South Korean Artist Jaye Rhee Reinvents Clichés in Seductive Video Works
Jaye Rhee, Cherry Blossoms , 2012. Courtesy of the artist.
This article was produced in partnership with the Korea Arts Management Service (KAMS).
Falling cherry blossoms, a field of flowers, a rising tide, a zen garden—these might seem like candidates for a screensaver or default phone background, but they are also the intentionally cliché subjects of some of Jaye Rhee’s videos of the early 2000s. In statements and interviews from that time, Rhee often expressed an interest in the idea of the “fake.” She would create a scene resembling those overused images out of ordinary materials, including gum, plywood, chalk, yarn, and eraser dust. (Several of these pieces were included in her first solo exhibition in the U.S., “Real Fake” at the Chicago Cultural Center, held in 2004 after she completed her MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.)
By creating these general impressions of stereotypically beautiful scenes out of obviously cheap materials, Rhee says she hopes to explore the question, “What is behind what I’m looking at?” In an interview with Artsy, she pointed to koans, phrases that are considered repeatedly in meditation, in the same way that a cliché image is presented again and again. In her view, through dwelling on these images, we might arrive at some kind of enlightened understanding.
Rhee was researching these ideas during the early years of widespread internet adoption, a period that is key to Hito Steyerl’s 2009 essay “In Defense of the Poor Image,” about the proliferation of the “bad” deteriorated image online. Recycled, pirated images of images, she writes, might evade attempts at privatization and create alternate networks of distribution. For Steyerl, the flattened image is more real than the seductive, high-resolution one: “One could of course argue that this is not the real thing, but then—please, anybody—show me this real thing. The poor image is no longer about the real thing—the originary original. Instead, it is about its own real conditions of existence.”
Similarly, Rhee’s recreations of images are less about some “original” image of cherry blossoms falling to the ground than they are about the creation of the cliché. In the 2003 video Cherry Blossoms, the artist, offscreen, tosses chewed-up pink gum onto the ground, until the pink clumps begin to blanket the floor. The video is edited to accelerate the process into something like a time lapse. When installed, the video is displayed across multiple screens that further replicate the imagery. (The soundtrack is a slower reveal: as Carol Becker has written, it initially recalls the plucking of a Chinese zither, but it is actually a slowed-down recording of the artist moving her hand through a box of packing peanuts.)
Jaye Rhee, Niagara 3, 2008. Courtesy of the artist.
Something shifted in Rhee’s oeuvre in 2007, while she was planning a trio of video pieces titled Swan, Polar Bear, and Niagara, filmed in a Korean bath house whose tiled walls were painted with the titular subjects. In Swan and Polar Bear, a static shot focuses on a sliver of the bath water and the mural behind it as Rhee slowly swims back and forth across the pool, sometimes creating the illusion of being immersed in the same landscape as those creatures. In Niagara, Rhee worked with actors, dressed in cheap plastic-bag-style raincoats, who crowd together and point excitedly at the mural of the waterfall as if they were at the real tourist site.
Since the owners of the bath house repeatedly refused to let her film these videos, Rhee instead entered the space courtesy of an employee who cleaned the bath house monthly and had overheard her request. She came to recognize that the relationships behind her work were determining its form and possibility, and became increasingly interested in allowing such encounters to guide her practice.
That project prompted Rhee to investigate some other stock characters of art history and visual culture: in addition to “the bather,” she has highlighted “the dancer,” as well as “the cowboy.” In the process of developing this ongoing body of video works, Rhee builds relationships with people who embody those roles. Then, in short videos Rhee makes with those people, the actors or performers often appear as generalizations of their “type.” For example, her black-and-white multichannel videos Notes (2007–2008) and The Flesh and the Book (2013) are set in a sparse white space with five long elastic bands extending horizontally across the frame: a visualization of a musical staff. Within this space, a group of black-clad dancers perform movements that one might associate with modern dance, such as jumping, crouching, raising one leg at a time, arriving at a skewed pose. The effect is easy to read: These performers stand in for musical notes arranged across the spatialized staff, and they perform the score with their bodies.
Jaye Rhee, still from The Flesh and the Book, 2013. Courtesy of the artist.
In fact, performers in The Flesh and the Book were actually dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which disbanded before Rhee shot this piece. While the performers seem to represent music and dance in a general sense, their individualized movements and shared history with the same company and tradition of modern dance bring a level of specificity to the work.
This contrast between performers’ lived and on-screen experience comes into focus in the two-channel color video The Perfect Moment (2015). Here, an unnamed woman describes in detail several moments from her life as a young choreographer in New York. She centers on two performances, one by a celebrated modern dancer, and one she did herself. Describing her own choreography, she dwells on a pose that, she says, she could have stayed in forever. The first channel of The Perfect Moment focuses on the choreographer from the shoulders up as she relays her experiences in a seemingly candid and unscripted monologue. On the second channel, a younger dancer is shown in another part of the same loft space performing what may or may not be the same gestures that the choreographer is explaining.
Rhee asked this younger dancer to perform based only on the script of the older woman’s descriptions; the two subjects did not discuss the movements, and the channels are not synchronized to match. For Rhee, what is interesting here is the translation, the attempt to remember, then articulate, and then embody something in the past. Like a recording of a recording posted online and streamed in low resolution, The Perfect Moment is quite far from that actual moment of mid-dance delight, but is about how that moment might carry on in other altered forms.
Jaye Rhee, still from The Perfect Moment, 2015. Courtesy of the artist.
Recently, Rhee has moved away from video towards performance itself. As part of her ongoing project “Far West, So Close,” she presented a performance and sound work titled Arizona Cowboy at the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale and in a group exhibition at the MCA Denver. Rhee explores the trope of the American cowboy and its global exportation, drawing on her personal experience of the fantasy. When Rhee was growing up in South Korea, for example, she owned a skirt made of a fabric printed with images of cacti under blue skies and listened to a 1955 tune titled “Arizona Cowboy,” one of several Korean pop songs of that decade that drew on an imagined American culture. “The song does not speak directly to imagery from Arizona,” Rhee wrote in a project proposal, “but instead relies on clichéd imagery of ‘the American West’ much like a spaghetti Western. Influenced by the remains of the American army in South Korea, the lyric spoke to Koreans’ desire to return ‘home,’ a desire shaped by displacement.”
In Rhee’s 2023 performance in the Seoul Museum of Art, this song was rearranged as a Gregorian chant and sung by a small chorus. The tune is recognizable as the pop song at the start but in a haunting register. Rhee specifically chose singers who are relative “foreigners”; they did not grow up in South Korea but moved there for vocal training. The performance feels mournful, perhaps especially for visitors unfamiliar with the original tune. Nearly seventy years after the source song was written, the figure of the cowboy might seem dated as an icon of America, but his cousins—the pioneer, entrepreneur, and settler—are as alive as ever, with readily apparent consequences. If Rhee’s cover of “Arizona Cowboy” evokes a sense of loss, then, the allusion is not to the loss of some original figure, the “real” cowboy, but rather to the losses these figures have caused. In other words, her work conjures all those who struggle in the shadow of the cowboy.
