Installation view 《TAXIDERMIA》 at N/A Gallery © Omyo Cho

TAXIDERMIA is a compound of “taxidermy” and the suffix “-ia.” Taxidermy is the act of making a dead animal appear more alive than it was in life. The suffix “-ia” connotes disease or a particular state. In this sense, taxidermy is both ornament and luxury. It represents the strange reality in which something that only appears more alive than the living holds greater value.

Society is no different. We neglect the living and instead assign meaning to the dead. We convert fleeting moments into images and revere them eternally. Social media embalms fragments of a person’s life permanently. Politics, too, is remembered through isolated images. A taxidermied tiger always appears to be roaring. In this process, life dissociated from images goes unremembered—and what is unremembered is ultimately killed. The artist calls this condition of a contemporary society that remembers only embalmed images: TAXIDERMIA.

Installation view 《TAXIDERMIA》 at N/A Gallery © Omyo Cho

Images are born alongside death. A person doesn’t become a hero because they die young; only those who die young can become heroes. Death leaves behind purity; life, only disgrace. The image appears the moment the real disappears. And because the real has vanished, the image becomes unchanging and eternally preserved.

Art is no different from taxidermy. We say art transforms reality into images. We say the essence of life is distilled in art. But just as roaring isn’t the essence of a tiger, art does not contain the essence of life. We merely believe it does. Through art, we convert life into images. People dream not of the tigers languishing in zoos, but of a wild tiger roaring in a place they’ve never seen. Yet that dream is nothing more than a dead ideal. We may sing praises of life, but in the end, only what is dead holds real meaning.

In response, the artist turns to the alleys of printers surrounding their studio and takes notice of the same objects discarded each day. These reusable and replicable dead things are summoned back into the world through the gesture of taxidermy. As such, these murdered objects reappear in the exhibition both as embalmed images and ornamental artifacts. Through these installations, the artist reveals how artistic practice hovers between acts of embalming and presentation.

The artist collects dead materials, buries them in clay and burns them, prints them onto paper, and enshrines them within the exhibition space—a ritualistic performance that interrogates long-standing practices of mourning and record-keeping. The gathered objects are taxidermied permanently by the artist and embedded throughout the exhibition space. These gestures endow discarded, purpose-made materials with new meanings, pointing to the possibility of a post-human memory—one belonging to the things themselves.

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