October, 2003

Jiyoung Chae has a traveler's curiosity but also her objectivity, and it is this powerful combination that makes her visual installations of rural and urban communities an experience in inhabiting familiar environments in entirely new ways. It is also this combination that the Korean-born artist will reveal in her slideshow presentation at October's MacDowell Downtown on Thursday, October 2nd at the Peterborough Historical Society.

“I'm not trying to put up big, political issues,” Chae says in her soft-spoken, almost meditative voice. “I'm just showing personally how I understand community.” Chae has involved herself in numerous community projects; one of her latest took place in Utica, New York, a town, she says, that is in decline. “It's a dying industrial city, one that didn't take care of its people. There were only metal and beer factories. I wanted to bring in nature, give something brighter with more resolution.” To that end, she re-invented an abandoned house, a symbol for the community-at-large, with natural elements such as carpets that appeared as waving grass and expanded windows that attracted more light. “I care about people even though they are not friends or family. I've always thought about people's lives, how they live in the world, and what my role is as an artist to enrich their lives.”

Presenting community to the community that lives there is at the core of Chae's work, but it is never a simple act of portraiture. Before she even begins creating her installations, she focuses on the environment intensely, often stopping by “historic sites, old factories, stores, farms, lakes, libraries, parades.” She talks to residents and tries to adapt herself “well enough to show what she sees and share it as an experience.” The experience she wants to create is one that illuminates the commonality between communities. “I know we have different languages often, and different backgrounds, but I also know we have common character, and we feel a lot of the same emotions and feelings. I hope that viewers arrive at an understanding of the situation that I create.”

Those situations are most poetically found in the medium of installation, where the viewer can literally inhabit a space and come to terms with what is discovered there. It's a worthy metaphor for the act of being she evokes, but it's also more than that. One of Chae's favorite things to do is talk to viewers after they have spent time in the space. “After people experience the installation, they can stop by and discuss their thoughts…already, we have something in common to talk about.” It's a noteworthy reversal: The same curiosity that compelled Chae into the community compels viewers into her installations, making them travelers in their own environment. And though they are seeing a representation of their home, Chae claims they are observing it for the first time in an objective way, much like a foreigner would. By discussing it afterward, they take their place among world travelers whose sole mission is to make connections out of nothing but a shared space and moment.

“A site,” she says, “is involved with the accumulation of time, history, accidents, lives of people, inanimate things, and animate things. We share the common experience that contains the private experience. And I believe art should touch people to carry on with their lives in a better way.”