Jaye Rhee’s Search for the Perfect Moment
In partnership with Korea Arts Management Service
Jaye Rhee, The Perfect Moment (2015). Two-channel video installation with sound (adapted exclusively for SONGEUN). 12 min. Exhibition view: Group exhibition, Panorama, SONGEUN, Seoul (16 August–28 October 2023). © Jaye Rhee and SONGEUN Art and Cultural Foundation, all rights reserved. Photo: STUDIO JAYBEE.
For Jaye Rhee, memory is a fallible entity that is continually evolving and reforming, its inherently intangible nature at odds with its representation through images.
The spectrum of memory and image is where Rhee finds space to explore nostalgia and imagination, treating the theatre of memory as an ever-shifting stage that attempts to keep up with a perceived present. Inextricably linked to sound, movement, and image, memory becomes a space to recount, play out, and rewrite desire. In her works, Rhee tackles it knowingly and playfully as a form of artifice, one that is easily lost or misconstrued in interpersonal translation.
Born in Seoul in 1973, Rhee moved to the U.S. in the early 1990s and today divides her time between Seoul and New York. Since graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2003, she has worked in photography, video, performance, and installation, often simultaneously across media within the same project.
Rhee recently returned to Seoul, where we met on a rainy day inside the graciously vacated docents' break room at SONGEUN in Cheongdam-dong. Within SONGEUN's unusual architecture—a sharp, triangular concrete monolith nestled snugly in between a Bentley car dealership and an indoor golf course—a wide, curving flight of gently inclining steps lead towards the first floor. The building was designed by Swiss architectural firm, Herzog & de Meuron, for their South Korean debut and opened to the public just two years ago, in September 2021.
Three of Rhee's video works are currently on show at SONGEUN as part of their group exhibition of Korean artists, Panorama (16 August–28 October 2023). Projected in rotation on a single wall, high up in the gallery's foyer stairwell, are The Perfect Moment (2015), Once Called Future (2019), and Again and Again (2019), which range from nearly four minutes to up to twelve minutes in length. It is a curious setting for the trio, two of which were originally made for and presented on multiple, separate channels.
The Perfect Moment, which Rhee first showed in the 2015 SONGEUN Art Award exhibition in its original two-channel format, centres on a mature dancer (Pat Catterson) who, in a nostalgic, prosaic monologue, retells past experiences of performing and watching others perform. On the adjacent left channel, which intermittently plays and then blacks out, a young dancer, Rebecca, reenacts parts of Catterson's narration in a light, airy New York studio.
Rhee describes The Perfect Moment as a development from another video work made two years prior, titled The Flesh and the Book (2013). This black-and-white video installation was first presented at Doosan Gallery New York in 2013, and features multiple dancers, some of whose images are digitally replicated, performing to a musical score co-created with American composer and instrumentalist Elliott Sharp.
Against a pared-back set, the dancers engage with five thick elastic ropes that are parallel to the ground, stepping on and around them or causing them to vibrate with the infliction of touch. Seen across a row of four channels, the composition resembles a musical stave, with the dancers, dressed in black, appearing as moving notes.
To produce The Flesh and the Book, Rhee spent time researching dancers and dance companies, attending performances and even taking some classes. She ended up recruiting dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), the school of the eponymous late American dancer and choreographer that had disbanded in 2011.
Cunningham, famed for his influence on modern dance, frequently collaborated with composers including his partner John Cage, as well as prominent postmodern artists including Andy Warhol, Bruce Nauman, Frank Stella, and Robert Rauschenberg.
'I love the geometry of the Merce Cunningham dancers,' Rhee said. 'It's very classical, and of course I like Fluxus.'
Inspired by her experience working with dancers from the MCDC, Rhee took a more personal approach with Pat Catterson, who had been a tutor at the school. Over the course of many months, Rhee came to hear about Catterson's experiences on stage and as a spectator attending performances. From these stories, she developed a script that would form the basis of The Perfect Moment.
'Based on this script,' Rhee explained, 'this young dancer [Rebecca] had to reenact Pat's movements—some with direction, or left to her own rendition.'
Though based on her own words, Catterson had to memorise and perform the script. 'That's why it's so flawless,' Rhee said. It became an exercise in reliving her experiences, at times questioning the accuracy of her memories or correcting them some time after they were first recounted.
Catterson's passionate narration ranges from recalling the time she realised, to her horror, that she was the only person in the audience at a dance performance ('My responsibility as the sole audience member weighed so heavily on me... It was just so sad, really... On the other hand it was really, really, really inspiring') to the feeling in her body when executing the 'cat movement' ('It was this gooey, sensual moment that I really liked'). The viewer's emotions mirror accordingly, evolving from awe to anxiety and tension to excitement.
Rhee describes the concept of the 'perfect moment', which she wanted to explore at the outset of the project, as the feeling experienced by artists, writers, or dancers when something 'feels right'. She likens the term to a koan in Zen Buddhism. 'When you get into meditation, there is one sentence or one word that you start with, this koan, to get into the meditation,' Rhee said.
Rhee's artistic process might also be framed through a series of such 'perfect moments', contingent on intuitive combinations of image with score, speech, or motion. In The Perfect Moment, Rhee betrays the impossibility of reality, perception, and recollection, teeming with nostalgia for an unreachable past. Rhee pauses: 'In the end, it was perfect.'
In her latest work, the artist revisits this sense of longing for a rose-tinted past, traversing both temporal and geographical boundaries. At the opening of the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (SMB12), THIS TOO, IS A MAP, on 21 September, Rhee debuted the choral performance Arizona Cowboy (2023). It is inspired by a 1959 Korean song of the same title composed by Oh-Seung Jeon, with lyrics by Bhu-Hae Kim and performed by singer Myung Kukhwan.
Rhee first heard 'Arizona Cowboy' when visiting Seoul around 2016. 'It was a funny song,' she said. Throughout the lyrics is a refrain of 'Arizona cowboy, Arizona cowboy', with wistful musings about a beautiful sunset, a joo-mak [an archaic Korean term for a lodge or bar], and the young woman there. 'It was known to be the first mainstream Korean pop song that was influenced by Western music,' Rhee said. 'The lyrics were trying to explain something, but they kind of failed to do so.'
That the song was released a few years after the Korean War, in nascent South Korea still with a significant U.S. military presence, adds another dimension to its interpretation. 'There's this aspiration to have a "home"—a home that was lost, or a utopia,' Rhee said. The song's idealistic portrayal of 'Arizona' captivated Rhee, who described it to be 'like when you think of a place you've never been. It's not an earthly place; it's like paradise.'
Rhee worked with Korean singer-songwriter BOHEME to compose an eight-minute interpretation of the original song, retaining many of the same lyrics but arranging it for a choir of seven. For its premiere at the Seoul Museum of Art, seven vocalists (BOHEME, Drobotenko Anastasiya, Estela Santana, Idertsog Dashnyam, JOO YOUNGGYU, Ye Won Kim, and Zhang Wei) stood dispersed around the gallery, walking slowly while singing in chorus. The melody grows increasingly sombre and melancholic, with the baritones becoming more prominent as the song progresses. Each performer was selected according to her own criteria of 'foreigners living in Seoul', but Rhee challenges this qualifier too, asking, 'How do you define "foreigner", or being foreign?'
The recorded version of Arizona Cowboy is currently playing on SeMA's outdoor speakers for the duration of SMB12. The same work is also on view in the group exhibition Cowboy at MCA Denver (29 September 2023–18 February 2024), where it envelops visitors at the museum's entrance.
Arizona Cowboy forms part of a larger body of ongoing work titled 'Far West, So Close' (2023–ongoing), for which Rhee hopes to expand the performance with different performers across different places. In her itinerant proposition, Rhee may continue her search for an evasive paradise, or a perfect moment. —[O]
