Jaye Rhee,(Hand crafted Reality〉, Exhibition View, 2021, Fulton Center, New York, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for the Digital Art program. The works are on display until end of September 2021. Image provided by Gallery Baton.

Jaye Rhee, a Korean American artist in New York, presented her public art video art titled 〈Handcrafted Reality〉 at the 24-hour subway reopening celebration event on Sunday, May 16, and Friday, May 21, 2021, at Fulton Center Subway Station in Manhattan, New York. The exhibition, which runs until the end of August, are co-hosted by private companies and the New York City subway. Ticker displays were installed throughout the subway platform, large screens on the first floor, and dome ceiling so that Rhee’s two-minute video art could be screened instead of advertisements every hour.

〈Handcrafted Reality〉, installation, 2021, Fulton Center, New York. The object is created and reconstructed into an image by cutting and pasting paper on a specific printed image. 52 large screens inside and outside the Fulton Center, where 12 subway line platforms in New York City gather, plays Rhee’s work every hour for two minutes.

Jaye Rhee,(Hand crafted Reality〉, Exhibition View, 2021, Fulton Center, New York, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for the Digital Art program. Image provided by Gallery Baton.

Interaction between Humans and Machines

Jaye Rhee’s work consists of a friendly image reminiscent of video games in the 1990s. It reminds of the color and design of video games such as Tetris or Minecraft. The Fulton Center subway station shopping mall, filled with Crispy Cream Doughnuts and Shake Shack Hamburger stores, and subway users will reminisce about their childhood with digital games while watching Rhee’s work. While the release of the work was delayed for more than a year due to the emergence of unexpected pandemic, the artist projected the image of modern people maintaining social relationships, working, and enjoying leisure through virtual reality or digital platforms in a social distancing environment on the motif of retro-style video games.

Jaye Rhee,(Hand crafted Reality〉, Exhibition View, 2021, Fulton Center, New York, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for the Digital Art program. Image provided by Gallery Baton.

Generation X, including the artist, who grew up experiencing video games as part of their daily lives have nostalgia for retro video games. These people feel much more familiar with characters from popular games such as Super Mario, Pokémon, and Lineage than with their cousins and relatives whom they can only see every few years. Because these game characters and graphic motifs appear only in virtual reality, they are like intangible mirages that disappear when the power is turned off. However, a person who grew up playing games can describe each character's emotional characteristics as if they were a virtual family. The pastel-colored cute geometric object in Jaye Rhee’s Handcrafted Reality resembles a person in the memory of virtual reality. The artist, in her work, melts the characters of green screen protection or rudimentary video games that anyone who grew up in the 1980s and 1990s would remember. The huge monitor is full of round objects such as insects or animals running on the meadow or the green background as in the game Minecraft. However, the author claims that computer graphic landscapes are also eventually hand-made products based on human imagination, thus she named her work as Handcrafted Reality.

Jaye Rhee,(Hand crafted Reality〉, Exhibition View, 2021, Fulton Center, New York, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for the Digital Art program. Image provided by Gallery Baton.

Currently, Rhee’s performance video art on the theme of Niagara Falls and polar bears, is collected and displayed in a famous American museum collection. Thousands of artists apply for the MTA Art Program (Metropolitan Transportation Authority Art Program) every year, but only a few of them are invited. There were many Korean American artists who previously showed ceramic tiles, glass, and metal crafts works, but Rhee was the first to present video art through dozens of display monitors throughout the Fulton Center. Her work contains a philosophical view of the relationship between machines and humans while showing the influence of pop art that appropriates icons of popular culture. In short, Rhee goes beyond the problem of modern people who are socially isolated and experience relational disconnection and raises the issue of humanization of the non-human world, where people feel stability, nostalgia, and even trust in machine-human relations. Rhee’s work is a pleasant and lively project that speaks of empathy between humans in the 21st century, when artificial intelligence is applied throughout life, home appliances equipped with robots are prevalent, and deep learning is active.

Jaye Rhee,(Hand crafted Reality〉, Exhibition View, 2021, Fulton Center, New York, commissioned by MTA Arts & Design for the Digital Art program. The works are on display until end of September 2021. Image provided by Gallery Baton.

※ This article, originally published in the August 2021 issue of Art in Culture, is provided by the Korea Art Management Service under a content provision agreement with the magazine.