Imagine. Before you lies a bar of soap, porcelain-like in its milky and opaque surface.
How much are you willing to trade this soap for?
Before you answer my question think about what this soap means to you. Or rather, consider why this soap may not be of any value to you.
Well, you might say, for starters, it dissolves. Every time someone runs it through water, it’ll descend into a frothing storm from which it emerges slightly less whole than it was before.
Such impermanence is referred to as ephemerality. You might retort: where is the value in that? Isn’t ephemerality just a grandiose way of saying that soap erodes in value over time? If this conversation were to actually transpire, I’d pause it here. That last part about value retention warrants scrutiny. To be more specific, the premise of that last part invites discourse. Does value always stem from a preservation of form? Is the value of a system rendered obsolete if it fails to remain intact against the flow of time?
Is the value of a system rendered obsolete if it fails to remain intact against the flow of time?
This question is at the core of Meekyoung Shin’s Time Material: Performing Museology exhibition held at SpaceC. Shin is a soap shapeshifter. For the past two decades, she’s been transposing soap into intricate objects that don’t look like soap at all; vases, Victorian busts, Greek statues, watercolor painting-esque slabs.
What’s unique about this exhibition is that Shin deploys art intervention in its presentation. I know what you’re thinking—art…intervention?
The term is more straight forward than you think. Art intervention is a means of inserting art into foreign—if not anachronistic—contexts so that changes in thought, perception, and action are brought about through its intrusive presence. Put simply, art intervention challenges the idea that art and the “real” world exist in parallel to one another, always mirroring but never touching. Such dichotomy and the idea that art is sequestered from reality is shattered through art intervention.
Art intervention is a means of inserting art into foreign—if not anachronistic—contexts so that changes in thought, perception, and action are brought about through its intrusive presence.
What does all this have anything to do with soap though? It’s a fair question but one that requires a bit of musing over the nature of soap and its significance as an expressive medium through which Shin’s ephemeral brand universe manifests. In specific, I’ll be examining Shin’s work as tangible ekphrasis, the metaphor behind using soap, and the message mediated through both from a branding perspective. This isn’t all just a bubble—I promise—so read on.
Tangible Ekphrasis
Chances are, unless you’ve analyzed Shakespeare at three different points in your life (not for the faint of heart), you’ve probably never come across the word “ekphrasis”. This fancy looking Greek word basically means a literary description or response to pre-existing art. So any depictions of sculptures, paintings, statues, etc. in prose or poetic form are all ekphrasis.
Likewise, Shin’s work can be seen as a poetic reference and response to the traditions crystallized in art. What makes her work even more alluring than the typical ekphrasis is that, for the most part, her oeuvre is tangible. On the material level, her works are as concrete, albeit less impervious, as the relics she aspires to make a commentary on. That Shin’s soap pieces are on the same level of tangibility as that of the historical artworks she re-interprets, intimates an equality in experiential gravity that stems from an indisputable presence of form; there is little room for the viewer to dismiss the ekphrasis in favor of the original as the former is immediately present for sensory reading.
Shin’s works are juxtaposed against Dali’s Space Venus, sculptures by Ferdinand Faivre and Clodion (Claude Michel) that embody an Art Nouveau and Rococo aesthetic, respectively, and traditional Korean beauty-related artifacts, to name a few of the works forming the backdrop of this exhibition. Such juxtaposition in prestige and materiality—one is historically revered and forever, the other upcoming and ephemeral—brings the following question to the fore: is tradition truly immutable? Shin probes the audience to re-examine the staticity of tradition through the language of soap.
Intrusion into public space
Shin prompts us to contemplate this question of staticity even in the most intimate, yet public, of spaces: the bathroom.
What you see here is precisely what you think it is. Each of SpaceC’s restrooms houses an intricately molded bust made out of soap. For the sole purpose of allowing you to wash your hands with them. To correct myself, perhaps the sole purpose behind the installation of Shin’s artwork isn’t actually for your sanitary disposal but rather to get you physically engaged with Shin’s narrative.
Each time you wash your hands with Shin’s work, you’re essentially enacting the narrative of ephemerality. The act of stroking, rubbing, caressing the soap figurine with wet hands, which results in its slow effacement, is a metaphor for how our perception and understanding of history, tradition, systems is molded by us. Moreover, the gradual reduction of the soap’s elaborate appearance speaks to how even the most seemingly unshakeable of socio-political-cultural systems are subject to demise should the people who uphold them evolve.
That this abrupt intersect between art and reality takes place in the bathroom (remember, art intervention!) insinuates two things: one, art intervention induces a state of reflection that permeates even the most mundane of moments. The act of gazing into the mirror or washing our hands (hopefully not à la Macbeth) is inherently retrospective as we actively review our outer appearance—the results of a multi-faceted system—and cleanse our hands of the things we touch—the contents of the aforementioned system. Whether we should retain a grasp on the various elements that comprise the system we are familiar with is worth questioning. Two, the indelible effects of art intervention—or its impact—is reified through gradual changes in the smallest of human patterns.
Impact, impact, impact
We hear the word “impact” thrown around a lot. Everyone wants to make an impact (my McKinsey friends I’m looking at you). So it shouldn’t come off as a surprise that art intervention should want to make an impact.
But what does it mean to make an impact?
Within the context of Shin’s soap universe, impact can be construed as a subtle enlightenment—an awakening—of one’s retrospective faculty. A realization that our world, re-envisioned in the form of soap, is, at its core, designed to be dismantled. Our most cherished beliefs, norms, traditions cannot be eternal. Such is the impact of Shin’s seemingly static art form, which, ironically, espouses fluidity in thought through its materialistic temporality.
From a branding perspective, and building off of Shin’s soapy commentary, “to make an impact” is synonymous with giving people the courage to question the unquestionable and welcome new modes of thought.
From a branding perspective…. “to make an impact” is synonymous with giving people the courage to question the unquestionable and welcome new modes of thought.
Brands that make an impact—so to speak—are the agents of constructive dubiousness. Such brands offer people a moment of respite during which the act of questioning is encouraged. Impact is not immediate. None of the brands that we associate with impact—Nike, Patagonia, Virgil Abloh—inflicted instantaneous change onto the world. Rather, they all espoused a new world view onto which people subscribed.
To borrow a succinct phrase from John Hoke, Nike’s CDO: “the best way to predict the future is to create it”. Seeing that the world is all but regenerative soap, why don’t we each arm ourselves with a version that is endlessly inspiring?