Doosan Gallery New York is pleased to announce "Cruel and beautiful...," a solo exhibition of Chang jia, one of the recipients of the Third Annual DOOSAN Artist Award, which will be on view from March 6th through April 3rd. This exhibition will comprise of around ten representative works from the artist's oeuvre. 

Chang jia is an artist who creates works that directly challenge uncritically accepted social conventions, rules, and taboos of contemporary life.

This exhibition’s major work Sitting Young Girl (2009) depicts a young girl sitting on top of a glass jar containing eels, which appears as if the girl is being cruelly punished, but by showing the beautiful backside of a nude female figure, the artist reveals the male-driven gaze of how society views the female form. Like the title of the exhibition, this work attempts to portray the apparently cruel scene of the young girl being tortured from a beautiful, aesthetically appealing perspective.
Standing Up Peeing (2006), which captures the scene of a female nude urinating while standing up, conveys the essence of social structures as being an entity which hides and excludes in order to maintain its own validity.
To Survive the Death (2013), a large cow hide that contains text iron-seared with instructions on surviving the world as well as human beings’ various activities of everyday life, is a piece that negotiates both the commonplace and the grotesqueness of life itself.

In addition, there will be works from Chang’s 2013 solo exhibition “The Reason Is You”? bricks, small figurines, as well as toy like models, all made with cow blood. Presented along with a video of the production process, it will evoke the essence of blood by showing the process of its objectification.

Chang jia has been creating works that question and challenge sexuality, taboos, and social norms, and therefore have been the subject of controversy due to the experimental nature of her works. This exhibition at Doosan Gallery New York will provide a good opportunity for the works to go beyond the constraints of the national Korean art scene, for objective response and observation within a wider, global terrain.

*image (left)
courtesy of the artist and Doosan Gallery