A Night Visible To The Nake Eye - Nayeon Yang

Nayeon Yang
2019-2022
Variable dimensions

"A Night Visible to the Naked Eye is concerned with the exploitation of migrant workers under the neoliberal economy. The form of the project mimics entangled relationships among nations, labor, capital, and arts. It is presented simultaneously in two locations, Buddy, an art store, in Chicago and Apexart, an art gallery, in New York City, connected through live videos broadcasting from each exhibiting location. Part 1 is the print t-shirt sale where overhead cameras capture shoppers’ hands searching for clothing at the store; Part 2 is a multi-channel video installation of migrant farm workers’ working hands at a gallery in New York City. This project intentionally presents others’ tragedies and oriental elements as sellable items in the form of art, and the shoppers/audience’s interactions are surveilled by the people in the other location. Circumstantially, I give the audience passive roles as bystanders for the Korean-reading audience and consumers for the non-Korean reading audience. Through this project, I hope to expand the idea of who is considered ‘us’ by visualizing our interconnected societies."

Part one (t-shirt installation) in Chicago: Second-hand t-shirts
made in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Guatemala,
etc, five article excerpts about the exploitation of migrant workers
written in Korean calligraphy, and live-feed video cameras capturing an audience/customers’ hands.

Part two (multi-channel video installation) in NYC: videos of Cambodian migrant farm workers’ working hands and live-streamed
videos from the Chicago site, blending hand gestures of working
and shopping.
Online Platform: https://AVisibleNight.co