In conjunction with the exhibition Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Universal Skin Salvation, the artist will give a performance lecture incorporating images and video to expand on thematics addressed within the show.

With K-beauty advertised as achieving the flesh of a Korean female subject devoid of her subjectivities, it becomes apparent that she is repurposed as technology for attaining desirable surface quality, one rendered as technically superior flesh. What skin are we seeking and looking at in K-beauty – one that emphasizes rehabilitation from war, narrative of assimilation in the U.S., and machinic visions of Asiatic femininity? Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin’s performance lecture “Fleshing Out the Ghost: the Fetish, Desire, and Master in K-beauty” investigates K-beauty as a site to unpack its racialized and gendered imaginary of Korean flesh and the fetish that congeals from it. Shin examines how the Korean woman complicates instead of clarifies the distinction between the master and the fetish object and the haunting and the following pleasures that occur from “wearing” contaminated desires of otherness as second skin.

About the exhibition
On view November 10 – December 16, 2018.
Tiffany Jaeyeon Shin: Universal Skin Salvation exhibition features a custom line of K-beauty products and a fully immersive sauna alongside new video, photo, and collage works. Visitors are invited to apply the beauty products and enter the sauna installation, absorbing small amounts of home-brewed lactic acid. For Shin, the active bacterial agent acts as a stand-in for bodily rehabilitation from the Korean War, and as an extension of the Korean “flesh” enlivened by biological matter.