Début is the self-descriptive title chosen by Aerin Hong for her first solo exhibition. This tautological start points to the moment of pressure when a personal experience enters a collective arena (with its set of norming references and ideals) and is recognized as such: an individual, new and unique expression of the self, neatly fitting the puzzle game of social expectations.
Dismantling the fantasy of individual subjectivity, originality, and self-control, the show builds on Hong’s sculptural exploration of the gendered domains of domesticity and skin care, expanding into the phenomenon of ventriloquism. She draws references from objects and products that, due to their powerful position in collective imagery, form a semantic infrastructure along which normality and typicality are negotiated. Asserting what is proper to be desired, this infrastructure serves the spasmodic urge to fit in and to be accepted. At once, it constructs the deviant and the pathological as worthy of exclusion, while it finds its very own raison d'être exactly in that pathological desire it is meant to prevent.
This pathological infrastructure becomes palpable in the works Whip and Bubble. They present skin cleansing products (used by the artists) in acrylic boxes wrapped in industrial plastic or partially covered by an oversized passe-partout frame. The partial concealment does emphasize the words of the product names. Perfect Whip and Perfect Bubble are skin cleansing products launched by Senka in the early 2000s. Their rich foam, practical packaging, and logo font have become symbols of cleansing fetishism among East-Asian consumers. Clear skin is a key aesthetic tied to social status, with “good skin” functioning as a non-verbal signifier of economic class. Thus, Perfect Whip and Perfect Bubble serve as emblematic products that provide the illusion of social mobility through skincare. Through Hong’s presentation, the sadistic ambivalence of their names is highlighted. For instance, the whip not only points to a soft and sweet cream. It also prefigures the burning pain of a perfectly placed stroke of a lash. The bubble is not only a funny entity in the infantile bathroom environment. It is also stands for social isolation and financial speculation.
Thesculptural series King, Queen, and Twin consists of six wood bedposts created in collaboration with various master woodturners (“Drechslermeister”) in Germany.
Even today, fairytale-like norms continue to shape our lives—one of the most persistent being the idea of the “princess.” In popular media, the bed often serves as a primary symbol of a princess’s identity. For this project, the artist provided three different Drechslermeister with a brief outline of the life of an anonymous girl, following the typical design logic of a “princess” character. Their task was to produce a set of bedposts (headboards) based on these fictional details, with the stylistic and formal details entirely left to their discretion. Each bedpost is designed to fit the dimensions of modern bed sizes: king, queen, and twin.
In the excerpt Untitled, Hong addressed the peculiar phenomenon of ventriloquism: the ability to speak without moving the lips so that the voice seems to be coming from someone or something else. It is centered around an ongoing collaboration with UK-based ventriloquist Trish Dunn, who has more than 20 years of professional experience. The work reflects Dunn’s both professional and personal relation to ventriloquism. According to her, it is not merely a refined stagecraft, but a complex coping strategy that she has developed in early years and sustained throughout her private life to this day. To know the “voice” of things and to let them “speak” is to welcome multiple personalities in one’s self, as Dunn puts it.
In the theater of ventriloquism, the puppet is always the protagonist. The dramatic structure is simple: the ventriloquist and the puppet engage in a debate, which invariably ends with the puppet’s victory. Because of this dynamic, puppets are often designed after figures with whom the ventriloquist would have the fiercest arguments. Trish Dunn describes her puppets as both her closest companions and composites of people she has encountered who opposed her views. In Untitled, Dunn follows the artist’s direction to conduct an “exercise without a puppet”—a rare practice for a ventriloquist. In the absence of a physical puppet, she instead performs in response to imagined, nonverbal emotional reactions. Shot in a single take, the self-recorded video reveals a gradual expansion of emotional range—certain emotions repeat, others blur together, and some emerge unexpectedly. Here, the selves once externalized through the puppet begin to reintegrate into the ventriloquist’s own body.
Lorenzo Graf & Aerin Hong
