→ Wake me up (inside) (2022)
Wake me up (inside) is the title of Taehee’s solo exhibition at Blade Study which showed a series of 3D printed sculptures, risographic prints, and video exploring how the technology of Taehee’s childhood has morphed into 도깨비, dokkaebi.
Dokkaebi are goblin-like, supernaturally occurring creatures from Korean lore who possess extraordinary abilities, like shape-shifting. They maintain a contentious and playful relationship with their human counterparts, at times playing tricks on them, and others, helping them when facing danger or financial hardship. The original form of dokkaebi, a gregarious masculine spirit, is associated with objects of nostalgia, especially antiquated household objects and appliances that have made contact with blood, possibly, as recent studies from The Academy of Korean Studies suggest, menstrual blood.
Exhibition View
Legend describes dokkaebi in many different forms: humanoid monsters, poltergeist phenomena, haunted objects. However, the visual depiction of dokkaebi is a contemporary amalgamation of cultural entanglement, colonial erasure, and decolonial revision. Much like Donna Haraway’s Cyborg, dokkaebi is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self based on its history. The popular imagery of dokkaebi, a horned red skinned hairy man, is a modern byproduct of mistranslation and colonial erasure that started before Japan’s occupation of Korea. After the erasure, Kwak Jaesik’s “Korean Monster Encyclopedia” (2018) recounts the attempt to reclaim dokkaebi imagery in 1980~1990s Korean folkloric academia by gathering all the mythical beings that might be a dokkaebi. One of the few pieces of evidence of dokkaebi’s amorphousness could be found in the translation of Karl Marx’s “Communist manifesto” published from The Dong-a Ilbo in 1947. “A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of Communism.” In that Korean translation, they used the word dokkaebi for “specter” instead of ghost (유령).
3D Rendered Virtual Tableau
Taehee’s imagined software package,“Dokkaebi 1.0”, represents a container for the memories harvested from the floppy disk’s dokkaebi ok display. 도깨비 is a force, but it’s also a “thing”. As understood by Martin Heidegger’s distinction between objects and things, when an object breaks or is misused, it sheds its conventional role and becomes visible in new ways: it becomes a thing. Thing theory draws upon this notion of productive estrangement to consider the meaning that physical artifacts can have for human subjects.
3D rendered image of “Dokkaebi 1.0”
The napping dokkaebi at the center of the installation lays in a dream state on top of The Bliss, the iconic Windows XP wallpaper introduced by the company in the year 2000. The video sculpture installation revisits the artist’s childhood family desktop while exploring queer existence of dokkaebi in relation to technology, capitalism, colonialism, and the pursuit of decolonialism.
“Dokkaebi 1.0”, as a publication