The Ninth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

85 ARTISTS Top: Jeong Geumhyung with Private collection 2016–18/ Image courtesy: The artist Below: Private collection: Rearranged objects (installation view) 2018 Installation with found objects and videos / Installed dimensions variable / Courtesy: The artist / Photograph: Kiyong Nam / © Fondation d’entreprise Hermès JEONG GEUMHYUNG Born 1980, Seoul, South Korea Lives and works in Seoul With a background in dance, choreography and animation, Jeong Geumhyung has developed a form of puppetry that activates a curious array of objects as extensions of her body. In performances that she describes as ‘duets’, Jeong operates her extraordinary ‘body machines’ through physical interactions that range from gentle encounters to monstrous confrontations, suggesting a complex politics of prosthesis, sexuality (and the industries constructed around them), and the role of human agency. Her installation Private collection: Rearranged objects 2018 clinically arranges these performance objects across a series of plinths and in unusual categories that suggest unlikely associations. The original performances play continuously on monitors around the installation, establishing an immediate connection between the objects on display and their earlier roles. Jeong’s bizarre inventory centres on anthropomorphic forms commercially available for specialised uses: medical dummies for CPR, emergency and rescue training; human-shaped martial arts punching bags; shop mannequins (typically dismembered); anatomy models and inflatable sex dolls. Presented matter-of-factly in the installation, they form typological touchstones for other curious objects, including physical rehabilitation and exercise equipment, home hardware, cameras and accessories, sex toys and novelties. These are joined by complex machinery, from robotic vacuum cleaners to air compressors to remote-controlled drones, often hacked with objects from unrelated fields, such as plastic heads or sexual prosthetics. With so much evocation of the human body, even the most practical and run-of-the-mill products — ladders, cables, tripods, balloons — take on erotic and uncanny connotations, while others — particularly a range of outsized, multi-handled pruning scissors — appear decidedly threatening. In Jeong’s work, strict taxonomies often become confused, and moral frameworks blurred; it becomes difficult to tell, for instance, if a certain item was produced as a sexual rehabilitation aid, a medical training device, or an adult toy. Video documentation of Jeong’s provocative, compelling works — which the artist wryly calls ‘tutorials’ — runs looped on monitors surrounding the installation. In 7 ways 2009–17, Jeong explicitly genders her interaction with her body machines, referring to them by male pronouns (‘he’ or ‘him’), and adopts stereotypically feminine roles in her performances. No matter how submissive to, or imperilled by, these horrible objects the artist appears to be, she executes her encounters with remarkable strength and precision. And, such is the nature of Jeong’s physical relationships, she is always in control. In other performances, this relationship manifests as overtly sensual. In Fitness guide 2011, the fetishism suggested by gym equipment, toned bodies and attractively designed machinery is the point of departure for vigorous movements that align physical exercise and sexual exertion. CPR practice 2013 and Rehab training 2015 involve similarly erotic encounters with the inanimate, and draw gender-based assumptions about affective labour, and the identification of care and service industries (such as nursing) with the feminine. As overtly sexual as Jeong’s interpretations of her objects may be, it is possible to read her performances as intense, embodied expressions of more mundane fetishes, and as extrapolations of the desire to partake in mass consumerism and rarefied connoisseurship alike. For the apparent surrealism of her juxtapositions — her bizarre contraptions and her intimate engagements — they are so provocative and so suggestive that they cannot be completely random; they must follow a certain logic. With its association of gender relations and commodity fetishism, of bodily limits and personal agency, Jeong Geumhyung’s unique artistic world suggests that this logic might be both widespread and deeply held. Reuben Keehan