-020 Claire Chey
If there is one thing that you can change in a previous project of yours, what would it be?
The Shame in the Title
Artists have their own unique logic for giving titles to their works. I like to keep mine relatively simple, something close to a clinical description: A Lamp, A Girl in Blue, A Red Centaur, High School Punishment, Mother in my Dream #1, Mother in my Dream #2, Guijeop #1, Guijeop #2, A Cremation Chamber, and so on. Sometimes honest to the subject matter, other times intentionally ironic or dishonest to unsettle my viewers. This logic shifted slightly for my thesis work at the Yale School of Art. The titles for my paintings were, respectively, One Who Makes Love to a Ghost, Cow Udders, A Cradling Woman, and Creation of Athena.
In a conversation with one of my closest professors at school, she asked me what my paintings were about. I told her that Creation of Athena was about my own birth. It started from ruminating on the traumatic origin story of mine that my mom once shared. When she was pregnant with me, my father came home extremely drunk one night, and banged his head against the mirror several times until it broke. He then pivoted backward, and my mother, while very pregnant, ran to catch him as he fell. His head landed directly on her belly which caused her water to break prematurely. “Creation of Athena,” in which Athena is born from Zeus’s cracked skull, was, therefore, a euphemism. I wanted to point to the violence of birth and the lingering inheritance of trauma. The professor continued to ask me why I didn’t just title the work “Me Being Born”. She argued that the imagery was already complex, and that complicating the titles further would be a disservice. Her suggestions for new titles were: “A Ghost Fuck”, “Cow Tits”, “A Woman”, and “Me Being Born”. I agreed with her but never changed them. I admit it was out of cowardice.
I developed a habit of being cautious about how I talk about my work out of necessity. Before Yale, I spent four years working as an artist in South Korea. A country that, despite its rapid developments, remains deeply conservative and emphatically misogynistic, even within the ostensibly progressive art world. I once had the opportunity to speak with a tenured painting professor from one of the country’s most prestigious universities during his visit to my first solo exhibition. He walked over to a painting I had made in 2017 and asked me to elaborate. I told him it depicted a scene of sexual violence. The title UTI Caused by Non-Consensus referred to sexual violence and its often overlooked impact. As I continued to elaborate, he slowly walked away, quickly saying his goodbyes.
My time in Korea was marked by deliberate attempts to grapple with the ingrained misogyny of Korean culture and the burden of compromise placed on women in art. I can’t even count the number of times people told me to stop painting what I painted. I caved to make a living. I didn’t want to change the way I painted and decided to stop sharing my intentions. With my work titled
Apple Seed Removal, which was a barely abstracted depiction of a red ass and a vagina, a collector kept asking why it looked so inappropriate. I repeatedly said that it was a painting of an apple. She ended up purchasing the work, which covered three months of my studio rent.
I went to graduate school to paint whatever I wanted to paint. My work is about the messy and sticky ties between human desire and trauma. The guiding principle is honesty: with myself, my desires and morbid curiosities. I was given space to fully explore my subjects in depth and to develop a more nuanced language to talk about my work during the program. Nevertheless, the shame and fear resurfaced, especially under the stress of thesis and the urge to please the
commercial art world before I enter it. At the Perrotin artist talk, I failed to stand by Creation of Athena yet again.
I have countless regrets about previous works, but I reckon certain choices about form and installation are ultimately adjustable as long as I am alive. I do, however, have regrets about certain misgivings that led me to mis-title the work insofar as they led me astray from the guiding principle of honesty. I have to, and will continue to contend with how my paintings are understood: insisting on confrontation rather than concession. And I owe my work the same honesty with which it was made.
All images courtesy of the artist
www.clairechey.com