Flourishing in the lag time

2018 Chingada Gallery - Portland, OR

The DMZ is a place where wildlife flourishes. This space has been touched by the hands of meaning. That meaning repels visitors, and those who enter tread cautiously. It is an elusive in-between space. And if you are there, you accept the terms that you don’t really know.

Although it is without order, it is not without structure.

Outside of that zone, there are objects that are defined as whole. The wholeness is defined by an order of heavenly decree: L’homme moyen. Stray too far and you don’t know what is up or down, a twig or a landmine, yourself or everything.

Flourishing in the lag time is a collection of cast objects that examines the means in which identity is created, defined, and perceived.

Following the armistice of the Korean War, Bbudae-jjigae is a stew that was created by the surplus food scrounged from US army bases in South Korea. Common ingredients included instant noodles, Spam, Vienne sausages, American cheese, kimchi, scallions, mushrooms, and tofu. Spam was considered a luxury food item because of how scarce meat was at the time. It is now as inextricable from Korean culture as American imperialism.

The simulation of objects reflect colonialism as recreating an original to an existing body. The result is an unsettling similarity, but a little different. As a departure from the modernist approach of form-follows-function, these objects reject bodies categorized to their function.

In this zone, objects contain complicated functions of instant, undefined, and disposable bodies.