Arizona Cowboy (as part of Far West, So Close)

Manipulating physical and virtual perceptions of everyday places, Jaye Rhee’s videos, photographs, and performances explore and challenge distinctions between concepts of reality and illusion. Her works combine elements of the body, space, sound, image, and the flow of time to reveal gaps in memory, and fantasy and explore language and imagination, and seeing and knowing. In her performance Arizona Cowboy(as part of Far West, So Close), which corresponds to a larger ongoing work, a choir of foreign singers residing in Korea performs the work’s eponymous song. Originally released in Korea in 1955 following the devastation of the Korean War, it became the first Western­influenced Korean pop song to enter the country’s cultural mainstream. Its lyrics rely on clichéd fantasies of “the American West,” reflecting the influence of the lingering U.S. military presence in postwar South Korea. The song also speaks to the desire of several generations of Koreans to return “home,” a sentiment provoked by forced displacement and longing for an impossible return to an idealized past.