Artist Jang Pa and her portray “Gore Deco – Flat Gap #1” (2025) / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery
Jang Pa doesn’t paint our bodies a lot as break up them open. In her artwork, entrails spill, flesh festers, cavities throb and vaginas bristle with enamel.
By way of what she calls the “female grotesque,” the artist challenges sanitized beliefs of magnificence as upheld in male-centered visible traditions. Her uncovered interiors — visceral, porous and monstrous — recast the feminine physique as an untamed presence, pushing again in opposition to its lengthy historical past of objectification.
This outlook is unmistakable in “Gore Deco,” her solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery in central Seoul, which brings collectively 45 new work and drawings.
“As a result of girls and different marginalized people have lengthy been denied entry to the mainstream as talking topics, their ‘language’ typically emerges not by way of speech however by way of physique,” the 44-year-old stated in an interview with The Korea Instances. “I’m serious about how far this physique, particularly its inside sensations, will be articulated with out restraint.”
She went on to level out how gendered hierarchies are inscribed on the stage of sensation itself. The masculine has traditionally been aligned with the psychological and the transcendent — qualities thought of noble and elevated — whereas the female has been tethered to the physique, forged as corporeal and unstable.
Jang Pa’s “Gore Deco – Emily” (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery
These binaries will be witnessed in artwork historical past as effectively. The well-known Seventeenth-century French debate over the prevalence of line versus shade in portray gives a telling instance: Line was elevated as mental and rational, and due to this fact masculine, whereas shade was understood as sensuous, emotional and unruly, and thus female.
Jang persistently retrieves subordinate parts inside this hierarchy, forcing the bodily, the female and the chromatic into the foreground of her work. For her, the grotesque capabilities not solely as spectacle however as technique — a manner of questioning established energy constructions by intentionally thrusting into view what they have been meant to suppress.
Set up view of Jang Pa’s solo exhibition, “Gore Deco,” at Kukje Gallery in Seoul / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery
That insistence has typically been met with unease. Some artwork world professionals steered that robust colours “simply don’t promote” in Korea. The artist recalled what number of viewers right here discovered her selection of material and shade palette to be a form of “sensorial risk.”
“The colour combos I take advantage of aren’t mild or conventionally fairly; they’re forceful and assertive,” she stated. Saturated reds, fleshy pinks and acidic magentas dominate her canvases. “Folks perceived them as aggressive and unsettling. I anticipated some resistance, however I encountered way more of it than I had imagined.”
That sense of discomfort, she famous, generally prolonged past reactions to the work itself. Seeing solely her work, some viewers would image her as risky or unhinged — the so-called “mad girl.”
“Once they met me, they have been genuinely stunned by the hole between what they’d imagined and my precise presence. I’d say almost half reacted that manner,” she stated.
Jang, nevertheless, stays unfazed. “I’m merely following my very own ‘jouissance’ as a painter,” she stated, referring to the concept of uncontained, unruly pleasure.
Set up view of “Gore Deco” at Kukje Gallery / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery
Set up view of “Gore Deco” at Kukje Gallery / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery
In “Gore Deco,” varieties lengthy objectified and dismissed as vulgar are reclaimed and reimagined throughout her canvases.
One portray, for example, borrows its title from Gustave Courbet’s Nineteenth-century “The Origin of the World,” which notoriously presents a cropped, close-up view of a lady’s genitals. In Courbet’s picture, Jang noticed, the physique seems inert and nameless, diminished to flesh and not using a head.
Jang Pa’s “Gore Deco – The Origin of the World” (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery
“By naming that picture ‘The Origin of the World,’ a lady is diminished to a single orifice and nothing extra,” she famous.
Her remodeling challenges the simplification of the unique. The physique turns itself inside out, demanding to be seen in all its rawness. Its floor, with fleshy folds and coiling entrails, feels totally alive.
Elsewhere, vaginas are armed with enamel. The motif attracts on Denis Diderot’s 1748 satirical novel, “The Indiscreet Jewels,” the place girls’s genitals begin talking candidly about their homeowners’ needs and secrets and techniques. Nevertheless it additionally gestures towards the long-standing delusion of “vagina dentata,” which embodies male anxieties over feminine sexuality and energy.
In some works, silkscreened icons and symbols appear as if tattoos. The imagery attracts from an archive Jang has constructed through the years, comprising 1000’s of pictures tracing girls’s illustration all through historical past.
Some pictures come from world mythologies or medical textbooks. Others originate within the male-dominated on-line communities which have thrived in Korea because the 2000s, the place misogynistic memes and newly-coined slurs unfold at dizzying pace.
“I started encountering these phrases always after I entered faculty,” she stated. “Web memes expose hatred in its rawest type, which is why I began searching for them out. I feel that form of language and imagery has deeply formed how the present era sees girls.”
Amongst them are pejoratives like “kimchi girl” and “doenjang girl,” labels that circulated broadly till the 2010s to mock girls deemed useless or materialistic. A listing of supposedly undesirable traits in feminine companions have been compressed into an acronym, “moon-dam-pi-seong-dong-nak,” shorthand for tattoos, smoking, piercings, beauty surgical procedure, dwelling with a accomplice outdoors marriage and abortion.
Set up view of “Gore Deco” at Kukje Gallery / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery
By reclaiming these pictures and phrases, Jang redirects misogyny by way of wry humor. The gesture is much less about neutralizing its violence than exposing its absurdity, holding up a mirror to the distorted fantasies which have been accepted as norms.
“In a manner, I feel my work is humorous,” the artist stated. “Laughter turns into a manner of confronting these oppressive constructions head-on. However solely a small group appears to choose up on that humor and giggle alongside, principally girls of their 20s and 30s.”
Jang finally hopes this mind-set will attain extra viewers. “In the event that they acknowledge it, it forces them to face the hateful gaze and understand that it may well all the time flip again on them. As an artist, I would like that realization to register not simply within the thoughts, however within the physique.”
“Gore Deco” runs by way of Feb. 15 at Kukje Gallery.
