Jung Min: Boundaries

Jung Min, Boundaries. Courtesy Darren Johnson/the Las Vegas-Clark County Library District

Jung Min, Boundaries
On view at Enterprise Library, Las Vegas, through July 18, 2021

By D.K. Sole

The first drawings I remember seeing of Jung Min’s were the self-portraits of her face strapped up with white tape, eyes squeezed and hair bunched in loops. The tape is real tape, stuck over the paper surface, and that gives the series the air of a jokey nuisance, as if the face had been sitting on the page normally until someone came from the outside and decided to irritate it for fun. The giant drawing of a disembodied hank of hair in the Womxn of Color Arts Festival group show in the Arts Factory at the start of 2020 felt like a sign that she was moving in a new direction towards hair-as-abstraction. Unlike the hair in the tape-portrait drawings, the lone hank was not vulnerable to outside interruptions. In Boundaries the hair is still there and it’s found new places where it can reattach itself – not to heads, but to giant samples of Korean-language calligraphy and to faceless breasty, buttocky ink-on-Yupo bio-blobs.

(I mean, there’s one drawing in the show that depicts faces but they’re tucked into the hair-flow like spies as though something new has happened here too: instead of the hairs attaching themselves to a head, the heads have attached themselves to the hair.)

If the massive hank of hair was somewhat monstrous – what giant owns this crop? – then the breasty blobs are monstrous in a different, more exposed, way. “I am using my female body and ethnic black hair to create images of extreme discomfort and visual dissonance,” Jung Min writes in her artist statement. The source of alarm has shifted, with the arrival of the blobs, from “my” body and hair to a more universal sense of the female grotesque. Without a face or a hairstyle, it’s no longer clear that the artist thinks of the hair as ethnically Asian. The sense of a separate, self-contained culture comes, instead, from the independent action implied by the curled, springy lines, the long hairs flexing themselves around the bulk of the blob as if alive.

The notion of an identifiable ethnicity has been placed in the calligraphy pieces instead, a pair of jokes that she shares with us in the titles, explaining that the one that ends in a forked gesture like open legs means “Shit” and the one in which the word ends in a loop spells out the word “Hang.” The loop is soft and empty and the installation of the vertical sheet of Yupo sets it low on the wall, nowhere near neck-height. Nobody is being hung, any more than the faces in those older tape-squeezed graphite drawings were being permanently mangled. The joke is grim but it advertises its harmlessness. The blobs are a different matter. There’s no sign that these mutant globules will ever resolve themselves into anything that will put you at ease. Then again, thinking of the artist’s love of jokes, isn’t that one mooning you? Fully, blatantly, showing you its arse? While it maintains the plausible deniability of being a blob? Can’t we interpret that as communication? Friendly, almost? A sign of a mind and a personality? A conversation-starter?

Jung Min, Boundaries
On view at Enterprise Library, 8310 S Las Vegas Blvd, Las Vegas, NV 89123
May 20 – July 18, 2021

Published July 3, 2021