Solo Exhibition〈Freaky Freaky〉Statement
Artspace Hyeong 2024.01.30. - 02.13
Your most shocking feature is a terribly ordinary body!
Written by Kim Eunhee
Jean Song observes and re-presents what has been marginalized in a majority society: the “atypical,” the realm of ugliness preserved by the collusion of those in power, and the beings, events, and circumstances suppressed, concealed, or forgotten under dominant ideology.
In 《Freaky Freaky》, the artist references the freak shows that thrived in the 17th–18th centuries, focusing on the taboo of the “freak,” who was regarded as the misfortune of the minority for the happiness of the majority. The “freak show” was a form of show business that exhibited people with unusual appearances or incorporated them into circuses. Its subjects included conjoined twins, people with Hypertrichosis, Dwarfism, Gigantism, Neurofibromatosis, limb deformities, intersex bodies, as well as racialized minorities. These minorities were defined as “abnormal” in contrast to the “average norm,” and thus stigmatized as defective. In the case of disability, this stigmatization by the majority was all the more powerful.
Having lived for so long in Plato’s cave, we have consolidated diverse ideologies into a single dominant ideology for the sake of stability and order. Those who deviate become, in a Nietzschean sense, unfortunate beings born of the consensus and collusion of the rulers. In the process of modern nation-building, all freaks became targets of oppression, and such ideology turned into taboo. Throughout art history, taboo has often served as a powerful source of inspiration for artists, who re-enacted these forbidden images devised by dominant powers.
For Song, the individuals included in the group portrait <Freak Show>(2018) serve as tools for questioning the grounds of normality and abnormality. She remarks: “I attempted to engage in dialogue based on archival materials and sources. By closely observing their subtle hand gestures, bodily orientations, and gazes in the images, I was able to place them in new emotions and situations, eventually reimagining them as new portraits. Just as a work of art is never entirely separate from its creator, the essence of these new portraits may lie in the subjects themselves—or in the artist herself.”
The artist raises existential questions about the human being, no longer as God’s creation but from a biological perspective. She reinterprets what has long been cast into the shadows as ugliness into “difference,” thereby broadening the understanding of how body and identity are culturally constructed. Her freaks invite us to reconsider the plural dimensions of “normal” and “abnormal,” while also embodying an attitude of *Tolérance.
This exhibition does not demand sympathy or pity for freaks. Rather, it simply tells their stories. They are merely unfamiliar presences. Their backgrounds are ordinary domestic spaces. Yet these spaces are densely inscribed with hybridity and ambiguity, as though striking against taboo.
In a humanitarian 21st century, there are no spectators at freak shows. Instead, upon entering the gallery, one finds oneself as the freak, surrounded by a multitude of freaks. At the moment when minority and majority are reversed, I become the minority. The exhibition thus proposes to overturn the hierarchy of the unilateral gaze embedded in the traditional freak show. Confronted with an unexpected “abnormal” moment, one may be shocked, but also led to question the standards of normality and abnormality, to discover the abnormal within normality, or even to encounter the hidden recluse within oneself.
“Your most shocking feature is a terribly ordinary body.”
Placing perspectives on heterogeneity at its center, the exhibition reconstructs another freak and dismantles the privileged universality of the “ordinary body.” It reveals how perspectives and concepts are endlessly variable, and quietly asserts the necessity of social and cultural acceptance of difference.
We can only see ourselves through others; to look at oneself is always to gaze at the other. In this sense, minorities are not discriminated against because they are minorities; rather, they become minorities because they are discriminated against. Despite the risk that her gaze might reinforce prejudice, the artist willingly advocates respect for difference, suggesting her practice itself as a gesture of hospitality. This tolerance is inseparable from her sustained interest in diversity, heterogeneity, and hybridity.
Thus, as an impartial observer, Song employs investigation, imagination, and recombination as her most compelling tools—questioning conventional values such as human and monster, normal and abnormal, logic and illogic. She invites audiences to reflect on their own cultural perceptions, creating an ethical space that evokes personal responses and emotional insight. In doing so, she seems to restore the didactic pleasures that contemporary art may be losing.
* Tolérance (from the French “to endure, to bear”) is usually translated into Korean as “forbearance” or “acceptance.” Here, it signifies an attitude of embracing “difference” itself—be it of religion, thought, skin color, culture, or gender.