Pixel Flesh
Eye on Art: Pixel Flesh
Nanda van den Berg, director of the Huis Marseille photography museum in Amsterdam will introduce us to her research into film and photographic images in the era of new technologies such as generative AI. Featuring images and excerpts from the artists Heesoo Kwon and Charmaine Poh.
Nanda van den Berg is director of Huis Marseille, and curator of the exhibition Shadow Self – Portal to a Parallel World. For Shadow Self, five artists were invited to investigate parallel worlds through a personal or autobiographical approach.
Nanda van den Berg highlights the artists Heesoo Kwon (South Korea, 1990) and Charmaine Poh (Singapore, 1990). The former made a montage especially for this show at Eye of the experiments she did during the creative development of Going Home, a work in which she uses AI to expand her childhood photographs, putting Korean history and the family archive in a new historical perspective. She shares her thoughts on the new collaborative possibilities AI offers her.
The ‘shadow self’ that inhabits the parallel world points the way to another dimension. What’s it like, for example, to endlessly circulate on the internet as the twelve-year-old child you once were – which is what happened to artist Charmaine Poh? In the early 2000s she acted as a child star in the television series We Are R.E.M. and this experience underpins The Young Body Universe, from which several works can be seen this evening. Through an online lecture performance, she addresses the plethora of questions surrounding virtual ownership.
Charmaine Poh was recently announced as Deutsche Bank’s Artist of the Year 2025
Programme
Going Home (Heesoo Kwon, 2024)
In Korean, the word for marriage is 'honin', which originates from the idea of 'going to the in-law's home'. In her new video piece Going Home, Kwon delves into the aspects of marriage in various forms, from her mother's life story within a traditional patriarchal married lifestyle to Kwon's own marriage, which occurred a month before the release of this video. The work features voice recordings of Kwon, her mother, husband, and hypnotherapist, and is layered with visual elements: Kwon's family photos, their animated versions created by 3D modelling software and artificial intelligence programs (AI), as well as home video footage spanning from 1989 to 2024.
Good Morning Young Body (Charmaine Poh, 2023)
Eternally twelve-year-old character E-Ching arose as a deepfake from footage that continued to circulate on the internet of Poh’s younger self in the series We are R.E.M. A deep-fake video revives the character she played, E-Ching, and allows this to respond to the online commentary and criticism she was exposed to back then.
Public Solitude (Charmaine Poh, 2022)
In this double-screen video, we see E-Ching responding to questions about desirability, performance and reality. The work is based on dramaturgic pedagogics, Stanislavski's theory of public loneliness as a resource for freeing the actor from an audience, and on the power of the anonymous gaze of the online audience.
In the Shadow of the Cosmic (Charmaine Poh, 2023)
In an online discussion, Poh draws the audience into a performance-lecture in which she investigates the multifacetedness of the avatar. She draws a technological line from the East Asian economic miracle of the 1980s and ’90s to the rise of techno-orientalism. She proposes that the digital image of the East Asian female body arose from a merging of these two historical developments.
Production in collaboration with Huis Marseille, where the exhibition Shadow Self – Portal to a Parallel World can be seen until 9 February 2025.
This is part of
Details
Production year
2025
Length
101 min.
Event language
English
Country
NL
Part of
Eye on Art
Eye on Art is a programme on the intersection between film and other arts. Eye on Art keeps up with current events, with presentations on contemporary artists and programmes that coincide with important exhibitions, manifestations and Eye activities.
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