Smiley Suicide

In the performance video Smiley Suicide, a kind of black comedy, Shin’s body and face function as a field where opposite values, meanings, and emotions meet. She disguises herself as a smiley face and repeatedly mimes shooting herself with a toy gun that emits laughing gas (Nitrous oxide) from a whipped cream dispenser. Mixing a dizzy, hallucinatory loss of self with laughter, she evokes the spectrum between two opposites: laughing and crying, happiness and sadness. The laughter caused by the laughing gas is the result of a lack of oxygen in the brain; this sensual pleasure and the biological pain are two sides of the same coin.

A “smiley”, a stylized representation of a smiling human face, is often used as a generic term for emoticons—symbols that divide human emotions into several simple, typified icons. In the real world, however, human emotion is more like a chaotic, messy mass of contradictions rather than an organized chart. Putting on the smiley face like a mask or makeup refers to social expectations that women be perpetually cheerful and pleasant. “Smiley Suicide” was in fact inspired by Shin’s father exhorting her to always smile, no matter how she really felt. At the end of the video, by cracking the yellow face, Gyung Jin— an Asian woman—attempts to deny a standardized and fixed identity.