Walking through the exhibit, one immediately saw Cream (2018) playing opposite the reception desk on a vertical screen leaned against the wall. In the mildly disconcerting video, a woman’s upper body is seen upside down. All but part of her chin, mouth, and nose are covered up in what looks like a white leather body bag nearly zipped closed. In fact, Cream was striking because that small section of flesh was the only patch of color among Chang’s four other black-and-white installations. Throughout the six-minute video, white leather-gloved hands thoroughly massage a cream along the grooves, contours, and outline of the woman’s face. The woman intermittently utters, in an uninflected, monotous voice, buzzwords used by the beauty industry to entice buyers; “life,” “firm,” “gradient,” “shining,” “long-lasting,” “young,” “healthy,” “glossy,” and “clean” are just a few of them. Cream turns on the double meaning of its title, relating both to what’s used to condition leather and keep it looking radiant, and Korean skincare products, which are now a booming global business. Unfortunately, one could just make out what the woman says in Cream because of the television’s low volume and the blaring sound of Circle (2017)—a meta-textual video essay on circular time and the apocalypse, among other things—that overwhelmed the gallery space.  

Going deeper into the exhibit, one viewed A Story of a Bear, Who Drowns Forever, Over and Over (2013) projected on a wall. In a single take, a woman wearing a paper-mâché bear mask tells a story involving a polar bear with a kind of interpretative dance, engaging her entire body. She presents this to the stationary camera, ceaselessly filming her. The spectactor had to wear headphones (Circle could still be heard) and yet the audio sounded distant, like a recording on an old answering machine, as if the sound were disconnected from the visuals. A buzzer rings, the woman stops in the midst of her tale and goes behind a divider wall in the background. She reappears, picking up where she left off. The buzzer goes off again; she goes behind the divider. And so on and so on until she finally completes her account. The repetition, the starting and stopping of the narrative, the performance to the camera—all of these elements make A Story of a Bear resemble an audition or a rehearsal. The singsongy tone in the woman’s voice suggests a young audience. Moreover, the story of the arctic mammal, trapped in an endless cycle of dying and death, has the whiff of a Grimms’ fairy tale, and seems to reflect on the act of narrating itself.