Hyeweon Park

Permitted Body

A woman's body is constructed and adjusted within social gaze and image before it ever belongs to the individual. Growing up, I was surrounded by an environment in which standards of beauty and femininity were absorbed as something natural — and it was only later that I came to recognize how deeply they had taken root in me.The female body as presented in fashion magazines and mass media appears ideal, perfected — yet invisible norms and mechanisms of control operate beneath that surface. Rather than reproducing such images as they are, this work uses collage to fragment and reconstruct the body, exposing the artificial structures that hold it together.I am particularly interested in inverting the idea of "bodily extension." Extension typically implies new possibility or liberation, but here it works in the opposite direction — as the process by which external standards and outside gazes are layered onto the body. The severed figures and artificially joined forms reveal how unstable and manipulated the body constructed under the name of beauty actually is.Ultimately, this work asks how the female body and its image — things we have come to accept as natural — are made and maintained. Through this process, I want to expose the gap between the body that is looked at and the body that simply exists, and to make visible the tension and discomfort that forms in that space.