GROUP EXHIBITION

In 2001, Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury (b. 1961) staged a ‘make-up performancea’ t Art Sonje in Seoul by renting a sports car and repeatedly driving it over piles of eyeshadows, lip glosses, foundations, and nail polishes. The destructive exercise, sponsored by a major international cosmetics firm, produced a disaster landscape of cracked glass and splattered liquids, soiling the art institution from within. As a symbolic ritual, it offered a sense of cathartic release—not only from the deadpan seriousness of the white cube art space, but from the products themselves: their intensifying grip on visual culture and the fashioned female body of the new millennium, poignantly identified by Fleury. Twenty-five years prior, the Yugoslavian artist Sanja Ivekovic (b. 1949) had already understood the cruel optimism of make-up products—the way they package gendered fantasies of self-improvement in delicious little bottles that promise happiness, even as they simultaneously monumentalise human decay and our capitulation to superficial solutions. Her retort was a series of conceptual video artworks showing the young artist at work—or at war—with her beauty cabinet, patiently exposing the labor of sensually chemical post-production required to look young, to look beautiful, to successfully look ‘girl.’ As with Fleury, the point was never to renounce these fetishistic commodities outright but rather to technically map their disproportionate effect on our senses of self—so outsized that even simple ritualistic destruction or subversion of these goods can feel like an act of political and psychic rebellion. In today’s maelstrom of YouTube make-up tutorials, Ivekovic’s ritual feels uncannily prophetic. Viral viewers around the world take pleasure not in the final illusion of beauty—‘the look’ itself—but in the arduous, desperate, yet highly creative labor of constructing it. By freely exposing the tools and techniques of cosmetic deception, by reveling in ‘the hack’ of contemporary standards of beauty, we mistake beauty products and their professional spokespeople as our allies, hoping that the ideology of artifice can somehow be socially redemptive. Parents, teachers, and rearguard feminists never managed to respect (let alone understand) that a ‘face of stone,’ as Proust once described one of his characters—to look like a ‘crumbling goddess statue in a park’—can be socially vindicating.

As the artists in Pigment Compound prove, everyone has since subscribed to regimes of chemical self-improvement— even our moms (Haena Yoo, b. 1990), our politicians (Simon Fujiwara, b. 1982), and our artists. The material innovations in make-up in the industrial age far surpass that of paint, so artists can choose either to employ its enchanted pigments directly (Anna Munk, b. 1994; Pamela Rosenkranz, b. 1979) or subliminally evoke them (So Young Park, b. 1971). The consumer packaging of beauty—a sensual ecology of plastic casings and other artfully protective shells—becomes an object of intense commodity fetishism (Diane Severin Nguyen, b. 1990). In our minds and visual culture, consumer products often stand in for bodies and skins quite literally, but also psychologically (Haneyl Choi, b. 1991; Ju Young Kim, b. 1991). Beauty commodities constitute an allegorical world of their own, where material, affective, biological, and fantastical logics are brought into dynamic and absurd play—often to dialectically deal with unnamed sensations of being a body, or trying to take care of one.

Cosmetics today are found everywhere, in every shape, for every problem—and yet we continue to suffer. This consumerist dilemma is particular in being felt so closely on the body, in the most specific materiality: powders, serums, lotions, and sprays communicate their esoteric promises not through images, but through their cakiness, oiliness, mattness, and sheen. They speak to us about improved selves in terms of pigment—about nothing less than ‘perfect skin’ as both a surface and a prosthetic sensation. Beauty capitalism renders the epidermis the theater of all our achievements and aspirations, our fears and shame. This dermatological battleground has a long cultural history: beauty practices have historically emerged from imperial, medical, and military entanglements with female bodies, and blend biopolitical intervention with aspirational regimes of pleasure centered around logics of cleanliness, youth, and health. ‘Skin,’ writes Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, ‘becomes the terrain where the residue of war and empire is both visible and effaced.’ But these derma-logical ideas have proliferated explosively in the past decade of photographic social media and have notably changed tone—toward something more brutal. Retinols, exfoliants, alpha and beta hydroxy acids: at the core of the so-called ‘new skincare era’ is the allegory of chemical violence, a kind ambivalently cushioned by a therapeutic language of treatment, healing, and care. Violence is packaged for every corner of the vanity cabinet: a tragedy of self-presentation by way of erosion.

Curated by Jeppe Ugelvig