Kent HENRICKSEN
Arario Galley Seoul is proud to present Kent Henricksen’s first solo exhibition in Korea. On show will be Henricksen’s representative works of embroidered silk screen pieces, sculptures, and wall papers specifically designed for the exhibition. The show begins on May 26th and lasts until June 21st, and is expected to be an important first step for Henricksen’s works to be introduced to the Korean public and evaluate how his messages will be translated to them.
The first impression of Henricksen’s work is similar to that of looking into a home of wealthy, noble class family in the Middle Ages. His works possess certain atmosphere of calmness and serenity. The images bound by elaborately decorative and brightly gilded frames are similar to that of old school masterpieces one sees in a museum. However, upon closer inspection, one is quickly overcome by an uncomfortable sense of fear, an unsettling realization of what these almost comically and delicately rendered characters symbolize. They are masked and hooded male figures, immediately suggestive of the Ku Klux Klan or similar terrorist groups, thieves, rebels, and ghosts, all of which are today’s symbols of violence, destruction, death.
By observing the masked characters dispersed throughout the picture plane, the audience is reminded of words such as robbery, terror, assassination, and fear. The imagery has very approximate relationship to the violence that has always existed throughout human history. Kent was first inspired by the uniforms which Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka wore, a group of suicide bombers in the 1970s who laid out their lives for independence. The members of this group paraded around Sri Lanka while wearing hoods and masks with one wide opening for both eyes, this uniform symbolizing their will to die for the cause. After embroidering the Tamil Tigers, Henricksen began experimenting with altering small details. He used white thread and two separate eyeholes, and they became ghosts or KKK members. By adding a mouth to these two eyes made the character resemble a robber in a ski mask, or a medieval executioner. Then he also began altering the shape and color of the hoods and skin tones underneath the open hole to show that masking and violence is cross- cultural.
The violence and destruction symbolized by the masked characters are resituated within the context of extremely feminine and domestic medium of embroidery. Instead of directly revealing the atrocious imagery of war, terror and rape, he camouflages them among the alluring sceneries of false utopia, and this is where the irony of his work resides. By combining harsh, brutal sadism of human events such as lynching, bestiality and torture with the intricate, decorative, familial medium of embroidery, Henricksen calls attention to the passiveness that we feel for the atrocities in the world, especially when they are not directly ours to suffer through.
