Innocent Monster
Suah Im, Wie-yi T. Lauw, Jinran Ha
23.03 to 31.03.2024
HilbertRaum

The exhibition brings together three artists of the post-migrant generation whose artistic practice explores the cultural appropriation of symbols, icons and stereotypes. Their focus is on the material cultures, mythologies and marginalised minorities often neglected by Eurocentric perspectives. The everyday lives of migrants in a post-colonial context, their views and counter-views of the 'other', the 'foreign' and the 'unknown' are expressed in various ways in their installations, drawings and video works. From the painted nails of a migrant worker to a snake growing out of a finger, a hybrid creature that transforms into a dragon, gentle claws and the wings of the unknown, the works of these three artists in the exhibition unfold an unusual chain of associations. The artists use fragments of symbols and stereotypes to question our usual notions of the unknown, the other and the monstrous, exploring the ambivalence and symbiotic nature of our existence.

In their installations and drawings, artists Wie-yi T. Lauw and Suah Im explore the mythology of the dragon and its cultural appropriation in Asia and Europe. The dragon, which in the Christian pictorial tradition embodies evil, the sinister and the demonic, is often regarded as sacred in Asia. These different perceptions of the mythical creature and its fluid transformations from the Middle Ages to pop culture serve as a source of inspiration for the two artists to explore questions of cultural hybridity and their own identity. In a humorous and playful way, the two artists reveal the flip side of Eurocentric notions of the monster and its innocent side.

Jinran Ha presents a video installation created in collaboration with Kook-Nam Cho-Ruwwe, Suza Husse (NAILShacksfacts*fictions) and the Korean Women's Group in Germany. Her video work deals with the process of symbiogenesis of different organisms into a new whole; her video shows how a foreign body in a microbiological cell gently merges with other cells and this unknown manifests itself as a group of Korean guest workers. The grateful foreign bodies of German society mutate into a collective of monstrous power.

Yes, they are innocent monster!