Brainrot: Affect and Feminist Strategies in Si On's Work

A psychedelically smiling sun is slowly waking up while emerging from the horizon. Its glow lights up the untamable waters of the ocean. Seagulls and albatrosses are soaring above an island whose surface – upon closer inspection – proves inhomogeneous, fused out of countless splinters and shards of human presence: cigarette butts, old chewing gum, wigs, rags, brand-name trainers, airport keyrings, empty cola and energy drink bottles. This is the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, or the plastic soup that can reputedly be seen from outer space. Humanity's greatest DIY project and an unofficial monument to the Anthropocene. Seated on this unstable drifting mass – like a spider on its heaving web – is she: the trickstress, the princess of chaos, the paradoxical heroine of this tale. An outsider inhabiting the solitary island. The rubbish queen. With a long stick, she is stirring a boiling soup brewed of waste, allegedly by the power of tsunami and sea currents, recovering from it drifting chargers, clips, crisp packets and yogurt tubs, toys, and toilet brushes. Out of these remnants and colourful trinkets she builds voodoo dolls and other figures which – quite incidentally – take on her own features and names.

Possibly, the waste island and its magnificent queen are just a myth. Scientists have spent years trying to prove that it is a clickbait-driven oversimplification. This, however, is beside the point. We have all seen those Photoshopped images of marine waste dumps. One thing is beyond doubt: the common feeling that we are all swimming in rubbish soup. The hyper-consumerism of platform capitalism enables instant shopping with door delivery, available at a single click. Temu, Shein, and Amazon offer inexpensive products and quick satisfaction – a momentary endorphin shot guaranteed. The Internet is flooded with absurd items like toilet minigolf sets, snakes in potato crisp tins, creative socks, or a toy bungee-jumping Jesus.

Si On collects these objects and processes them into monumental, overwhelming assemblages. She works intuitively and compulsively. Though petite in stature, the artist makes large-format works combining a variety of materials, sets them on fire, melts them, or expressively destroys them with hammers, knives and axes. She juxtaposes gestures full of violence and rubbish with flowers, bold colours, and plush toys. She is involved in ongoing mixing and blending: she hybridises forms while subjecting meanings derived from different orders to creolisation. She employs the aesthetic of brainrot, the language of the late Internet era, demonstrating the individual's confusion in the inundating excess of content. What her works have in common is their monumental scale, as though the artist wished to overwhelm the viewer with the quantity of objects, motifs, and cultural references.

I remember my two earliest encounters with Si On's work as if they were yesterday. Both made a stunning impression on me. The first was at her exhibition at London's Parasol Unit in 2019, when she still used the name Hyon Gyon. That experience really got under my skin. Composed of more than a dozen panels and spread over 20-plus metres, her monumental painting We Were Ugly (2018) filled a whole wall in the gallery. It depicted a scene after the end of the world, or a battlefield after the battle: human skulls and bodies lying around in a flower meadow and, above them, flames that occasionally aligned themselves into rainbow-like (or benzene) patterns. The painting was not an allegory dissociated from history. Hyon Gyon was invoking East Asia's trauma: the relations among Korea, China, and Japan, balancing for years under the threat of nuclear terror, as well as the memory of those who 'survived' such bombs.

The other one took place in Venice, during the 2022 Biennale, where its accompanying exhibition Uncombed, Unforeseen, Unconstrained at the Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello featured Si On's installation Doomsday (2020). It was composed of hundreds of processed garments, shaped into a large mass of water, seemingly rising, resembling a waste dump in form. Its epicentre was a swelling wave of several metres in height, waiting to fall and smash the whole composition into pieces. Placed in-between the 'waves' were lifesize wayside shrines, holding figurines resembling representations of Catholic saints and a decorated cross. These elements were reminiscent of the 'naive' vernacular art that can be seen at crossroads in the Polish countryside. Both of these encounters with Si On's art stayed with me for long as two mutually complementary metaphors of the reality of crisis spanning two axes of lethal elements: flood and fire.

Si On's work involves the use of affect – the primal system of responses that is faster than thought and speech. Her art instantly actuates the body. It evokes emotions rooted in biological mechanisms: anger, fear, repulsion, a sense of being overwhelmed or overstimulated. These impressions arise in direct contact with Si On's objects and are manifested physiologically – with a heightened pulse, muscular tension, tightness of the chest or abdomen. They never leave us cold; quite the contrary, they trigger the impulse to run, to defend ourselves, or to confront the danger. It takes a moment to overcome it and make an intellectual attempt at familiarising the situation. Curiosity takes over and initiates the slow decoding of the components that hail from various cultural, aesthetic, and symbolic regimes. Si On draws the viewer into the element of her own expression before they manage to take the safe position of constructing interpretations. The affects adhere to the viewer. As Sara Ahmed points out, emotions are not solely inner states but rather forms of interrelations: they stick to bodies, objects and images, endowing them with weight, direction, and political potential.

The work of Si On will not be tucked neatly on the shelf labelled with a 'movement' or a 'trend'. She is not an artist with a mission to illustrate current fads but rather to eat, chew and spit them out in new form. Her practice unfolds at the crossroads of several powerful traditions of 20th-century art – Dada, surrealism, pop art, expressionism, and feminist art – but none of them is dogma to her. It is rather a toolbox that she reaches for without being sentimental or asking permission. Her boundless need to quote, collect, and use anything that is within her reach brings to mind the earliest avant-gardists. The Dadaists and the surrealists gladly availed themselves of readymades; they constructed absurd, witty-and-disconcerting constellations of objects intended to disarm common reason and bourgeois norms.

Another relevant point of reference is pop art, with its obsession with mass-manufactured items, its 'low', kitschy popular aesthetics, and its daring removal of the division into high and low culture. Pop art emerged in the 1960s, the euphoric era of plastic, advertising, and a consumerist boom, when the future consequences of that prosperity were not obvious yet. Si On revisits this visual language already after the disaster, being fully aware of the costs. She is not far from the energy of Robert Rauschenberg and his assemblages, which seemed to explode with the quotidian, or to Arman of the Nouveau Réalisme group, constructing his works along the logic of accumulation, excess, and overwhelming scale.

In the Polish context, the most immediate point of reference would be Władysław Hasior – the master of assemblage, fetishising everyday objects but also immersing them in the dark aspects of history, religious symbolism, and wartime trauma. It is this 'hauntological' quality – being spooky, tinted with local mythologies, critical of social systems of beliefs – that makes Hasior and Si On so close, despite the different contexts and sensibilities.

Si On's work can be placed in the broad tradition of art created by women acutely sensitive to social commentary – women to whom no object is innocent. Everyday objects are not neutral props here but rather vehicles of meaning – of cultural stereotypes, phantasms, fears and desires – and also tools for quiet grooming, training for specific roles and behaviours. Just like the Black American artist Betye Saar, Si On perceives objects as condensates of collective memory and spirituality – things charged with history, violence, and magic which operate like talismans or cursed relics. Her stance is also akin to that of the Estonian artist Kris Lemsalu, who perceives the woman's body as being non-normative and uncontrolled, eluding the regimes of attractiveness and productivity. Isa Genzken represents human figures as empty vehicles of symbolic violence, of gender projections, and consumer fantasies, set in a world that increasingly resembles a stage set deteriorating after the finished show of modernity. With all these female artists, everyday objects come alive and start speaking their own, often sinister, language. Their works suggest that the reality in which we function is neither rational nor stable – it is surrealistic, spiritual, sticky, and monstrous.

What Si On adds to all that is the Internet aesthetic of brainrot, of music videos and Tik Tok rolls, embracing short-sequence cuts and bright colours. She reveals to us her own version of affective feminist expressionism. In interviews, the artist has more than once invoked the mudang figure of the strong women who have been shamans in Korean spiritual tradition. Their fundamental role has consisted in therapeutic support for and representation of the underprivileged, in addition to assistance in the four phases of life – birth, old age, illness, and death. The female shamans have thus been women of power in the otherwise patriarchal Korean society, which in this respect hardly differs from our local Catholicism and conservatism. They have been some of the few positive role models that the artist can relate to when she herself embodies them in her work, and also depicts them in her paintings.

Si On's works indeed seem to be begging for a feminist reading – and that is not just because they are made by a female artist and consistently place woman at the centre of the narrative, as is today the case with numerous pop-feminist practices. Their strength lies elsewhere: in the critical, even ruthless identification of gender roles as constructs. It is this performativity of gender – as discussed by Judith Butler – that becomes one of the key domains of Si On's work.

This is most evident in the installation Born with a Void, in which Si On has formed six simplified female figures oscillating between clothes shop mannequins and game pawns. The rigid wooden bodies are topped off with ceramic heads – similar to one another in their facial expressions but different in their hair styles or head coverings. Each figure has a different costume painted on it, evoking recognisable social types and cultural clichés of womanhood. There is a housemaid here, a schoolgirl, a hoodie, a boxer with a quotation of No Woman No Cry, and a beach goer wearing a swimsuit with smiley emoticons. Labels bearing the artist's name are attached to some of them, suggesting that each of them functions as a version of the same 'self', an alter ego in a variety of roles. Si On has added verse to the installation, which sounds like operating instructions, a promise, and capitulation at the same time:

Dress me up in the maid's uniform.
I will make a bed.
I will make a perfect house.
I will always be ready to serve you.

More costumes follow that 'deal one the pupa', more roles, or perhaps 'mugs', the kind that society persistently projects onto the woman's body. The text ends in an admission to a void and confusion: the persona does not know who she really is but agrees to accept the imposed forms. In a heteronormative reading, a man could be the addressee of the poem; in a broader perspective, however, it is society at large, operating as the normative apparatus, producing femininity through repetitive gestures, outfits, and expectations; involved continual categorising and perpetrating symbolic violence on the individual. Being a 'global' artist, Si On can pick any place on the planet to reinvent herself – take on ever new masks and freely mould her own hybrid identity. This work, however, imparts a clear message that identity is not merely a matter of an individual's sense of belonging but also a social construct and a prism through which the individual is perceived – as a woman, a migrant, or an Asian – along with the whole baggage of intersectional stereotypes.

A somewhat different image emanates from the paintings Big Girl (2024) and Unstoppable (2024), of which the latter, by the way, has a title that triggers another pop-culture connotation – the song by Sia, a hymn of heroines who pretend to be unbreakable as a survival strategy. The heroines in the paintings are big girls who stride confidently ahead, fitted out with attributes of combat and consumption. Carrying plastic shopping bags, bottles of sweet beverages, and packets of chips, they snack on reheated pizza as they go. Their half-naked bodies, bulging from tight shorts and knee socks, do not hide cellulitis, imperfections, or plasters. Quite the contrary: they are exposed for everyone to see – heavy, real, present. Depicted in motion, they unwaveringly march on, full of inner strength. They daringly fill the large-size paintings and look down on the viewer from up high. They look like giants – women you just wouldn't want to stand in the way of.

In some of her other works, Si On places her female protagonists in a colourful, ornamental scenery, filled with exotic flowers (The Observer, 2022). Some of these can be identified as anthuriums and strelitzias, which have erotic and corporeal connotations in various cultures. The heroines' faces remain hidden, concealed behind the bouquets, as though ornamentation and excess were taking on the function of a mask. The artist paints in characteristic long, thin brushstrokes, constructing a vibrating, dynamic structure of the image. These formal features bring to mind decorative arts, girly aesthetics, something between illustration and wallpaper design. Si On keeps knowingly balancing on the boundary between kitsch and camp.

Rage is of key importance to this practice. In interviews, Si On often refers to her anger at the world and society as the driving force of her work. She fits the heroines of her paintings out with rifles, harpoons, axes, swords, torches, and ceremonial staffs. Sometimes, one of them is preceded by a funny, somewhat absurd-looking little dog carrying a burning torch. The artist depicts her figures with their mouths slightly open, revealing sharp uneven teeth – the best tools of female self-defence, next to fingernails. In some cases, they are holding a smouldering cigarette in their mouth (a counterculture prop) or wearing pink balaclavas, invoking the tradition of female anti-systemic rebels such as Guerrilla Girls or Pussy Riot. In her painting Kill, Kill, Kill (2021), the protagonist embodies the Saint George figure – and slits the dragon's throat without a hint of hesitation.

Combative women bring to mind the angry brand of feminism – the variety which forgoes masking its frustration or any attempts at being 'nice' or 'polite' to meet social expectations and instead openly articulates its anger at structural injustice. This is the kind of feminism that resorts to radical aesthetics and blunt rhetoric – ranging from the slogan 'Fu*ck off!' chanted during the Polish Women's Protests of 2020 to the uncompromising strategies employed by such artists as Kara Walker, using violence as a language of criticism. It manifests as practices taking on the cultural stereotype of the woman as polite, caring, and pacifist. Trying not only to normalise the presence of feminine rage in the public space but also to show its agency and transformative power.