Do beauty and spa routines secretly control our lives? This South Korean artist asks the question

Maybe this is just me, but spas are stressful. Like everything else in my adult life, I blame childhood trauma – my mother used to drag me from one beauty salon to another on her sporadic trips from Singapore, where she lived, to visit me in Hong Kong. She was concerned that I lacked a strong feminine presence, one palatable for a male gaze during my crucial teenage years (I was raised by a grandmother who had an arranged marriage and worked in a factory). What I remember most about my mother’s visits was not her presence, but the sensation of being confined to a salon chair as someone fixed my untidy eyebrows underneath blinding white lights.

Then there’s also the warped time-space of the spa itself: the soundtrack of soft jazz that commands us to calm down, the incidental intimacy between you and the stranger to whose touch you have consented to, the instructions to just relax and let yourself be pampered. Who is really in control here: me, the paying customer, lying down and naked, or the beautician-masseuse, who could do anything to my face and my body for an hour?

These were the questions running through my head when, on a Saturday afternoon in December, in an industrial building unit that houses Kiang Malingue’s Tin Wan gallery, Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong announces to the crowd, “Today I’m going to demonstrate spa and beauty.”

She’s in a forest-green gown and red slippers, and there are about 50 of us at the gallery for the closing performance of the week-long exhibition titled “Spa & Beauty”. The space is strewn with uncanny objects and contraptions: a bottle of “foot shampoo”, flesh-coloured mannequins with bristles protruding from their chest, a glossy bust with sharp toe brushes for arms, a bathtub with a bearded man plopped at its head so the tub resembles an extension of his body.