M.Butterfly Vol.2: Death Proof thematises both global political fantasies of great power and questions of gender identity. Kim Hankyul takes up these motifs, detaches them from the narrative obligations of theatre and transforms them into a game of allusions and free associations and the choreography of robotic movement sequences.
Kim Hankyul (KOR), who has received several awards, including the Kistefos Prize, deals in his works with themes such as violence, alienation, colonialism, religion and media society as well as with sound images created by the physical movement of sculptures.
'M. Butterfly' was conceived in 2020 and first time presented in KRAFT Bergen (Norway) in 2022, as a kinetic theater installation. The work questions the Western tradition of binary understanding on gender and ethnicity. The exhibition was created on the basis of the play written in the same name, which was devised as a counter-narrative toward Puccini's opera 'Madame Butterfly' and its colonial perspective toward East and female. Both in the play and in the exhibition, the character setting of the play is changed from an obedient female to a transvestite male diva, both of who own a lethal and exotic charm. In the exhibition, this body of diva is visualized through different craft techniques including metal bending, glass blowing and glass slumping in a way to effectively symbolize the transformative nature of a body, and the illusionary image between fantasy and reality. The gallery space will be converted into an Opera stage where an audience’s own perspective could be questioned by confronting the illusionary performance.
The exhibition places multiple objects created in glass, textile, wood and metal into a connective scenery, to visualize the idea of Orient that is exclusively represented under the Western context. Based on the play ‘M. Butterfly’ by David Henry Hwang, the mythic illusion onward ‘Orient’ observed in Western contexts is sarcastically portrayed in an aesthetic landscape of a stage of exotic charm and visual traditions of different Asian nations are jumbled into one round idea of ‘Orient’, a state of being an object of exoticizing gaze. The images seen from the interior of Asian restaurants in Western countries and Oriental attire depicted in Western media work as the major reference point in establishing visual gesture in the exhibition.
In esc medien kunst labor, Kim Hankyul presents ‘M. Butterfly Vol.2 : Death Proof’, as a sequel of the original work to have an advanced approach in media and visibility. While the first project primarily focused on embodying the dissonance between an objectified body and the colonial gaze through ambivalent traits of materials and symbols, in the new project, the topic of cultural representation will be expansively bridged toward the digital identity formation process remarked by ‘resolution’. The project actively involves AI in the creation process, letting it create videos in the mixture of the highest to the lowest resolutions, generated from the text prompts including the words such as Orient, Asia, Western gaze and Transvestite. The sequence of motor motions for vibration of the whole window is also created by a random sequencing using AI for the major commandment, which directly results in the constant sonic humming in the space.
The project intentionally avoids reproducing cultural dichotomy between the West and the East and the male and the female, by completely leaving the ‘agency’ of commandment and letting the creation process occur through Artificial Intelligence, and also by overconsuming the symbols of cultural representations from the first-person perspective, before the body being consumed by ‘the others’ or ‘the exterior gaze’. The result is shown in a partly self-pejorative and entirely unaesthetic manner of locating every object and the origin of motion on the floor and empty of a center, with lo-fi cinematic effects using cheap fans and hair dryers being used to create blood effect. The distance between the images of the spectacle and the boring technical settings to create them are blatantly exposed and expand the understanding of a body toward the question on media representation : Does our bodies belong to us? Is there a predestined aesthetic of a body before it is seen by the others?
The choreography of the main anthropomorphic figure repeats the motion of demolition and resurrection, embodying the fluid identity formation process in contemporary media settings, full of gimmicks and memes. The visual components, by being arranged in the color palette of red, awaits for the whole landscape to be mediated through a digital chroma key screen, to disappear and enter into a perfectly transient state of subjectivity - of traversing through different resolutions and dimensions, in the body of images with unknown origins, either extremely poor or queer, virally attacking the gut of sober society. And the question is recursively asked : isn’t it the only way to keep the body in its authentic presence, to go absolutely disturbing by its decision before someone names it disturbing?
