SOOJIN CHANG, expanding on animacy through non-hierarchical encounters with technology, Agi Ki, δημοσίευση στο CLOT Magazine [4/12/2022]
Soojin Chang is a Glasgow-based non-binary artist of Korean descent whose multimedia art practice considers interpersonal, interspecies and industrial interdependencies. Inhabiting the systemic cracks of boundaries between personhood and objecthood, art and life or human and inhuman agency, Chang works across performance, moving images and ritualistic practice. The artist’s research mainly deals with themes of identity, hybridity and man-machine processes, with a particular interest in xenotransplantation, multispecies surrogacy, and genetic engineering.
BXBY is Chang’s recent semi-fictional work, a year-long performance project exploring the fusion of life across the species, for which the artist received the 2022 Jerwood/FVU Award. Chang embraces technology and uses their own body to experience and convey their search for new ways of reproduction in the present moment, speculating for the future. Always in becoming, repeatedly reorganising, the shapeless body becomes an event of physical transformation and arousal full of affect. Experimenting on their own physicality to test reproductive technologies is also a way for the artist to simultaneously embody subjecthood and objecthood as a living queer organism.
With power relationships circluded within one body, the artist is able to explore the subordinating forces of our current cultural, social and political realms. On this year’s summer solstice, working together with the artist, DJ, sage and Daoist practitioner Georgie (Rei-n) Lo, Chang presented their performance in the form of a ritualistic gathering, incorporating choreographed physical movements and technological equipment in order to collectively meditate on the question of land redistribution and ownership. The art piece borrowed from animist methodology and approached the exhibition building as an animate being.
Η συνέχεια εδώ.