Participating Artists Eleanor Antin, Charles Atlas, Pauline Boudry &
Renate Lorenz, Leigh Bowery, Alison Jackson, Dick Jewell, YoungHo Kang, John
Kelly, Katarzyna Kozyra, Nikki S. Lee, Christopher Makos, Yasumasa Morimura,
Tomoko Sawada, Jack Smith, Ming Wong Masquerade is an international exhibition
mounted for aesthetic re-illumination of artists and artistic tendencies engaging
self-deformation, disguise, and role-play since the 1990s, referencing myth,
history, art historical texts, and popular cultures. A purpose of the
exhibition is to understand persona theater performances (self-deformation
performances) transforming indicators of people, race, gender, and class
engraved on the body, and the politics of race, gender, and national identity
in contemporary photography and video art. Another is to study “the
intermediate self” between categories and the concept of the subject in an
obscure, open process through a layered context between self and other, man and
woman, white and black, man and animal. The
exhibition, consisting of sections such as “Mask behind a mask,” “Cross-dressing,
transvestitism,” “Overlapping people, race, and nationality,” and “Protagonists
projected onto mass culture and art history,” includes 16 artists who use the
method of ‘masquerade’ for their multiple roles as performer, actor/actress,
photographer, designer, dancer, singer, and director. These artists re-signify
the social, bodily categories that have bounded oneself as a formless, and a
non-place, by performing post-structuralism and dismantlement as well as
continuously revealing variability, fluidity, and instability under the name of
art. Hosted
by Coreana Museum of Art
Supported
by Coreana
Cosmetics, Co.,
Ltd., Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture Charles Atlas, Teach, single channel video, 7min 47sec, 1998. Courtesy of the artist Dick Jewell, What's your reaction to the show, single channel video, 40min, 1988. Courtesy of the artist John Kelly, Barbette, archival digital print, 45.7x30.5, 2012. Courtesy of the artist Youngho Kang, The king who grows the chin, pigment ink on fine art paper, 150x160cm, 2009. Courtesy of the artist Jack Smith, Flaming Creatures, single channel video, 46min, 1963. Courtesy of the Jack Smith Archive Christopher Makos, Lady Warhol, Gelatin silver print, 61x50.8cm, 1981. Courtesy of the artist Tomoko Sawada, School Days, c-print,13x18cm,2004. Courtesy of the artist