New York City based South Korean artist Jaye Rhee explores the limitations of human perception, playing with the tensions between fantasy and reality through multimedia work spanning video, performance and installation.
Read MoreJaye Rhee was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1973. Later relocating to the US, Rhee completed both her BFA and MFA at the School of the Arts Institute Chicago in the early 2000s.
Rhee has participated in several international artist residency programmes after graduating, including the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, Palais de Tokyo Workshop Program in Paris and Delfina Foundation's residency programme in London.
In 2010, Specter Press published her monograph entitled Imageless, which charted the development of her work, alongside commissioned texts from several prominent art historians, curators and writers.
Rhee's artworks explore an engagement with and analysis of the image, thinking through the gaps and tensions between construction and reality, memory, language and fantasy.
Utilising a broad range of media such as performance, video, photography and installation, the artist investigates the evasive nature of desire, channelling and interrogating the viewer's own sense of perception. Often describing her work as 'revelling in the space between the ironic and the poignant', Rhee reveals the limits of human's capacity to see and know through the virtual image.
Between 2007–2009, Rhee created a series of work that revolved around the stage of a public bath house. In Swan (2007), Polar Bear (2007) and Niagara (2009), performers interact with a bath house whose backdrops are tiled wall paintings of swans in a lake, polar bears in the North Pole and the Niagara Falls. Through this work, Rhee challenges collective memory in response to cultural scenes and monuments, pointing out the idealised nature of these images in our unconscious.
Rhee explores collective optimisms and aspirations in her work Once Called Future (2019), which takes mid-century retro-futuristic designs as a starting point to understand what people in the mid-20th century might have imagined our future would look like. In this three-channel video installation, Rhee reflects on the notion of 'not here/not now' as a stand-in for alternative spaces or futures.
Rhee also explores the personal limitations of human memory in her video installation The Perfect Moment (2015). This work is centred on a veteran dancer recounting her experiences around her craft: as the only audience member to a modern dancer's solo piece, her own first solo performance, and what she considered as the perfect moment during her debut solo piece. In the video, Rhee exposes the veteran dancer's lapses in memory—the performances she describes do not seem to match up with other narrations of the story, recent renditions are not faithful accounts, among many other apparent inaccuracies.
Rhee's massive 52-channel video installation Handcrafted Reality (2021) was developed during the Covid-19 pandemic. In this work, Rhee examines human relationships with digital screens and virtual spaces. Rhee created three-dimensional renderings of various objects and altered their configurations to create fantastical environments, similar to that of video games like Minecraft. Through this project, Rhee highlights our intertwined existence with the digital space, bridging the gap between the real and the virtual.
Jaye Rhee has received a number of awards for her art.
In 2008, she was the recipient of the KAFA Award from the Korea Arts Foundation of America in Los Angeles. In 2009 and 2010, she was awarded the Arts Council Korea Grant for Cultural Exchange.
In 2010, she was awarded the Franklin Furnace Fund, and in 2011 she was awarded the DOOSAN Art Award. In 2015, she was awarded the 15th Songeun Art Award, by the Songeun Art & Cultural Foundation. In 2017, she was awarded the Byucksan Cultural Foundation Art Grant, by Byucksan Cultural Foundation.
In 2023, Jaye Rhee was announced as one of 13 artists chosen for the Korean Artists Abroad programme supported by Korea Arts Management Service.
Jaye Rhee has held several solo exhibitions at spaces such as the Fulton Center, New York; Korean Cultural Center, Los Angeles; Doosan Gallery, Seoul and New York; and Chicago Cultural Center.
Her work has been included in group exhibitions at the Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, South Korea; Seoul Museum of Art; Mori Museum of Art, Tokyo; and Queens Museum, New York. Her work is collected by institutions such as the Seoul Museum of Art; Flaxman Library at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; and the Norton Museum of Art, Florida.
Jaye Rhee has been written about in a number of publications, including Frieze.
Arianna Mercado | Ocula | 2023
