Hyojung Bea
Artists in residence for the month of March 2023
Hyojung Bea explores fear, identity, and the anxiety-provoking instability of groundlessness due to her constant moving without a permanent home. Being active both in New York City and Jeju Island where she currently resides, she has moved about twenty times since she left home at the age of 19. While attending art school in New York City, she found a part-time work as a nail technician, a typical job for undocumented Korean female immigrants, like the women employed as masseuses who were recently victims of gun violence in Atlanta, Georgia. As she painted people’s finger and toe nails every day, she encountered racism, social isolation, and judgement and suffered language barrier, culture shock, and homesickness. The experience left a profound and nightmarish impression on Bea. In one of her performances, she presented herself as a hedgehog covered in thumb tacks. She reflected her fear of making close emotional and physical relationships with others; if two hedgehogs came in close proximity, both would get hurt by each other’s quills. After she moved back to Jeju Island, she was inspired by Haenyeo’s life and she started to work on the underwater performance videos. “sea women,” also known as “Haenyeo”, distinctively all female divers who are tough as nails. Dating all the way back to 434 AD, these women free dive without oxygen tank or nets, and harvest sea life by hand to sustain their livelihood. They represent a unique matriarch society in a male dominant Korean culture. Bea activates dialogue by reimagining the relationship with her body through sculpture, video and performance.
As a fighter and cancer survivor, she longed for freedom as she often felt trapped. She tries to understand her longings in three ways: turning towards her discomfort by engaging through performance, taking refuge in familiar objects through sculpture, and learning to live within the flux of her instability through fantasy instilled re- enactments and documentation. She studied Visual Arts and animation from Seoul National University of Technology, holds a BFA in Studio Arts from CUNY Hunter College, and an MFA in Sculpture from Jeju National University. She had solo and group shows nationally and internationally, including Jeju Museum of Art, Jeju Cultural Center, Kidang Museum, Delmoondo museum, In-sa Art Center, and many more. She is a recipient of Jeju Cultural Foundation Award for the Excellent Artists Grant among others.
