InterviewJang Pa and the art of 'feminine grotesque'

Artist Jang Pa and her painting "Gore Deco – Flat Hole #1" (2025) / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

Jang Pa does not paint bodies so much as split them open. In her art, entrails spill, flesh festers, cavities throb and vaginas bristle with teeth.

Through what she calls the “feminine grotesque,” the artist challenges sanitized ideals of beauty as upheld in male-centered visual traditions. Her exposed interiors — visceral, porous and monstrous — recast the female body as an untamed presence, pushing back against its long history of objectification.

This outlook is unmistakable in “Gore Deco,” her solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery in central Seoul, which brings together 45 new paintings and drawings.

“Because women and other marginalized individuals have long been denied access to the mainstream as speaking subjects, their ‘language’ often emerges not through speech but through body,” the 44-year-old said in an interview with The Korea Times. “I’m interested in how far this body, especially its interior sensations, can be articulated without restraint.”

She went on to point out how gendered hierarchies are inscribed at the level of sensation itself. The masculine has historically been aligned with the psychological and the transcendent — qualities considered noble and elevated — while the feminine has been tethered to the body, cast as corporeal and unstable.

Jang Pa's "Gore Deco – Emily" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery

These binaries can be witnessed in art history as well. The famous 17th-century French debate over the superiority of line versus color in painting offers a telling example: Line was elevated as intellectual and rational, and therefore masculine, while color was understood as sensuous, emotional and unruly, and thus feminine.

Jang persistently retrieves subordinate elements within this hierarchy, forcing the bodily, the feminine and the chromatic into the foreground of her paintings. For her, the grotesque functions not only as spectacle but as method — a way of questioning established power structures by deliberately thrusting into view what they were meant to suppress.

Installation view of Jang Pa's solo exhibition, "Gore Deco," at Kukje Gallery in Seoul / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

That insistence has often been met with unease. Some art world professionals suggested that strong colors “just don’t sell” in Korea. The artist recalled how many viewers here found her choice of subject matter and color palette to be a kind of “sensorial threat.”

“The color combinations I use aren’t gentle or conventionally pretty; they are forceful and assertive,” she said. Saturated reds, fleshy pinks and acidic magentas dominate her canvases. “People perceived them as aggressive and unsettling. I expected some resistance, but I encountered far more of it than I had imagined.”

That sense of discomfort, she noted, sometimes extended beyond reactions to the work itself. Seeing only her paintings, some viewers would picture her as volatile or unhinged — the so-called “mad woman.”

“When they met me, they were genuinely surprised by the gap between what they had imagined and my actual presence. I’d say nearly half reacted that way,” she said.

Jang, however, remains unfazed. “I’m simply following my own ‘jouissance’ as a painter,” she said, referring to the idea of uncontained, unruly pleasure.

Installation view of "Gore Deco" at Kukje Gallery / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

Installation view of "Gore Deco" at Kukje Gallery / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

In “Gore Deco,” forms long objectified and dismissed as vulgar are reclaimed and reimagined across her canvases.

One painting, for instance, borrows its title from Gustave Courbet’s 19th-century “The Origin of the World,” which notoriously presents a cropped, close-up view of a woman’s genitals. In Courbet’s image, Jang observed, the body appears inert and anonymous, reduced to flesh without a head.

Jang Pa's "Gore Deco – The Origin of the World" (2025) / Courtesy of the artist and Kukje Gallery

“By naming that image ‘The Origin of the World,’ a woman is reduced to a single orifice and nothing more,” she noted.

Her reworking challenges the simplification of the original. The body turns itself inside out, demanding to be seen in all its rawness. Its surface, with fleshy folds and coiling entrails, feels utterly alive.

Elsewhere, vaginas are armed with teeth. The motif draws on Denis Diderot’s 1748 satirical novel, “The Indiscreet Jewels,” where women’s genitals start speaking candidly about their owners’ desires and secrets. But it also gestures toward the long-standing myth of “vagina dentata,” which embodies male anxieties over female sexuality and power.

In some works, silkscreened icons and symbols appear like tattoos. The imagery draws from an archive Jang has built over the years, comprising thousands of images tracing women’s representation throughout history.

Some images come from world mythologies or medical textbooks. Others originate in the male-dominated online communities that have thrived in Korea since the 2000s, where misogynistic memes and newly-coined slurs spread at dizzying speed.

“I began encountering these terms constantly when I entered college,” she said. “Internet memes expose hatred in its rawest form, which is why I started seeking them out. I think that kind of language and imagery has deeply shaped how the current generation sees women.”

Among them are pejoratives like “kimchi woman” and “doenjang woman,” labels that circulated widely until the 2010s to mock women deemed vain or materialistic. A list of supposedly undesirable traits in female partners were compressed into an acronym, “moon-dam-pi-seong-dong-nak,” shorthand for tattoos, smoking, piercings, cosmetic surgery, living with a partner outside marriage and abortion.

Installation view of "Gore Deco" at Kukje Gallery / Courtesy of Kukje Gallery

By reclaiming these images and terms, Jang redirects misogyny through wry humor. The gesture is less about neutralizing its violence than exposing its absurdity, holding up a mirror to the distorted fantasies that have been accepted as norms.

“In a way, I think my work is funny,” the artist said. “Laughter becomes a way of confronting these oppressive structures head-on. But only a small group seems to pick up on that humor and laugh along, mostly women in their 20s and 30s.”

Jang ultimately hopes this way of thinking will reach more viewers. “If they recognize it, it forces them to face the hateful gaze and realize that it can always turn back on them. As an artist, I want that realization to register not just in the mind, but in the body.”

“Gore Deco” runs through Feb. 15 at Kukje Gallery.