Chang Younghae (b. 1994) experiments with and explores the body as a place and the social rules that surround it, as well as the affects it generates, through diverse media such as video, performance, and installation. For the artist, the body exists as something that can be transformed and reconfigured through technology. She focuses on the processes of converting the body into images or fragmenting and objectifying it, employing media-based devices such as AI, cameras, and X-rays.

Introducing herself as “an artist who experimentally explores the body as a place in the present era,” Chang Younghae has, in her early works, reconfigured bodily modes of behavior produced by the rules of sexuality through performances using pole dance and pair skating. 

In particular, she focuses on how, through certain forms of role-playing, the body can become passive or active, and how the ways in which the body is used can make it one’s own or render it as belonging to another.

For example, the performance work I want to die because I want to touch aono / I want to hold aono so badly I could die (2021) questions the conventions of sexuality by revealing the obsessive rhythms of gendered embodiment and the tensions between belief and perception through a choreography of pair figure skating combined with live reading. 

Likewise, her performance ???? climb, fronthook, angel, invert, daphne, figure head, scorpion, fall, gemini, princess, chopstick—first presented in 2023 at Shower—features two performers taking turns pole dancing to exhaustion to piano renditions of songs by female pop artists from the 2000s and 2010s, while a narrator on the side describes each pose in real time.

The work’s title corresponds directly to the performers’ movements. Using words that either describe actions—such as fall, invert, or fronthook—or image them—like angel or scorpion—the title invites viewers to match each pose to its name in real time. Yet, as the performance proceeds and the act of narrating the pole dance begins to unravel, the alignment between title and movement gradually breaks down. 

Chang Younghae describes this work as “an experiment on what happens to the body when it is interpreted through text or image in real time.”

In this work, the genre of “pole dance” itself functions as a device that subverts conventional representations of sexuality. Within the rules of sexualized performance, the pole has traditionally symbolized the phallus, with the act of a stripper circling it reproducing sexual metaphors.  

Yet, over the extended duration of this piece—where male and female pole dancers alternately continue the dance—the reenactment of a woman circling the phallus is at a certain point overturned, shifting the position of subjectivity and beginning to unravel the traditional codes of sexuality.

Furthermore, in 2023 Chang Younghae explored how the social codes of pornography intersect with optical apparatuses through a collaborative performance work with artist Min Hyein titled Black Maria. The work’s title refers to the first mobile film studio devised in 1893 by Thomas Edison and William K. Dickson; Chang cites Edison’s Black Maria as the stage for this piece.

At a time when filming was mostly done outdoors in natural light, Edison captured 30-second performances of famous vaudeville acts, sportsmen, dancers, and acrobats inside a studio whose lighting and sets were meticulously fabricated. The bodies staged within this optical set were often rendered in provocative images, employing the codes of pornography as they were produced for screening and business purposes. 

Chang Younghae and Min Hyein each presented a performance of the same title simultaneously on the same stage and within the same duration. While doing so, they identified different roles and sources of the artificial lighting they used, thus accepting distinct citations from the optical set of the Black Maria.

Meanwhile, in her 2024 solo exhibition 《Glove box》 at Alterside, Chang Younghae addressed “the body under medicine,” exploring how modern medical practices have transformed the body. This new line of inquiry stemmed from someone’s death and extended into her reflections on the anesthetized body, or corpus. 

The exhibition’s title, “Glove box,” refers to a sealed container that allows one to handle an isolated subject inside an incubator through gloves. Chang saw the glove box as a device that reveals much about the body positioned within the hierarchies of contemporary medicine.

Taking the glove box—a device designed to control isolated subjects—as a metaphor for modern medicine, Chang Younghae continued to reflect on how we perceive images of anesthetized or dead bodies under such control, and what it means to confront an actual dead body.
 
Based on these reflections, her exhibition 《Glove box》 presented scenes not of works in their original form but of bodies and objects caught in the midst of breaking down or collapsing—landscapes that appear after invisible forces have already taken effect. The figure of a cat continually disintegrates (Cat), while real insects are degraded into 3D-rendered images and repeatedly revived (Insect Looping Video).

In the video work Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation / 1S34008AP, F010122011964, .04. 0*8. 5mm, a dead body—or an invisible presence assumed to be dead—emerges as the subject of vision through the camera body located off-screen. The video interlaces the urgent, relentless motions of cardiopulmonary resuscitation with the careful yet quotidian gestures of sweeping up cremated remains. Like retracing the path of titanium teeth left in the ashes as a non-body residue, it reconstructs the scene of surgery while showing, without concealment, the red blood pooled inside the mouth.
 
Meanwhile, another video work, Ray, stages an emotional farce centered on intoxicated figures, juxtaposing their actions with X-ray images that illuminate the interior of their bodies and map the structure of desire.

In the performance work 3, presented in 2024 at LDK (formerly the Ambassador’s Residence), the artist explored the issue of distance—or the sense of spatial relation—between elements and phenomena that constitute the world, referencing the “21-foot rule” commonly used in American policing. 

In this performance, Chang Younghae used an empty mansion at midnight as the stage, installing filming lights to transform the interior into a space reminiscent of 3 p.m. She staged a scene in which a small spherical object, resembling a baseball, hurtles through the window at speeds exceeding 100 km/h. The moment the object strikes the floor and becomes damaged, its true identity—as a lemon—is revealed through its scent.

The artificial lighting that alters the time of day, the lemon disguised as a baseball whose identity is revealed with a temporal delay through its scent, and the setting of an empty mansion at midnight, all metaphorically evoke conditions of uncertain temporality, where reality and fiction intertwine with events across different timelines, including contemporary instances of massacre and violence. 

This work, initially staged in a realistic and private space, was later transferred to the black box at ARKO Arts Theater in 2025. By employing scrims and lighting, the theater was repurposed as a massive window, creating a heightened illusion that hovers between reality and fiction.

In the new works presented at 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025》 at DOOSAN Gallery, Chang Younghae examined how the vitality of the body is dulled and distorted in sensory terms in a contemporary society dominated by advanced media and technology.  

In the video annie, cobalt (2025), as she looks at how warfare has been consumed as spectacle in the media environment and massacre sites have been covered up with golf courses, she illustrates mechanisms in which violence goes beyond the realm of an extraordinary shock to pervade familiar environments. In blur, blur (2025), she delves into AI technology’s attempts to represent distinct human emotions and gestures in its pursuit of average-based perfection. In the process, she explores the contemporary “body horror” that technology has wrought.

In this way, Chang Younghae has explored the physical properties and positions of the body as it transforms through social rules, technological environments, and media across various mediums. Her work, which continuously experiments with the body as a multilayered and dynamic place, invites reflection and investigation into how violence and desire surrounding the body have been reshaped and distorted in contemporary society.

 “Through video, I was interested in the moments when the body transforms into an image, or when it acquires different physicalities through various media. This also connects to my interest in social rules surrounding the body, such as ‘sexuality’ or ‘anesthesia.’ The moments when the body becomes both a subject and an object are particularly important to me.”   (Chang Younghae, interview at Korea National University of Arts)

Chang Younghae majored in Intermedia at the Graduate School of Fine Arts, Korea National University of Arts. Her solo exhibitions include 《21feet》 (LDK, Seoul, 2024), 《Glove box》 (Alterside, Seoul, 2024), 《???? climb, fronthook, angel, invert, daphne, figure head, scorpion, fall, gemini, princess, chopstick》 (Shower, Seoul, 2023), and 《Surge analysis》 (Gallery175, Seoul, 2021). 

She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions and performances, including 《DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025》 (DOOSAN Gallery, Seoul, 2025), 《off-site 2: Eleven Episodes》 (Kukje Gallery, Seoul, 2025), the 25th Seoul Intl. ALT Cinema & Media Art Festival (Hongdae KT&G Sangsangmadang Cinema/Suite, Sangsangmadang Gallery, Seoul, 2025), and 《Into the Rhythm: From Score to Contact Zone》 (ARKO Art Center, Seoul, 2024).

References

• 한국예술종합학교, 장소이자 장르로서의 몸ㅣ작가 장영해ㅣ한예종 라이징스타
• 아트선재센터, [전시 개요] 오프사이트 2: 열한 가지 에피소드 (Art Sonje Center, [Exhibition Overview] off-site 2: Eleven Episodes)
• 두산아트센터, [전시 개요] 두산아트랩 전시 2025 (DOOSAN Art Center, [Exhibition Overview] DOOSAN Art Lab Exhibition 2025)
• 윈드밀, [전시 개요] Black Maria (Windmill, [Exhibition Overview] Black Maria)
• 얼터사이드, 강동호: 마취된 시간 — 장영해의 《Glove box》를 나서며
• LDK, [전시 개요] 21feet (LDK, [Exhibition Overview] 21feet)
• 2025 아르코데이, 프레젠테이션: 작가 장영해 (2025 ARKO DAY, Presentation: Artist Chang Younghae)