‘THE MOMENT YOU TOLD ME YOU WANTED TO EXPERIENCE IT, I THOUGHT ABOUT GIVING YOU THAT EXPERIENCE’
by Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo & JinBin Chen
White Box, Oslo, Norway26 Mar 2020
‘A Happy Meal’; (un)framed & crumpled photographs, canned kimchi & douchi, steel tube, plaid shirt; dimension variable
Installation view of ‘A Happy Meal’
Close-up of ‘A Happy Meal’
Close-up of ‘A Happy Meal’
Close-up of ‘A Happy Meal’
Close-up of ‘A Happy Meal’
Close-up of ‘A Happy Meal’
(Photo documentation by Jacky Jaan-Yuan Kuo)
Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus state1:
‘We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.’
A Happy Meal focuses on close-ups of various bodies and faces which are scattered over the exhibition space. Those human skin colours are not simply impersonating or referring to characters from JinBin’s texts on the wall. The close-up is the face in that the close-up facialises, or converts a concrete entity into a decontextualised immobile surface, with motor tendencies that express an affective quality/power. I explore how the pleasures of eating and the erotics of display emerge from our bodies’ original functions together — in particular patriarchy often reigns supreme, in my personal domestic memory — to deface the vulnerability and absurdity of masculinity, and to also see a fragment of a body which is represented somewhere else fully.
1 Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, (Translator) Brian Massumi, 1980. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. ed 1987. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press.
Support:
Oslo National Academy of the Arts (Kunsthøgskolen i Oslo)
(ENG︎︎︎中文) (︎︎︎Back to Overview)
Installation view of ‘A Happy Meal’ at White Box, Oslo, Norway
Installation view of ‘A Happy Meal’ at White Box, Oslo, Norway
Performance, inkjet printing (Grindr blue & texts) on archival photo paper by JinBin Chen
He said to a viewer, ‘Du må unnskylde at jeg dytter deg unna, men jeg er ikke vant med denne formen for kjærlighet’. (Eng: Please forgive me to push you away. Because I am not familiar with this kind of love.)
Navigating personal experiences in an impersonal sense, JinBin excerpts the Grindr blue, fictional stories, and varied episodes in the life of communications
with strangers. With an attempt to resonate the aesthetic pleasure and the sexual pleasure, he forms a double confession of both his life itself and the truth that his creation is after all the extension of himself - and it does not escape from being biographical.