Dho Yee Chung

Dho Yee Chung is a media artist originally from South Korea. Her work questions how media mediates and shapes the narratives of human activity to understand the self in the digital era. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design at Yale University. Currently, she is an assistant professor at Oakland University in Michigan.

She writes:

My work entails ideological, cultural, and aesthetic reflections on the meaning and complexity of the new forms of a surface. There are some reoccurring visual themes in my work such as skin, mask, and costume. Within my work, they function as an apparatus that disguises their appearance. In this way, they can manipulate the impression that others might have of them. The use of masks raises a question on authenticity and how hyperreality can be easily fabricated. In addition, masks are considered as extensions of the outer surface of a body within my practice. Just like skin, mask and costume function as a physical system that maintains continuity of contact from its origin point through various transformations. I intend to explore the extended surface where personal desire and the expectations of consumer society are embodied in order to seek a complex stage of mediation between individuals and reality. Furthermore, I am particularly interested in images of women encoded with the desires of consumer society. One of my videos, “A Prototype of Desiring Being, 2018”, elaborates this idea by depicting a female figure posing in front of a camera. This figure in costume and mask embodies confusions, fears, and desires in response to the projection of social expectation onto itself. The skin-toned costume suggests an empty surface for self-representation, which is a process of externalizing an impression that others might have of oneself. This surface plays a unique role as a shelter, filter, or mask and costume for camouflage instead of a simple representation. My works and research investigate various phenomena happening on this complex surface of representation.