Installation view of 《Glove box》 (Alterside, 2024) ©Alterside

At the dentist, one has a wisdom tooth pulled. Only the sense of pain is blocked, so the living tooth gripped by the extraction tool resists firmly, and the mass of the skull being tugged along is vividly felt. At the psychiatrist, one receives medication for mental hygiene. From the moment of ingestion, two versions of the “self” diverge—incapable of truly understanding one another—alternately dying and reviving again and again. When struck by a deadly infectious disease, one becomes confined at home. Private space overlaps with the quarantined wards of public medical networks, and for years everyone must endure a life where one’s bed is indistinguishable from the hospital’s bed—and at times, from a coffin.

Chang Younghae has long developed works that examine the contact that makes us oscillate between the belief in “I” and the perception that “my body is not my own.” While her previous solo exhibition focused on the obsessive rhythms and emotional movements produced by the conventions and rules of sexuality, this second solo exhibition foregrounds the mediation that such movement always entails. The visual metaphor that embodies this mediation—and the objectification it performs—is the glove box: a container equipped with gloves that allow one to control a quarantined specimen. It is this medicalized image of touch and containment that anchors the exhibition.

Within the paranoid observational structure that the glove box diagram suggests—and under the inevitable hierarchy between controller and controlled—symptoms are artificially suppressed, lesions are sometimes severed from the body, and in some cases, even the body’s survival itself is suspended.

These are the small and large deaths that medical control distributes across the various layers of life in the name of living. Such deaths are, perhaps, the most mundane evidence of the renewed truth that we cannot equate our bodies with our “selves” in any literal sense. Yet, Chang deliberately withholds the easy irony that the subject can only emerge through such excription—through the helplessly open body exposed to the external world. Instead, she quietly gives form to the sensation of the body, as part of the “self,” being subsumed as a material object within the professionalized domain of the “clinical.” In doing so, she memorializes all the different forms of death that surface in that process.

There are inert masses that look as if the foreign sensation of control—scraping away and hollowing out the “self”—has been pressed and trimmed into shape. The weight and sharpness of objectivity accumulate endlessly: in the labored gasping of CPR counts, in the cold indifference of X-ray images cutting across the screen, distancing both the audience and the figures depicted. The equation established between viewer and exhibition remains open toward the deaths entombed within the viewer’s own body.

Standing or projected here are corporeal forms that both support and separate from the “self,” like a platform: bodies under medical control, and the cadavers of instantaneous sensations that once flared up or shriveled in those mediated experiences. In this white cube—an environment as sterilized as a hospital—viewers are invited to diagnose, each in their own way, the causes of death of these bodies. In certain places, diagnosis and mourning are indistinguishable.

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