SPOTLIGHT: JAISEOK KANG—PORTFOLIO CONTEST WINNER

Moments out of the womb, we are swaddled in a warm blanket and in due course gently girt with a diaper. (Blanket and diaper are the initial accoutrements used to packaged us for the visual consumption of fawning onlookers.) We are born naked, but, like Adam and Eve, as we gain awareness we are dogged by our loss of innocence. We learn how to present ourselves to the world with typically more than the biblical fig leaves allotted to those aforementioned progenitors—we don conventional clothing. Artists, on the other hand, being an unconventional faction of the human race, may think of covering a nude body in something unexpected, something that’s analogous to fabric that conceals and protects. A covering that embodies how we project ourselves into our cultural environment. Could that garment be…bubble wrap?

That quintessential packing material is the garb that artist/photographer Jaiseok Kang, aka Jason River (hereafter referred to as Kang) uses in the series you see here, titled, simply, “Wrapped.” The idea came to him when he helped a friend and fellow artist swathe his figurative sculptures in protective bubble wrap for transportation to a new studio. Wrapping those human simulacra with tape-cinched, textured, semi-transparent plastic was a revelatory experience.

A decade previous, Kang had been working on a photographic series using dancers for his nude studies. While taking a figure-drawing class in Brooklyn, he met a model/dancer who not only posed for his photographic work, but connected him to her fellow performers. With people eager to collaborate and experiment with Kang, the ideas and images that began with “Wrapped” evolved into several series using the nude figure with this unconventional material. What we see here are the beginnings.

Kang says of this body of work, in an interview for Canvas Rebel, that he was inspired by window light revealing the shapes of the statues and bubble wrap. He decided to take it further: “I started to wrap real humans with bubble wrap and duct tape for years. I felt like I became an abstract painter, because I had to wrap, photograph and unwrap my models as fast as possible. If not, you may imagine what happened to my models.”

At the Hansung University in Seoul, South Korea, Kang had studied industrial design with an emphasis in photography. After graduating, he pursued a career in commercial photography, then moved to New York City in 2005 to study printmaking, painting and drawing. He has lived there since. Although abstraction is the elemental aesthetic in this series, Kang has thoughtful implications of being packaged in bubble wrap. His reflections are noted in a statement, written by Clarence A. Haynes on Kang’s website: “The use of physical labeling/packaging that obscures a figure’s body and severely limits movement can serve as a metaphor for how social labeling/packaging in our contemporary world can obscure who we are and dictate our possibilities.” Haynes further adds, “Packaging/labeling can bind us in ways that limit a broader, more imaginative understanding of our humanity.”

True—some of the photographs present a figure completely obscured by packing paper and/or bubble wrap, with only a name and place to imply that a human might be within. Those photographs are countered by others revealing a person within the wrapping material, which leaves one thinking that they are shedding or perhaps bursting out their confines—their humanity overcoming what they are trapped by. There is a welcome tension between the two presentations.

The difference between the two illustrates the human condition of being snared by the very recent and enthralling digital landscape, wherein everything about us, including our appearance, is bundled and sold by faceless corporations. The question intimated in Kang’s series challenges the viewer to consider how they see their own identifying information in the context of the cyberspace we all now so freely inhabit. Will we allow someone else to package and define us, or will we break free and remain in control?