Existing in Costume, Beauty and the Beast

Stylized image of Beauty and the Beast. They are standing together next to the fireplace.

Since graduating from the Slade School of Fine Art in 2007, Chan-Hyo Bae (born 1975, Busan, South Korea) has expressed in his work the feelings of cultural and emotional estrangement he experienced when he first came to study in England. His Existing in Costume series saw him posing in a variety of female historical western costumes. Researched in meticulous detail, he created elaborate scenes of himself as a noblewoman from Elizabethan to Regency periods. More recent work has drawn further on the idea of placing oneself into a collective consciousness within the dimensions of nationality. Chan-Hyo Bae has chosen as his subject the realms of western fairytales: stories that have permeated our culture and become embedded into our general psyche. His current series depicts the subject of punishment related to the exercise of power.

"We call western people’s fixed notion or distorted view toward the East ‘Orientalism,’ which originated from cultural prejudice in the West, and ‘Occidentalism is a comparative notion which contrast with Orientalism. E. Said formerly criticized that both are nothing but false images that see other cultures from an ethnocentric viewpoint and this tendency has justified the western imperialists’ invasion against the East. From a historical or social point of view, the difference of culture and language has been one of the most important standards that make a distinction between various social classes. Additionally, a war is one of the most significant factors that enable us to grasp the essence of the world history, and the social classes became more differentiated in this ‘weak-to-the-wall kind of society’ caused by the wars. The age of imperialism accelerated this law of the jungle by force in a full scale.

H. Spencer’s ‘Social Darwinism’ is nothing other than the ideology that justified imperialism of ‘the law of jungle.’’ This imperialism ultimately brought about Orientalism that the West as a winner will understand the East as a loser from a prejudiced point of view.

From my point of view, this prejudiced notion of the West is the most highlighted particularly in the western portraits. All the western portraits that I have observed are drawn by oil painting, and all the persons in the pictures seem to be described, following the direction that their superiority and tough spirits are maximized. For example, the portraits of the King Henry VIII or the Queen Elizabeth I that I saw are the ones that described the shapes of the aggressive people who had made a big contribution to building ‘the great England.’Here I think that the skill of oil painting and the images of the people described by it are two essential factors that make it possible for me to approach the shape of the West because these points are so western that they are hardly shown in the eastern culture. In other words, oil painting has not been used in the eastern culture, and atypical eastern portrait drawn by water painting does not describe a person as an aggressive image. Thus, I have applied this western painting method to my photographic works in order to express my emotions of ‘alienation and prejudice’ in the world of my art. For instance, some distinctive features such as the strong color contrast, composition, the pose of the person and the background of the time which are shown in one of my works, ‘Existing in Costume 1’ were inspired by these traditional English portraits.

From now on, I intend to seek these notions from the stories of heroes or heroines in the traditional western fairy tales, as a link in a chain of efforts that aim at developing my works . In other words, in the first half of my activities, the motives used in my works were from history, those in the second half will be based on traditional western fairy tales. The philosophy in my works will be the same, I will pursue the materials for expressing my emotions in another place. It indirectly exposes the feelings of ‘alienation and prejudice’ that I have coherently claimed exist everywhere in the western society.

I think that both history and fairy tales share a common point with each other in that they lead their readers to accept a fixed conclusion or thought.

From this viewpoint, I claim that narrating a fairy tale is quite similar to describing history in that it tends to unwittingly infuse a fixed virtue or a formed frame of thought to the readers who experience it. Therefore, for me to convert the source of my motives from history to fairy tales does not break the consistency of the philosophy in my works.

I have examined some representative western fairy tales for my new activity; for example, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Beauty and the Beast and so on. What I found in them is there are definite social classes in these stories, and all of them contain tacit messages that the weak should obey the order designed by the strong in order to enjoy happiness. This point corresponds to the historical fact that the powerful western countries intended to strengthen and solidify their regime in the conquered countries by indoctrinating their governing ideology to those whom they ruled.

Chan-Hyo Bae