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Jaye Rhee
My video performance work explores the evasive nature of authentic desire. I focus on the tension between “real” desire and “fake” objects of desire, as embodied by images, presenting “real fakes” and “imageless images.”
For example, in my recent series, Swan, Polar Bear, Niagara, performers move in public baths against a background of wall paintings depicting swans in a lake, a North Pole scene with Polar Bears, and the Niagara Falls. These images exist in words, as well as in collective memory shaped by culture. But where do they actually exist? The swan, the polar bears of the North Pole, and the Niagara Falls, all exist without existing: they are idealized images of the nostalgic imagination.
Thus I present “real fakes” through video performances that forthrightly foreground artifice. By acknowledging the “fake” substance of the materials used, the artworks actually revels the authentic nature of these imaginary worlds. The product is a “real fake” that, notwithstanding its artifice, is authentic and thus genuine.
Ultimately, my goal is to create a new visual space in which artifice evaporated through the candid presentation of images as naked materials. This “honest artifice” would ultimately lead one into an experience of reflection about ones own nostalgia.
