Jaye Rhee Solo Exhibition
Far West, So Cluse, 2024
Work Area: Poster, Handout.
Client: Jaye Rhee
Poster︎︎︎
594 × 841mm
Far West, So Close is a performance that intertwines images and sounds. The artist explores visions of places imbued with political desires for utopia—visions that are inherently flawed and nostalgic—and the motivations that bring these visions into being. This piece extends the artist’s ongoing investigation over the past 20 years into the “hidden layers of images and the nature of miscommunication.”
One key element of the work is the Korean pop song Arizona Cowboy, one of the first popular songs in Korea influenced by American pop music following the Korean War. The song enumerates iconic but clichéd images of the American West, as depicted in spaghetti Western films. It exemplifies how Korean popular music, by adopting Western musical styles, successfully entered mainstream culture. The song’s “Western” clichés reflect the cultural influence entering Korea through U.S. military bases and evoke a collective Korean longing for an idealized past and a return home.
In this piece, the artist moves beyond the nostalgic vision of the “West” to reveal the fictional nature of concepts such as ethnic and cultural homogeneity. By doing so, the work examines the influence of American pop culture on postwar East Asian culture and revisits the theme of diaspora, a universal issue in contemporary society. Through this process, the performance persistently asks: “Who leaves? Who stays? And why?” addressing the modern condition in which, perhaps, everyone exists as a diaspora.
For the performance, Arizona Cowboy has been reinterpreted as an accordion and three-part harmony choral arrangement. Far West, So Close summons fragmented temporal and spatial worlds imagined through language and visual imagery. These fragments follow independent trajectories, momentarily converging before disintegrating through various media, creating a multidisciplinary performance.
Ultimately, the work shows that even an incorrectly copied utopia, despite miscommunication and the illusions of images, can become a “real” utopia in the fleeting moment of performance.
Texy by Jaye Rhee
