The Woman built a house, slippery like an oyster

At East Asia Feminism: FANtasia, an exhibition held in 2015 at the Seoul Museum of Art, Jang Pa received a question from a journalist at a press meeting. “Do you consider yourself a feminist?” Jang Pa was the youngest artist among the participants, and she presented a provocative figure. Supposedly Jang Pa responded in turn: “What do you mean by that question?” The journalist’s question was overtly disrespectful given its implication that Jang did not even know what feminism is. But in truth it is even more deceptive. It overrides the lack of self-reflection in feminism, art, and feminist art, and engages in an inquisition of violent judgment, asking whether “your work even fits feminism.” Of course, such a judgement depends on context, but few would pose such a blunt inquiry to Jang Pa, or to any other artist for that matter (Or perhaps not?!). Whatever the case, Jang’s work, which evokes a sense of suspicion and popular “enmity,” could perhaps be summarized as “woman’s grotesque.” Her work recreates the female form in a bizarre, extremely unnatural, and violent manner. So, can it truly be said to provide the perspective of women? In this respect Jang’s work boldly occupies the boundaries that question the nature of “feminism” and “feminist art.”

The provocativeness of Jang’s paintings is exemplified by the Lady-X series. Lady-X “deals with the sexuality of women at a micro-level and the issues of love at a comprehensive level.”² But in terms of theme and expression the work is rather frightening and dizzying. Phantoms Under Daylight, which is part of the Lady-X series, adopts the fetish of dendrophilia as its narrative theme, but it bears in it a type of voyeurism and creepiness, unromantic to the extent that it cannot be described as a girl’s fantasy. It therefore approaches a destination that is closer to necrophilia. The female forms portrayed on the canvas are even more problematic. Childish and coarse outlines, deformed faces, bizarreness of the eyeballs that seem to spill out from inside, and the schizophrenic and obsessive portrayal of body parts (breasts, genitalia, and eyes) evoke a sense of a nightmare rather than fantasy in the mind of the viewer (whether male or female). These forms are the result of pushing the male-centric iconographic and visual traditions of female depiction to the extreme, and yet they—like medusa’s stare—paralyze such voyeuristic gazes. If this is meant to be humorous, it is truly cruel, acerbic wit.

But Jang Pa does not create such works solely in response to the male gaze. Starting in 2010, she started to collect art historical and cultural imagery relating to the female form and investigated the historical layers of age-old misogyny. The Indiscreet Jewels and Women/Figure exhibition of 2020 is one such exhibition that showcased this archive. Here, Jang examines how the historic, collective preconceptions of female genitalia become entrenched in violence, and at the same time, how women bound by such codes can break through the oppressive objectification of self-expression and emerge subversively. The work confronts the history of oppression and mockery of the female body and reflects and reinterprets the female form. In doing so, it precariously toes the line between sarcasm and masochism and portrays a biting politicism and performativity. Above all, in feminist politics, the work is noteworthy because it demonstrates the ecstasy of “talking vaginas.” This ecstasy shakes the binary thinking that is entrenched in the preconceptions of “feminism,” the thinking that divides the masculine and the feminine, the Madonnas and the whores.

Above all, Jang’s work constitutes an indulgence in those things that have been disparaged in visual art, and in particular painting. It is filled with a rejection of the male-centric history of painting. First, there is a provocative indulgence in color, which occupied the position of an “accessory” in Western painting until the debate surrounding color was triggered within the 17th century French art community. Instead of focusing on the elements of drawings and composition that served to inform the canon that demonstrated the genius and spirituality of (male) artists, her work overuses pink tones that are so overpowering as to be juvenile, even tasteless. The use of artificial complementary colors and fluorescent hues pollute the canvas like a counterattack against the solemn paintings of rationality, spirituality, and light. The female form created through oozing red-and-black paint and the coarse application of the palette knife destroy the unblemished surface of the painting in a more tasteless and violent manner than that of post-war European artists belonging to movements such as Art Brut.

Where Jang’s work wields a sadistic wit within the deconstruction of form, Lee Eunsil’s work wields a dark, but detached humor relative to the deconstruction of socio-spatial structures. Lee’s paintings incorporate Eastern motifs such as hanok, giamgweseok (oddly shaped stones), mountain peaks, waterfalls, and smoke and fog upon paper screens. They use the techniques common to Korean traditional painting and create a delicate portrayal of the hardship experienced by individuals in the context of tradition and social structure. When they examine the pale paintings of Lee, people are often shocked. This is because in her work the perspective and landscape characterized by Eastern subtlety serve to unveil an obscene “narrative of the nether regions.”³

In the early 2000s, Lee drew attention as a debuting artist in Korea who refused to shy away from portraying sacrilegious sexual imagery in her painting. In particular, the dream-like ambience of the ink-and-wash color; the architectural elements of hanok; and the skin, body hair, and genitalia depicted frankly with a fine brush express in a provocative style the problematic status of desire made taboo by the smokescreen of patriarchal tradition and familial structure. In Confrontation, one finds the image of a person lying down and a person standing up in the smoke and fog through the window of the house opposite. But both the standing person, who appears to be male, and the person lying down, who appears to be female, have engorged, erect phalluses. Lee depicts the active, ambivalent desire possessed by women through such intersex forms and massive vaginas. At the same time, phalluses are depicted as limp and lifeless, whether they belong to beasts or humans, whether they are engorged or bleeding. Of course, there is also the expression of regret and anger held by a woman that is enduring a more oppressive reality in paintings such as Self-injury, where a lioness paws the ground with bloodstained claws; Hold on until the end, where a fountain of blood bursts forth; and Blind following, in which a palanquin falls apart. But for the most part within her paintings, the desire, pain, and trauma bound by “home” appear to be common challenges faced by both men and women. Whether the subject matter be a phallus, a vagina, or anus, it is nonetheless confined by inescapable pain and humiliation.

What chains this desire is this social structure, in particular family and tradition. This appears in Lee’s work in the form of perspective drawings, hanok structures, traditional doorways, and walls. But what is more interesting is the fact that these structures emphasize the frame of family, or home, while at the same time assuming the existence of an outside viewer, a voyeur. This act of voyeurism, which synchronizes with the gaze of the viewer, is in fact a stereotypical example of visual desire. Here, the voyeuristic gaze is not simply that of a male agent. It is rather a device that exposes the taboos that cannot possibly be put into words, the “private” matters. These taboo matters are commonly borne by families as concealed and suppressed wounds. The closed and tangled nature of the sexuality of Korean patriarchy operates in a manner that is uniquely oppressive towards women. The artist therefore adopts architectural elements as a device by which to pick apart this structure of oppression through her dissecting, endoscopic perspective, a device that reorganizes the exterior and interior.

Above all, the orgiastic gestures emanate in lewd and sensual manner from the countless forms of body hair painted in with a fine brush. But rather than developing the luster and undulation of genital hair, her paintings express the growth of the bestial hair, thus visualizing the outpouring of an animalistic nature oppressed by civilization. The forms and phalluses of humans appeared to be covered, almost suffocated, by thick carpets of hair. The entangling of desire is also expressed in the form of wriggling tiger tails. There is of course a limitation in depicting sexuality as simply opposed to civilization, or something that is shared with animals. Sexuality is, in part, something that separates humans from animals, and at the same time it can be described as something that hasn't been completely elevated to the status of civilization. But the texture of skin and body hair fills the paper screen. It serves as a reminder of the powerful senses of the body, and it creates a new sensibility of eastern obstruction, at the same time alluring and yet almost disgustingly refined. Such a sensibility can be found among the waves, waterfalls, and ridges clouded by smoke and fog. The artist’s imagery evokes a chilly uncanny nature—including the inner nature of human beings—that is in stark contrast to the concept of muwi (effortless action) in East Asian art. 

Park Jahyun’s paintings uniformly depict lifeless women. The Non regular Workers (2008-2009) series depict young women gazing ahead, drenched in white or black fluids. These fine paintings are painted as if creating a taxidermy, inking in dots upon paper. At first glance, they appear to be black-and-white photos. The fluids that the women are drenched in could be milk. Or because the paintings are black-and-white, it is unclear whether the fluids represent blood or blackish filth. The young women and the paintings all sit upright, but they all bear pale complexion and destitute eyes. Everyday Person (2008-2012), which was painted in the same period, also depicts the pale portraits of people in the mid-to-late 20s. Their gazes are even more empty—in some eyes the irises are white and as such quite frightening—and their expressions are even more blank and melancholy. The splotches upon the bodies and the grayish cigarette smoke form a cold image that makes them appear almost as corpses or spirits. 

The everyday people and laborers that appear in Park’s paintings do not represent categories that can be separated into notions such as the self, friends, and acquaintances. They live in goshiwon housing, where one’s head and feet touch the walls when one lies down on the bed. They are women who smoke behind the building during the break time. They are the “me” and “you” that endure everyday labor while facing discrimination and insults. They therefore constitute a single type. Park’s paintings thus express the alienation and scars of contemporary women and young persons through her monotone style. They constitute portrayals of the unfairness of society and reality in a manner that is more powerful than any colored painting could portray. However, the emotions therein are not so much of anger or sadness but rather a sort of resilience that bears within it a dampened uncertainty and sense of helplessness, as despite these things individuals stoically face the gray reality.

Following the moonroom project in 2014, Park’s paintings explore locales such as neighborhoods that are set to be demolished or subject to redevelopment, or the abandoned houses, graveyards, and secluded alleys used for prostitution. But these paintings, whether they depict a cat’s face, a dirt mound, or a closed entryway, emerge as a portrait or landscape of the carnification of an inescapable life. The “gate” series of paintings that began with The Gate of Gamman-dong (2018), continued through Today Is Clear, a solo exhibition held in 2021. The image of old bangseokjip (a type of establishment for prostitution) in Danggam-dong, Busan is left upon the page in the ephemeral forms of entryways that conceal the nature of the establishment, windows with narrow openings, doorplates that read “reserved,” walls lined with planks and linoleum, and abandoned plastic chairs and littered clothing. There is a complete lack of depth or perspective in the way these locales are drawn upon the surface with pencil. These locales were hubs of prostitution for refugee women following the Korean War, but it is difficult to find official records of such places. The artist seeks to hold on the memories of life borne by these forgotten locales. But she does not overlay these places with sentiments of exploitation or the melancholy of ruins. In fact, the artist harnesses them as a medium to offer the oral statement of a mother who suffers from dissociative amnesia. It is as if to remind people of the resilience of such a patchwork livelihood, of the beauty of such faint light. These places are not places to be purified, but rather a place that “someone’s mother, someone’s sister”  had to reside in, to survive in for the sake of their families. These are not simply places that were lost long ago, but they are also places where intangible labor takes place in the present. They are “places where the life and violence of the inside is concealed.”⁵ Through a series of works including Baekyang daero and Wanwol-dong, Park records the women’s lives and tight-bound physicality of such places as if taking a tissue sample or creating a rubbed copy of the scars. As such, her locale-portraits portray a soft, deep, and dark light like sad but stoic faces. 

In visual art, there is perhaps no medium where the masculine myth is so well established as in painting. Whether it be figurative or abstract art, the brushwork that fills the canvas serves as the traces of the artistic spirit of the male greats who have been mystified and theorized into a massive lineage. Even in Korean modernist art, monochromes and minjung art consecutively formed an unassailable backdrop of critical establishment and commercialism. Within that domain, the work of women artists has never experienced an abundance of critical richness, whether it be an evaluation in terms of monetary value, aesthetic form, or conceptual content. In both the East and West, to define “feminist painting” is an impossible endeavor. How can a painting that is “obviously feminist to everyone” even be possible? If the descriptor “feminist” involves framing women as uniformly positive, proper, and ambitious, it would be an image erased of all abject elements regarded as “feminine”—the “corset-free” image of shortcuts promoted by radical feminists would be an example. This constitutes a simple overlaying of the signifier of “woman” over “phallic” desire, no more, no less. 

Instead, by disrupting visual signifiers, we might discover a path forward. Jang’s feminine grotesque and iconographic rebellion; Lee’s work, which disrupts the internal sensibilities of East Asian ink painting through a dissection of sexuality and gender; and Park’s imagery, which record the body-space of female workers and otherized individuals, all fracture the visual mirage drunk on masculinity and extend tendrils that cross the boundaries. These “tentacular” paintings do not simply recreate female narratives and female forms, but they experiment with how the experiences and sensibilities labeled as “feminine,” that are denigrated and otherized and branded, can be expressed and overcome. I hope that through sharp critical work we will continue to discover and discuss more paintings where women uncover pungent-smelling desires and scars within the self, in the context of a shell of oppression, and paintings that enable the sharing of such pain and pleasure.