Doris Dehan Son

How You Like That
March 04 – 31, 2022

The Lighthouse welcomes artist and curator Doris Dehan Son to present her third solo exhibition: How you like that. Born in Switzerland to South Korean parents, her early life was a busy one, what time was spent outside of school and her studies, was usually spent in her family’s Korean restaurant, one of the first to introduce the cuisine to the Swiss. In 2021 she received a Master’s in Curatorial Studies from the ZHdK, and to date, has participated in 12 group exhibitions.

How you like that is a very personal work, created through a life of research and a process that explores an interest in the contradictions of cultural fetishization, a phenomenon where a human made object has power over individuals and groups. To do this, the artist explores her own identity before and after the development of the Korean Wave, the countries successful establishment of soft power through cinema, food, consumer brands and other forms of culture. Returning to her earlier life at the family restaurant, where an exotic experience was relocated, and a desire for the foreign taste established. In turn, she identifies the same desire, but on a mass scale, through the mania of manga, and K-pop bands.

By presenting a series of found objects, including Nongshim branded merchandise and cleaning rags, alongside four glossy fashion magazine prints, placed in world format frames, all of which could be found in a restaurant but are seen within the exhibition space. The artist allows her personal experience to be shared and interpreted in the moment, by ironically questioning the fetishization of gallery space, and what is considered an object of art, or what is expected of the artist, the curator, and the collector.

We may laugh at ourselves when we face these revelations, and further consider what we are creating, and contributing to, questioning the social mechanisms behind the ideas we peruse so deeply. Doris Dehan Son delivers this discovery in a final and subtle poke of fun, “I ain’t got no time for the troubles in your eyes, this time I’m only lookin’ at me, myself and I” – BLACKPINK.