GIGISUE

The recent work of Seoul-based artist GigiSue is organized as a commentary on—but also a subtly exasperated tirade against—her experience of gender relations and the pervasive persistence of patriarchal attitudes in South Korea. To this end she fuses personal memories of her childhood and adolescence with a regimen of materials and forms that are redolent of the attitudes, predispositions and actions she has encountered, and to which she has been subject, over the last three or so decades. Each of her series of paintings—including “Father Still Life,” the “Decoupage Paintings” and the “Flower Field” series—her work in video and a number of found and “assisted” ready-made objects, take-on particular aspects of the gendered positions she was obliged to occupy and against which she has long contended.
The artist’s personal biography plays a crucial role here, of course; but not through the kind of didactic, confessional or enraged engagements with a traumatic past that have often structured contestatory practices addressing masculinist subjection and abuse, many articulated in the terms and through the perspectives of western feminist or post-feminist discourse. At first, GigiSue knew only the inevitability of certain attitudes towards girls and women prevalent in “tradition”-permeated Korean culture, many already in place before she was conceived and then came into the world as one of three daughters born to a man who always wanted to have a son. This establishing loss in the genetic roulette that dominated her father’s attitude to life itself gave rise to a thoroughgoing fatalism, compounded by the loss or her biological mother and torment by an “evil” stepmother, with which GigiSue could only contend by making art in the aftermath of her father’s death when she was 24.
What results is remarkable for its capacity to reflect, unflinchingly, on the utter permeation of a female subject by the diktats of socially normative patriarchy, but, at the same time, to create a space that conflates indifference and resolution, even empowerment. While founded in subjection, this space is liberated by the repurposing of its symbolic forms and apparatuses. GigiSue thus seizes on the phallus itself as the order, above all others, by which she was once governed, detourning it through ironic diminishment (in the form of fruits, nuts and other small objects in Portrait of the Father) and renominating, taming—even neutering—it as “Biddy” in her videos. The “Flower Field” series, subtitled “fake flower origami,” recalls a specific, recurrent childhood experience with her father when she would play with papers, doodling, cutting and folding them while singing a well-known folk song that celebrated the father-daughter relationship using the metaphor of planting flowers that later bloom. “But, I wonder,” she reflects, “what kind of full blooms are now in me?”
The “Decoupage” series is organized by another order of folds and cut-outs as the paintings are constituted by tiny, finger-nail-sized, images of father and daughter that set out to record the passage of time and trace the patterns of memory. These works fuse the artist’s recollection of daily routines with a compound of miniaturization and idealization that gives rise to a “basic yearning” for something that is not simply past but might never have been possible. By producing her history as a mosaic of fragments that can be regrouped only in a puzzle-like refiguring, GigiSue takes up with texture and light so that distant memories of her father’s face offer to reglaze—rather than “paper-over”—the helpless fissure between past and the present.
In “Similar Figures,” GigiSue developed another means for the technical reconstitution of her relation to her father by using decalcomania—the imprinting of an image onto another surface so that it gives an analogous but blurred or shifted design. By this means, the artist sought to draw herself (out) while at the same time hiding what she had inherited from her father. The technique she deployed offered to underwrite but also to undermine this project. For just as an adult woman cannot really hide her father-sculpted self under foundation or make-up, so decalcomania offers a tendentious hiding place by repeating and smudging an original shape or profile. The “Similar Figures” do not recapitulate the past on behalf of nostalgia or fantasy, but confront it fatalistically by reflecting on the inevitability of genetic transmission. As GigiSue notes,“I cannot hide the existence of my father within me. It will last forever between the traces that resemble him.”
The “Father Still-life” paintings transpose the technical concerns informing these series into a focus on genre, governed by a mode that connects “stillness” and immobility with transience and death (the nature morte). GigiSue opens up the dichotomy between the fragility and decay of all living things foregrounded in the Vanitas tradition and the showy splendor, abundance and magnificence of the floral and comestible arrays feted in the seductively technical brilliance of Dutch and other Still-life traditions. Once more the equivocation played out by technical or generic legacies is transferred, allegorically, to the father-daughter relationship, overlaid here by different lineages of transcendence and continuity organized in Eastern ancestral rites and rituals and Western Christian notions of resurrection. This allows the artist to differentiate between—and contaminate—various modes of appearance of her father as an image: his receding physical appearance; the symbolic shadow he cast over her future; the father she might have wanted but never had; the projected father that answered to an ideal Father; the ideologically eternal father replete with kindness, affection and distinguished remoteness that was constructed for her as a child; and the father that, come what may, lives on in her. To this end she laid still-life paintings of lifeless objects onto scribbles drawn with her father when she was young.
GigiSue refers to the “Father Still-life” series as her “university,” the place where she learned to comprehend the enduring contradiction between the real and the symbolic. The portraits provided lessons in the existential conflict between reality and desire by portraying selfhood as a spectrum of projections screening obsessions tinged by unyielding futility. The “Color Blindness Test” series, on the other hand, is situated a little further along the artist’s journey of becoming, referring to a shift in family circumstances after her father passed away more than a decade ago. A long-running legal dispute over his will transformed the patriarch into a cipher for economic and property values, accentuating a role that he had always emblematized but that was at the furthest possible remove from GigSue’s somewhat forlorn attempt to recalibrate his image around whatever vestige of filial affection and wishful thinking had escaped the confines of his imperious masculinity. The series is comprised of coins from foreign countries slip-cast in white porcelain and then colored and arranged on a board-backed canvas in the form of a color blindness test. The result is a kind of neo-Liberal filtration system that mobilizes monetized tokens of paternity (each supplied with its national ruler-head) into a globally denominated test for forms of partial seeing.
GigiSue’s videos made in 2014 and 2015 feature the artist’s body or its parts performing with a kind of behavioral minimalism. Miming certain relations between the obdurate conditions of patriarchy and modern capitalist society, she thinks their relation as a binary opposition that somehow completes her own capacity to mean. In Missing One (2014), the artist wears a stained white shirt and track pants, faces the camera, lowers her head and acts out a clearly futile and already ironic search for her missing penis—ending up with her trousers caught awkwardly around her ankles. Patriarch Seating Position (2014) mimics the traditional Korean seating position or “Father’s legs,” adding another dimension, framed by posture and physical attitude, to the recursive relational field set out between father and daughter. In Biddy (2014), she twists and “tortures” her own tongue in order to visualize the sorrowful silence conventionally assigned to women by what the oppressive code of patriarchy understood as a form of “courteous” rectitude. Finally, the two channel (each roughly 6 mins.) video installation Flower Field: Fake Flower Origami (2015), revisits the economistic paradigms in which her relation to her father is situated, correlating these with intimations of fakery announced by a false origami flower situated onscreen between shots of a field of flowers in her father’s hometown on Jeju Island and the concrete “jungle” of Wall Street—set with the score for the children’s song “In the flower field … my father and I made together.”
Inspired by a fairy tale read to her by her father when she was a child Taoist Fairy (2013) addresses “The Fairy and the Woodcutter” from the point of view of the artist as a little girl. Focusing on the fairy rather than the masculine protagonist represented by the woodcutter, GigiSue begs the question of whether the tale is really a happy story, as is often assumed. Did the fairy truly enjoy a fulfilling life after she gave up her freedom and pledged marriage to the woodcutter? Or might the tale portray the loss of independence of one (enchanted) female through subjugation to the will of one (ordinary) man—a loss that is anyway undone by the woodcutter’s repetitive incapacity to carry out instructions about the management of the supernatural? In any event, the artist’s return to the fairy tale offers another scene of covert knowledge acquisition, for as Walter Benjamin surmised some 80 years ago, “the fairy tale . . . is to this day is the first tutor of children because it was once the first tutor of mankind.” Properly read, possibly between its own lines, “the fairy tale tells us,” he suggests, “the earliest arrangements that mankind made to shake off the nightmare which myth had placed upon its chest.” Only here, as GigiSue reminds us through the ghoulish confection of a girl’s headband, a handmade wig and wax modeling, the nightmare of myth is trumped by an allegory of subjection as the violence of mythology is replaced by the keen repressions of civilization.

<GigiSue: Pater Noster>
John C. Welchman
Professor, University of California-San Diego, Visual Arts Department
Art Critic
Curator
Director, Mike Kelly foundation

GIGISUE
Born in Seoul, Korea

EDUCATION
2014 M.F.A., Graduate School of Visual Art, Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, Korea
2003 B.F.A., College of Fine Arts, Art & Craft Major, Sookmyung Women’s University, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2016 Pictorial Impulse, PiaLux ART SPHERE, Seoul, Korea
2015 Flower Field l Fake Flower Origami, Alternative Space LOOP, Seoul, Korea
2014 Daddy & Biddy, Space CAN, Seoul, Korea
2013 Patriarchy and Capitalism : A history of Family Power, Space of Art, ETC, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2016 OLD & NEW_Kansong Art & Culture Foundation, Seoul, Korea
2016 Out of Worldly_TRIANGLE Artist Group, WESTWERK, Hamburg, Germany
2016 Cocoon 2016 Exhibition, Space K, Gwacheon, Korea
2014 VICE VERSA 1, Gaheodong 60, Seoul, Korea
2014 ‘Slow Slow Quick Quick!’, Kunst Doc, Seoul, Korea
2014 Parada Sarada, PiaLux ART SPHERE, Seoul, Korea
2014 Can Can KOREA!, Space CAN, Seoul, Korea
2014 Can Can CHINA!, Space CAN, Beijing, China
2014 The 4th Art Factory Project, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul, Korea
2014 9.5.9 Be Empty Exhibition, TOKA ART FACTORY, Seoul, Korea
2013 House Vision 2013, Seoul Citizen Hall Gallery, Seoul, Korea
2012 KOREA CHINA Diplomatic Relations 20th Anniversary, Galaxy Gallery, China