Jisoo Chung
Carry On, 2024
Resin cast of the artist’s skin, submerged photo printed on clear film
Courtesy the artist

This work is on loan for the exhibition, Living Here, at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, June 20 - December 20, 2025

This artwork unites dual meanings of the phrase “carry on” with a homage to Synecdoche (1991–present) by the Korean American artist Byron Kim. By filling a grid with squares of color representing the skin tones of people who sit for his “portraits,” Kim imbues an apparent abstraction with a private depth of meaning. Similarly, Chung uses her personal experiences to fill the space of the words “carry on” with new intent. The textured rectangles in these works are cast from the surface of her body and tinted with the color of her skin. “Carry on” is both the carry-on luggage she keeps close to her when she flies between Korea and her new home in the United States, and a phrase she uses to give herself strength as she endures the stress of the migration process. “Both meanings carry weight for me physically and emotionally,” she explains. “I am interested in how a body carries time and how those carriages mark their index on the body. I think about how the intangibility of time and language holds the body’s tangibility.” Embedded in the resin casts we see images that a search algorithm—responding to a request for “carry on”—chose from a gallery of pictures she created after she moved to the United States. They range from a screenshot of the guidelines for luggage sizes on planes to a photo of her grandmother holding a handbag. Chung invites us to expand language to be more capacious. “Here,” she writes, “the term carry on becomes a broader term for a container that can hold something.”