conventions of portraiture in order to challenge preconceived notions that viewers may hold about their subjects. Masquerade inherently implies parody, as the artists pretend to be someone else. The strategy entered the Postmodern canon in the hands of Feminist, Queer, Black, and other minority artists as they responded critically to a dominant White heterosexual male culture.

 

Masquerade provides these artists with an opportunity to defy and escape the conformity characteristic of Korean society, a nation that only recently has achieved global popular cultural influence despite its rigid educational system, marked imbalance of gender power, and a lack of Queer rights. Bae deploys masquerade as a critique of Eurocentric views of humanity. Kim critiques the burdens of fixed Korean gender roles and the rigid framework of traditional Korean folktales. Kang’s chameleon-like imaginary free-flowing human/non-human characters address climatological discourse in the Anthropocene.

 

Wednesday - Saturday, 12 - 6pm

appointment only: Monday and Tuesday

917-692-1545 (TEXT ONLY)

Studio Artego is located at 32-88 48th street, Queens, NY, 11103. 

For RSVP: hello@studioartego.com

https://www.studioartego.com