Gender Hierarchy [2018]
[14.09.18 — 18.10.18]
Artists: InYoung Yeo, TcoET (Dew Kim & Luciano Zubillaga), Stephanie Jane Burt, Priyageetha Dia
Grey Projects is proud to be collaborating with Space One to present Gender Hierarchy, a group exhibition featuring artists InYoung Yeo, TcoET (Dew Kim & Luciano Zubillaga), Stephanie Jane Burt and Priyageetha Dia.
As conversations on equality, protections and rights for women gain in complexity, what constitutes gender injustices consequently continues to evolve. This evolution catalyses the need for society to continually question and challenge the norms that confined all of us. Through performance/video, photography, mixed-media and sculptural installation works, the artists offer interpretations of the many channels through which gender roles pervasively dictate people’s behaviours in modern society. Each artist addresses what gender hierarchy means to them, from the subtle influence of internalised misogyny to the overt hyper-sexualization of advertising and culture.
In Birth, Dia explores the unwitting co-optation of misogyny by women in occupying and repeating, across many generations, the roles of both victim and fellow-oppressor. From family elders' dubious praise of soft-spokenness and domestication, to the metaphor of a passively pliable youth, these expressions create a never-ending cycle of self-effacement. Through a filmic photo series, Dia seeks to reverse this self-effacement through a visual confrontation of bold, layered dichotomies. The subject: the female form, nude, gold-clad, within a public housing environment. Gold - its sacredness, ritual and deification - is made to face the ordinariness of a housing estate. Dia also turns the fragile vulnerability of a female nude, often limited to private domestic spaces, onto the openness of a public one. Resplendent in gold, the nude figure does not shy from the viewer but demands its attention.
Me Gustas tú by TcoET (Dew Kim and Luciano Zubillaga) is an experimental 3D stereo K-pop video. It retains the typical elements of K-pop— the melody, choreography, sexy outfits, aegyo (cute displays of affection often displayed through facial expressions and body gestures)—yet simultaneously subverts these elements to deliver a bizarre juxtaposition of a capella singing against a disturbing dystopian visual and aural backdrop of constant and total war. This war is presented through animation and film, from the imagined camera perspective of missile strikes to footage filmed aboard a decommissioned Royal Navy submarine in a former British imperial dockyard. Selected for the Post-Cyber Feminist International week, this film proposes a new form of deploying K-pop towards queer aesthetics - from phallocentricity to full cyberfeminist telepathy.
Highlighting the imbalanced geometry of gendered body relationships, InYoung Yeo’s 0 inclination questions the expectation of “submission” and the general passive inclination of the so-called “second sex”. The work touches on three aspects: the active and passive patterns in gender roles, the binary ideologies of verticality versus horizontality, and tunnel vision brought on by stereotyping. Yeo materially realises these concepts as literal patterned vertical and horizontal “tunnels”, whose insides are lined with a web of ambiguous geometric shapes, seemingly figures even, suggestive of fragmented nude body parts. Against this kaleidoscopic backdrop, mobile phones loop GIFs of abstract graphics drawn from pornography across various Korean sites as well as material categorised as “Asian” in the West.
Burt’s installation, Belle De Jour, is titled after the iconic 1967 film by Luis Buñuel. The film follows a young reserved housewife who, unable to fulfil her masochistic fantasies with her dutiful husband, starts secretly working at a high class brothel under the pseudonym Belle De Jour. Burt blends colour, material and symbolism to subliminally evoke the tear in Belle’s psyche as she traverses between her two lives. to her left: white, purity, rope, binding, chains, ownership. To her right: black, corruption, lace, sensuality, fragility. These materials portray Belle’s perspectives, conflating the conservative sexual practices of her assigned gender and societal role as an obedient housewife with boredom, and conflating sexual liberty with a rebellion against such norms.
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InYoung Yeo is an independent artist, curator and director based in Seoul. With various forms of visual, verbal, textual to performative forms of interviews manifested into visual patterns and textual formulas, her work draws its structure from complex layers of the 'mind' and coincidences in the multi-dimensional time and space. She has put together and participated in various projects, exhibitions, residencies, talks and workshops in Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Germany, UK, US among others. Some of her projects and exhibitions include Space One project Intersections of Common Space and Time with Seoul Art Foundation, Goethe-Institut Seoul; Seoul Digital Foundation, Seoul Data Science Lab Project A.I.MAGINE with Seoul City, Seoul National University; 'a three-way dialogue' with the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017; East Asia Goethe-Institut project A Better Version of 人 programs in Korea; Group Exhibitions A Free Breakfast, Multitude, Bare; and Solo Exhibitions Space, Visual Interview and Self.
Dew Kim (Aka HornyHoneydew) is a South Korean artist based in Seoul. He works with sculpture, moving image, installation and performance. His practice involves sexuality, queerness, feminism, sadomasochism, pop culture, religion, mysticism, and the body as forms of knowledge and research. Dew is a co-founder of the experimental art collective TcoET (The Church of Expanded Telepathy). He exhibited work at The Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Camden Arts Centre, London, Haus am Lützowplatz Art, Berlin and Art Space Grove, Seoul. He graduated from Royal College of Art, MA Sculpture, and completed the residency program at Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2015) and Pilotenkueche, Leipzig (2017).
Luciano Zubillaga is an artist and scholar based in London since 1993 and now working between London and Suzhou, China. He works with sound, moving image, drawing, text and performance. His work involves transdisciplinary research in the intersections of philosophy, science and collaborative art practice. He recently exhibited work at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London and Image Movement, Berlin. His first feature film, Things to Come is based on the graphic score Ongilasch composed by Luis Zubillaga and narrated by German star Hanna Schygulla. In 2008, he received the London Artist Film and Video Awards (LAFVA) by the Arts Council of England and his work is part of the British Artists' Film and Video Study Collection (BAFVS). Luciano is a co-founder of the experimental art collective TcoET (The Church of Expanded Telepathy). He has given public lectures internationally including Ewha Womens University, Seoul, University of Buenos Aires, John Cabot University, Rome and Beijing World Congress of Philosophy.
Stephanie Jane Burt is an artist whose practice spans from sculptural installations to fictional prose. She completed her studies at Glasgow School of Art where she received her Bachelor of Arts (Hons) Painting in 2012 and her Master of Fine Arts in 2014. She moved back to Singapore in 2015, where she currently works and resides.
Her work invites the viewer to explore dialogues between her installations and their settings through a fictional narrative at times referencing film and literature. She is currently invested in feminist readings of mother-daughter relations, dynamics of female friendships and the analysis and representation of Girl culture.
Priyageetha Dia is a multi-disciplinary Singaporean artist whose practice leans towards site-specific guerilla installations. By bridging the banality of spaces and the act of subversion using gold mediums, her interventions question the morality of art in Singapore. Dia is known for her controversial public work The Golden Staircase in 2017 and the recent installation of Golden Flags at a public housing this year in March 2018.
Dia has been actively showcasing her works since 2017, including a collaboration with The Substation for Discipline the City campaign and a chapbook publication titled A Public Square by Singaporean author Adeline Chia. In addition, she has done several press interviews, including a feature in FEMALE Magazine’s F-Influential List in the November 2017 issue. She was also a panel speaker for ArtScience Museum’s Art from the Streets opening event in January 2018.