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Pains Retrouvés
Mécènes du Sud, Montpellier, FR
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
pains retrouves french toast hayoung sculpture bread
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It is while wandering the streets of Nice that HaYoung stumble upon abandoned loaves of bread, left to the fate of organic decomposition or scavenging. They gather a first group and revive them. Utensils and scraps of used metal are transformed into a multitude of legs, antennae, and armed prostheses, grafted onto chunks of bread. These thus take on the appearance of creatures emerging from earthly and galactic limbo, endowed with an invasive autonomy.

While their proliferation is impressive — and by its overflow recalls the Latin origin of the word "crust," crusta — it is also tinged with humor, both absurd and biting. The artistic gesture that breathes life into these cyborgian chimeras occurs alongside the discovery of a recipe, that of pain perdu (French toast), which HaYoung encountered upon their arrival in France from South Korea. Here, the ideal of monocultures turns stale, giving way to fragmented identities that find, remix, and recompose themselves.


In a corner, something suddenly catches my eye: a discarded piece of bread, its hardened and rotten crust pierced with small bits of metal.

Pains Retrouvés, 2018 – on going
INSTALLATION SCULPTURE
35 HARDENED BREADS, ROTTEN BREADS, METAL, VARIABLE DIMENSIONS

FOR SCABS
AT MÉCÈNES DU SUD, MONTPELLIER, FRANCE, 2023
CUR. MADELEINE PLANEIX-CROCKER

PHOTOS: © Elise Ortiou Campion, HAYOUNG

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION
FULL TEXT OF MADELEINE PLANEIX-CROCKER