CHOI&CHOI Gallery Cologne presents ‘I’m Burning’ by Jeehye Song, on view from the 6th through the 30th of April. This marks the Düsseldorf-based Korean artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery, unveiling a collection of artworks that delve into the complexities of contemporary existence.
Jeehye Song’s work is marked by contradictions. The scenes depicted in her paintings are painfully mundane, yet the air is heavy with the stench of stress and struggle. Simple tasks such as going to the bathroom in the morning seem dreadful and exasperating. Soft and tender shades of pastel depict nightmarish scenes of daily horrors. The agonising burden of taking a morning shower. The Sisyphean task of putting on another outfit. The ever so grotesque journey towards the window for the first smoke of the day after yet another night of tossing and turning. Hell is pastel yellow and baby blue. Hell is Tuesday morning. Hell is last night’s dishes. Hell is—other people! Hell is yourself. And hell is pretending all this is manageable.
In ‘I’m Burning’, Song delves into the inability to reconcile the gap between this pretense and reality. As the clichéd advice insists, you should absolutely ‘be yourself’, but with the caveat that yourself be palatable. The artist’s struggle to digest reality’s demand for fantasy manifests on her canvas as neo-surrealist productions of mundane fever dreams. Within the strokes of her brush, everyday scenes morph into absurd tableaus, where the banal becomes bizarre, and the mundane is tinged with a sense of existential dread. They provide a glimpse into the inner workings of her mind, where she grapples with the weight of societal expectations and self-imposed ideals.
Song’s compositions are diaristic and self-referential. Within the tumultuous landscape, her characters emerge as both protagonists and prisoners of their own narratives, each embodying a fragment of the artist’s psyche. They lay bare the contradictions and absurdity of the human condition, presenting her ongoing search for solutions to life’s incongruent realities. But all this internal dialogue is ultimately tied together by her characteristic brand of humour, underscored by the usual tongue-in-cheek display of cartoonish charm. And with this gesture, she reaches out to the viewer for a moment of connection, in hopes that heaven, too, could be other people. Faced with the impossible task of waking up every day, the artist decidedly, albeit apprehensively, strives to be an optimist.
