It's been two years since I found out that
fan death was a myth. While my generation in Korea is possibly the
farthest removed from antiquity and tradition, there are vestiges of
shamanistic voodoo that the people of the modern still refer to. I am
interested in this coexistence within the city: methodical rituals for
success alongside social conservative complacency in contrast to
"innovative thinking" of individuals that create a high-tech society.
For instance: pregnant women and those
around them still believe in the existence of a “birth dream,” where
their subconscious visions will predict the characteristics (and/or sex)
of their yet-to-be-born child. Dreams are bought and sold, not for the
sole purpose of making money, but rather in concern of doing the other
good. A shaman's ritual is a performance. She chants, rides blades,
sprinkles grains of rice, bathes in foggy incense, enduring violence
passed through her body for her client's success.
I'd like art within the gallery to be
believed as this mediator for the viewer's future "success." The idea
that the artist can filter the bad through her body and performance,
furthermore objects that serve as charms. Stripping these inherently
East Asian traditions from their aesthetic, I would like for Carolee
Schneeman to perform another rather violent and grotesque piece in the
space—but in a pseudo-religious context as the shaman, as a mediator
between man and something bigger. Synthesizing this idea of the ritual
with the accepted notion of Confucianist social hierarchy, and the
sexist rituals of "success," the artist will give the box containing
different objects, unknown to the viewer. The box will be suggested not
to be opened, but inside, there are a set of instructions for the viewer
to interact with the object. These boxes will abstractly mimic real
scenarios in Korean culture, where the new female employee is somehow
expected to undergo "rituals" such as sitting on a man's lap and pouring
him a drink, among other sexual and degrading "customs."
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