Artist Statement

Madeleine An (born 2003, Incheon; legal name An Soobeen) works with crime, violence, and the processes through which they are consumed and aestheticized as media imagery. Drawing from the visual language of 1970s true crime and analog media, she constructs fictional case records, manipulated archival images, video series, and digital interfaces that deliberately destabilize the boundaries between fact and staging, documentation and fabrication. Rather than reenacting crime itself, her work focuses on exposing the gaze directed at crime—and the desires, power structures, and gendered violence embedded within that gaze. Her primary fictional universe, Miss Cheshire, operates through the transference of historically repeated narratives of male serial killers onto a fictional female serial killer. This is not a simple reversal of gender roles, but a strategic intervention into crime narratives in which male violence has long been romanticized as cold, intelligent, and charismatic. By examining the mythologization of male serial killers such as Ted Bundy and Ed Kemper through media representation, An implants the same aesthetic logic of violence onto a female figure, questioning under what conditions—and on which bodies and genders—violence becomes legible, acceptable, and consumable. Rather than functioning as a single character-driven narrative, Miss Cheshire operates as a system. It unfolds through fragmented formats including video documentation, fabricated newspaper articles, missing-person posters, and case-file imagery. Viewers encounter these materials as scattered traces, assembling information in a manner akin to tracking a serial crime. This structure directly reflects contemporary conditions in which crime is mediated through streaming platforms, algorithms, and serialized content, where violence is transformed into entertainment and consumable narrative. An’s practice does not adopt a moral position of condemnation or denunciation. Instead, by repeatedly appropriating the formats of “crime scenes” and “case records,” her work reveals media not as a neutral transmitter of truth, but as a system that organizes, circulates, and narrativizes violence. Elements of brutality, exaggerated staging, and black comedy simultaneously provoke disgust and fascination, positioning the act of viewing itself as a complicit gaze. Within this framework, images of female perpetrators, female rage, and violence directed toward men destabilize the ethical coherence of conventional crime narratives, displacing the viewer’s comfortable moral distance and forcing a confrontation with the entertainment-driven consumption of violence. The exhibition space functions not as a site of passive viewing, but as a stage and apparatus. Rather than being presented with a resolved narrative, viewers move through fragmented images and records, required to interpret, connect, and complete the work themselves. In doing so, they are no longer distant observers safely consuming violence, but witnesses confronted with their own thresholds of acceptance—what they choose to see, and what they have long permitted. Through this experience, An invites a reconsideration not only of the relationship between violence, art, and media, but also of who has historically been imagined—and romanticized—as legitimate subjects of violence.