The impression that the exhibition spaces are gaining more resemblance to a shopping mall, and vice versa; all kinds of shops are turning into exhibition spaces are becoming more dominant. While megastores such as Costco and IKEA were designed for extreme efficiency to reach maximum sales within the given time, the current tide has changed its direction to its opposite. The newly emerging pop-up type stores choose highly inefficient and unproductive designs, over the system, order, calculated spacing and categorization strategy of the aforementioned model. Maximizing blank spaces and ornaments to bring out aesthetic effects, it prefers places with unique identities despite confined spaces, selling temporary experiences along with its merchandise.

Ahyeon Ryu’s solo exhibition Outlet evokes the reality of exhibitions as the sales stand for aesthetic experiences. The exhibition title refers to the Outlet, a certain type of market. Outlets of recent pasts were devices that guaranteed minimum surplus profits by selling unsold products, nowadays, it has become a means of consumption that enables one to buy high-end brand products at a relatively cheap price. The sanctuary of consumption has disappeared, and everything is re-commercialized. By settling on the exhibition title ‘Outlet,’ the artist throws art which is not free from social conditions, back into the logic of consumerism. Posing as merchandise despite being rarely sold and hitchhiking on presentism while constantly harboring outdated (anachronistic) temporality, the status of artwork is somewhat similar to a product in an outlet store.

The overall structure of the exhibition space mimics a store as well. First, Outlet (2023) a luminous sculpture in white lighting engraved with its exhibition title installed on the outer space entryway presenting the nuance of “a storefront sign.” Following through the consecutive signs, they lead to the inner space of the exhibition which consists of a ‘showroom’ and ‘fitting room.’ Each room is named after its functions at the clothing store, specifically the former as a place that exhibits clothes and the latter as a space where customers can try on products before the actual purchase. If the showroom is a place where the visibility of bodies is otherized dramatically, the fitting room is the space where images using bodies as mediums are secretly projected, and fierce self-confirmation occur (Think of the crowd queueing in front of the fitting rooms during bargain sales of SPA brands every season). This exhibition represents such placeness and distorts the representation of the body interlocked with it.

The audience is introduced to the ‘showroom’ first, which takes up the frontal space of the exhibition space. Contrary to its name, the showroom is prominently a white blank space. Apart from a few hours of the week, the space stays deactivated. Of course, a store beside operating hours or has its lights off no longer seems valid nowadays. No one believes in pitch-black darkness or regards the tranquil dawn as a state of sleep.
On the phone screens whose lights are on 24/7, sales and consumption occur incessantly. Large panel screens that block the center of the exhibition space reflect light flatly which happens to remind us of monitors as the window for distribution channels. At that moment, Ryu intentionally set a designated time, attempting to deactivate exchange, transaction, distribution of eye contact and desire.

At the appointed time every Friday, the space becomes activated for the moment, and the ‘showroom’ starts its operation. Despite a performance being in progress, the audience can enter the exhibition as usual. The panel that used to be just a flat screen when deactivated now has human figures sticking out. Body parts including arms, legs,  and faces protrude outwards of the panel, and the overall body figure can only be assessed through its silhouette. The image “figure on-screen” literally incarnates and shares an odd sensation. To do so, performers hide behind the panels, stay in position for a while, and move from one panel to another as the timer goes off. Therefore, during most of the performance time, the stationary state is  emphasized more than the motional state. The body of the performer becomes integrated to  the whole sculpture along with the panels. Plainly speaking, the performance in Stuffies (2023) is spatial and sculptural rather than temporal. The performance that is attributed to space more than time makes one oblivious to the  flow of time or the sense of  duration and hardens the few human fragments exposed outside the panels.

The second room, labeled as the ‘fitting room,’ further emphasizes stiffened bodies (Garments, 2023) as sculptures are in line behind the plastic curtains. These three-dimensional figures that take up space with volume can be called human body sculptures to follow the traditional genealogy of sculpture. However, at the same time, the sculptures indicate the exterior of the body and clothing.
Human body sculptures in the shape of torso, legs, feet, and  head become heavily padded puffer jackets, tights that emphasize sensuality, and masks with ornaments. In other words, what seems like clothing turns out to be a body. On one side of the garments, marks of skin or certain body parts remain as if  they hold traces of the casted interior. Has the body become adsorbed to the clothing (or the clothing to the body)?

The visual duality that traverses Garments (2023) presents the artist’s provisional diagnosis of the ‘body’ of today, which is a body but also an outfit. The habit of checking daily lives through the clothes worn that day(#ootd) being prevalent, and the phenomenon in which clothes have become the only standard that explains and makes up for our everyday values, pronounce the inability of a semiotic approach where fashion was interpreted as a form of self expression of individuals, or class symbols. If so, how can we explain more of this? “Volatilization of temporality, a dissolution of past and future alike, a kind of contemporary imprisonment in the present,” turns the scope that can comprehend the world to individual “reduction to the body,” 1and the body is only immersed in cultivating its enlarged epidermis.

Like rummaging through clothing racks, the audience can view individual pages of Garments 07 (2023). Each displays drawings of flatly materialized bodies. Likewise, this seems to carry negative implications of reducing the existence of the human body to the exhibition value of a product. However, the story cannot stop here. What if we push this image to the extreme? Would not the image as an outer skin that makes bodies compatible with external elements and binds the boundaries of the subject and the world enable imagining a new body? The body prepares for a new subject model by wearing a camouflage that infiltrates the present without exit and a device that widens the unseen gap. Ryu reflects on the human body seen as real estate subsided in presentism through the exhibition that represents the  market and logic of consumption – and winds the timer for the following time the stationary body moves anew.

1 Fredric Jameson, “The Aesthetics of Singularity,” New Left Review 92, Mar/Apr 2015. 120.

— Hojeong Hur
ENG translation by Yerim Lee