Installation view © Museumhead

each segmented body seems to possess its own agency, silently screaming as if urging viewers to purchase it first. Consequently, it is difficult for the consumer (viewer) to know where to focus, or even to distinguish what the main product (work) is from the add-on. These inefficient and unproductive works—which in doing so render sales strategy irrelevant, and which are, in a sense, flamboyant and grotesque—radiate a distinctive identity that piques the viewer’s curiosity.

Ahyeon Ryu’s solo exhibition 《Outlet》 takes its cue from the idea of an “outlet” that sells items from past seasons or trends. Products that do not sell well yet must always be produced to be marketable in a consumer society mirror the profound anguish and sense of mission of artists who must ceaselessly create new works that are expected to succeed every time. Works made under such conditions are, at times, stamped as valuable in the museum, and at other times discarded as failures in the studio. Ryu, however, recalls these works into her own outlet. In doing so, she creates a field of opportunity where works whose season has passed and whose value has waned can once again be seen without hierarchy.


Ahyeon Ryu, Garments 05, 2023 © Museumhead

Contraction and Expansion of the Senses

The exhibition space is divided like a clothing shop’s show window, showroom, and fitting room. The first thing one encounters—the “Outlet” sign—succinctly contains the brand’s concept and content. Entering the showroom feels like stepping into a store on the verge of closing: punctured walls and sculptures whose use and form defy definition stand in a deactivated state.

This place operates only on Fridays. In contrast to the hyperactive online sphere where sales proceed nonstop for twenty-four hours, this offline space allows only at limited times for fragmented bodies to begin moving each in its own way. The whole figure of the human body cannot be seen; it can only be inferred. Behind the works are people who control the movements, stopping at the appointed time, changing positions, and operating the works again. As performers and sculptures gradually move as one and then halt at unexpected moments, they expand—and then again contract—our senses.


Ahyeon Ryu, Garments 05, 2023 © Museumhead

Distinctive Corporeality

The fitting room more starkly reveals peculiar bodies. Bodyless statues and separated body parts are scattered about, occupying space. A glossy padded jacket with one arm cut off hangs from the ceiling; a smooth, snow-white plaster leg with incongruous hair; and a nude sculpture whose back appears as if chained and bereft of the will to escape—all generate a grotesque impression. The moment these segmented bodies enter the fitting room, they cease to be bodies. The torso becomes a top, the lower body becomes bottoms—in other words, body and clothing collapse into one another. Where, then, do we draw the line of what we call “our body”? In an age when fashion has become not merely an expression of values but a mode of everyday life, clothing is no longer a secondary means detachable from the body; rather, it grows in weight as the body itself.

The effort to equate the skin of the body with clothing and continuously draw it into the position of subjectivity proposes a new and distinctive corporeality. Through goods that do not wait to be sold, bodyless statues, and movements that remain still, the bodies repeatedly oscillate between sensory segmentation and becoming one. Resembling a brand shop that reflects contemporary society, Ryu’s exhibition invites us to reexamine our fixed bodies and to sense nomadically—so that we might move anew.

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