Introduction to the Exhibition

 

Art Space Pool is pleased to present a 2015 Pool Production, siren eun young jung’s solo exhibition Trans-Theatre, from August 20, 2015 to September 20, 2015. This exhibition presents a selection of works from the Yeosung Gukgeuk Project (2008 – 2015) that the artist has undertaken since 2008, introducing and re-casting the archival materials that she has collected and referenced in the process of planning and realizing the project. Yeosung Gukgeuk—a genre that began at the end of the 1940s and enjoyed the pinnacle of its popularity in the 1950s-1960s, only to then experience its decline—is a type of Changmugeuk (Korean traditional theater combining song and dance) in which all of the roles—including the male roles—are performed by actresses. Over the course of the project’s seven-year progression, siren eun young jung recorded with her camera lens the actresses’ preparation process (from makeup and rehearsalto the moment the actresses appear on stage) and their daily lives away from the stage, and has gone on to create plays based on these materials. Above all, she has utilized a diverse range of artistic productions and practices from a perspective of unfixed gender.

 

To be sure, Trans-Theatre is not a simple retrospective archive that organizes all of the artist’s collected materials and displays her works in chronological order. The goal of this exhibition is not to present the completion of an “exhibition” or “archive” itself, but instead to reflect the progression of the artist’s concerns that she drew on to conceive and execute her works in the midst of these archival materials and references. The exhibition space may have the appearance of a room holding reference materials on Yeosung Gukgeuk. But on closer examination, it is an ambiguous reference room full of materials whose dates of creation are unknown, images where the question of copyright is uncertain, statements that have no purpose, and oral declarations that jar with factualness. In this space, we see an individual—the artist—who is absorbing not materials that already became history, but rather histories that are unclear and nearly nonexistent; she sits at her desk, pondering how to unravel these histories and tease out artworks from them. As such, this is not an archival room of the type found in museums that seek a certain state of publicness, but rather an informal, private archive.

 

One might be curious as to why the artist would publicly expose the process of her deliberations. Even where she carried out the Yeosung Gukgeuk Project in a way that fits well within the institutional art system, i.e., attempting variations such as exhibitions, plays, lectures, research, and so on, why does she again present her project in a state of informality? It is an archival practice of “performative gender” that the artist has continually endeavored to integrate into her works up to the present. siren reveals that a certain performance of a certain subject can cripple historical interpellation and the solidity of the organizational interior through the concept of performative gender. In this context, the archive does not arrange materials that have been covered with a specific historical perspective, and it does not impart solidity to these materials.

 

Trans-Theatre is an exhibition-play by artist siren eun young jung. The scenes, alternating to and from the Yeosung Gukgeuk stages, dressing rooms behind the stages, and the homes of elderly actresses, finally cut to reveal the artist’s studio. The dedicated chronicler, who remained in the corner of each scene with her notebook and camera to capture the images of Yeosung Gukgeuk’s actresses, now performs her own theme on the stage. In her acting, there will only be piercing, performative actions in which the artist copies source materials, attaches them to the wall, rummages through bookshelves, and repeatedly watches videos, not clear dialogues that explain what she wanted to express in the meantime.