Masters of Disguise

Chan-Hyo Bae

Jung S. Kim

Youngho Kang

Artego Gallery is pleased to present Masters of Disguise, an exhibition featuring three contemporary Korean photographers whose practices revolve around masquerading in self-portraits: Chan-Hyo Bae, Jung S. Kim, and Youngho Kang. These artists investigate hybridization of cultures in our age of globalization. Employing masquerade to explore their individual personas, they design props, costumes, make-up, and hairdos to create staged images. Fluidity and artificiality, as manifested by ever-changing appearances, draw attention to the superficiality of biological and cultural markers. By blurring the boundaries of gender and race, these artists challenge and destabilize conventional notions of culture, race, and gender as determinants of personal identity.

Working in London, New York, and Seoul respectively, each artist utilizes masquerading as a vehicle to examine the multiple identities that exist within the self. Chan-Hyo Bae presents Existing in Costume, a photographic series that consumed a decade of Bae’s life following his move to the UK in 2005. Cross-dressing as female British nobility and characters from European fairytales, Europe’s history of power struggles, and the era of witch-hunting was a means to escape cultural alienation and offer a corrective to the stereotypical view of the Asian male in Great Britain and Europe. Meticulously researched and orchestrated, each work required collaborative effort, from scouting locations to hiring actors.

Jung S. Kim offers works from her Circle series. For Circle II (2010–2011), Kim transformed herself into characters from traditional Korean fairytales, largely inspired by an upbringing immersed in her Shaman maternal aunt’s life. Circle III (2016–2021), which appropriates the graphic format of the Korean gambling card Hwa-tu, is deeply personal, as the artist visualizes childhood memories that were the source of psychological trauma. Exhibited for the first time is her early 1997 reclining self-portrait taken during her pregnancy.

For his New York debut, Youngho Kang presents Portrait of Ouroboros–99 Variations (2008–09), theatrical self-portraits in which the artist masquerades as characters ranging from a drag queen to a hideous humanoid. Unlike Bae and Kim, who deploy static portraiture, Kang dramatizes his performativity through exaggerated facial expressions as he poses before a mirror utilizing prosthetics, props, and some rather messy materials. Kang’s project consists of poetry as much as photography, as he titles his works based on the chance occurrences of I Ching, combining words utilizing Surrealistic automatism that reveal the contradictions and absurdities of life, as in The King Who Grows the Chin and Courageous Betrayal.

Joining a long list of pioneering art photographers who have deployed masquerade in their conceptual practice, from Duchamp to Sherman, these Korean artists subvert the codes and conventions of portraiture in order to challenge preconceived notions that viewers may hold about their subjects. Masquerade inherently implies parody, as the artists pretend to be someone else. The strategy entered the Postmodern canon in the hands of Feminist, Queer, Black, and other minority artists as they responded critically to a dominant White heterosexual male culture.

Masquerade provides these artists with an opportunity to defy and escape the conformity characteristic of Korean society, a nation that only recently has achieved global popular cultural influence despite its rigid educational system, marked imbalance of gender power, and a lack of Queer rights. Bae deploys masquerade as a critique of Eurocentric views of humanity. Kim critiques the burdens of fixed Korean gender roles and the rigid framework of traditional Korean folktales. Kang’s chameleon-like imaginary free-flowing human/non-human characters address climatological discourse in the Anthropocene.

Chan-Hyo Bae explores gender, culture, social isolation, prejudice, and stereotypes. Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007, Bae has expressed the cultural and emotional estrangement he has experienced in England. Existing in Costume (2007–16) saw him posing in female historical Western costumes, inserting himself into history and a society from which he felt excluded. Researched in meticulous detail, Bae created elaborate scenes featuring himself as a noblewoman from Elizabethan to Regency periods.

Over the past ten years, Bae has been placing himself within the collective consciousness of nationality: Tudor history and the realm of Western fairy tales and witch hunting narratives—stories that have permeated Western culture and are embedded in our shared psyche. In his decade-long investigation of “becoming British” through masquerading and cross-dressing, Bae has brought curiosity about and fascination with gender that refutes Western discourse and the patriarchal system.

Chan-Hyo Bae (b. 1975, Busan, South Korea) studied Photography at Kyung-Sung University, South Korea and the Slade School of Fine Art, London. He has exhibited at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Museum of Photography, Seoul; National Museum of Singapore; Kunsthalle, Vienna; Royal Academy, London; Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg; and Chennai Photo Biennale. His work is housed in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, and the Museum of Photography, Seoul. A monograph, Existing in Costume, was published by the Museum of Photography, Seoul in 2019.

Chan-Hyo Bae is represented by Purdy/Hicks Gallery, London. Based in New Jersey, Jung S. Kim was born in Seoul, South Korea. She studied Fine Art Photography at Chung-Ang University in Korea, and in 2001, immigrated to the US.

Kim’s Circle is a journey of introspection and a quest for the personal identity. Parodying famous Western paintings, images of the Buddha, and Korean folklores, and utilizing Korean gambling cards and props, the series manifests as a visual narrative of self-discovery.

Kim has earned national and international recognition with exhibitions at the Providence Center for Photographic Arts, Filter Photo Festival, Humble Art Foundation, Center for Fine Art Photography, Griffin Museum of Photography, and New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2014, Kim appeared in The New York Times-Lens New York Portfolio Review and "Photography Now" at The Center for Photography at Woodstock. She has exhibited at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles; The 3rd Asian Women Photographer Showcase at the Obscura Festival; Kwangju Biennale; Daegu Photo Biennale; Seoul Museum of Art; Hanlim (Daelim) Museum in Korea; and Soho Photo Gallery in NYC. Kim has won the Robert Cornelius Portrait Award, Julia Margaret Cameron Award, Grand Prix Juror Award, Director's Choice Award from the C4FAP, and the AHL Foundation of Visual Arts Award. Circle has been published as "Zine Collection No10, Circle" by Editions Bessard in Paris. Collections of Kim's work are housed in FNAC (Fonds National d’Art Contemporain) in France, Imago Mundi Collection in Italy, Center for Photography at Woodstock in New York, Daelim Museum, and Samtan Art Mine Museum.

A sought-after commercial photographer in Korea since the early 2000s, Youngho Kang has created over six-hundred commercial works, including ads for Coca-Cola, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Dunkin’ Donuts, Fissler, Olympus, and has produced eighty film posters. His editorial work has appeared in major fashion magazines, including Vogue, Bazaar, Elle, W, Marie Claire, In Style, and Esquire He has produced portraits of two former presidents of South Korea and one presidential candidate. Earning the nickname "dancing photographer," Kang plays music to suit the concepts of his photography sessions: he says that his working process is more important than the end result.

In 2008, Kang started Portrait of Ouroboros–99 Variations, inspired by the myth of Ouroboros, an immortal serpent surviving constantly by swallowing its own tail. Photographing through a mirror, the camera appears as a subject, the mythical image and the realistic image coexisting, thus the contradictory relationship between conscious and unconscious produces cognitive dissonance.

Born in Seoul in 1970, Kang studied French language and literature at Hongik University, Seoul. He is President of Creative Company SangSang Variations & SangSang Art Museum. Kang lives and works in Seoul, South Korea. His work has been shown in Seoul and at Central European House of Photography, Bratislava, Slovakia: The Center for Fine Art Photography, Colorado; Gama Gallery, Istanbul; Hangar Art Center, Brussel; and Ballarat International Foto Biennale 2013, Ballarat, Australia. He was a selected participant in the 2015 New York Times Portfolio Review.