On my second go to to Hiya Goodbye at Dimin, ceramicist Michelle Im’s first solo exhibition in New York, her terracotta flight attendants had been a lot smaller than I remembered. Maybe it was the press launch’s reference to the Xi’an terracotta troopers that made me suppose they had been bigger, or the mixed presence of their multiplicity. Im’s attendants, coming in at round just below 4 toes (~1.2 m) and clad in what seem like Korean Air uniforms, are resolutely hand-built and flatly painted, in a method that’s extra graphic than lifelike. There are 9 figures in whole (all works 2025), every bearing their very own first identify and a singular pose, smiling and able to serve. Geum-Bi carries a teapot, Chae-Ri a bottle of pricey French wine; Younger-Eun demonstrates a security belt, whereas an identical twins Ju-Bi and Eun-Bi maintain their fingers collectively to kind a coronary heart form in a gesture of welcome. There’s something wondrous about her renderings of real-life particulars in clay, and the invention of every shirt button, patch pocket, and folded lapel is a delight.
Im first started working with flight attendants and associated imagery some years in the past, impressed by travels between her two homelands of the US, the place she was born and now resides, and South Korea, the place she spent a lot of her childhood and adolescence. Initially painted on ceramic vessels, parts resembling neck scarves and faces turned discrete sculptural parts through the years, earlier than changing into built-in into full-length figures just like these within the exhibition, however on a a lot smaller scale. And scale right here is vital, significantly when representing a topic that has been as totally objectified because the Asian girl. It’s troublesome to think about these figures, with their disconcerting clean gazes and barely inhuman proportions, offering a straightforward complement to a set of ornamentalized representations of East Asian femininity — the painted fantastic thing about a geisha, the porcelain figures of 18th- and Nineteenth-century chinoiserie. Though they might lack the gravitas of life-size figures, their presence is nonetheless substantial sufficient to evoke the uncanny, and their placement on plinths brings them eye-level with the viewer.
Left: Michelle Im, “Soon-Jung (純情)” (2025), ceramic, epoxy, acrylic; proper: Michelle Im, “Chae-Ri (彩悧)” (2025), ceramic, epoxy, acrylic
Flight attendants, as service staff, are prime examples of those that have interaction in affective, somewhat than productive labor. Such staff not solely have to hold out their core duties, but in addition take pleasure in doing so (or a minimum of seem to). Which is to say, showing to take pleasure in their core duties is in reality one in all their core duties. In The Managed Coronary heart (1979), her groundbreaking research of staff and emotional labor, Arlie Russell Hochschild outlines how vital a flight attendant’s smile is to an airline’s core enterprise and the way its many valences have been exhaustively picked aside by firm strategists. It should convey, she writes, that the attendant is “friendly, helpful and open to requests” whereas additionally showing honest, demanding a specific type of “deep acting.” By this lens, the grins of Im’s figures, which are actually painted on, lead one to marvel what fatigues or resentments they is likely to be concealing.
Alongside the bodily and emotional exhaustion of such service work, nevertheless, is the chance for enforcement and management. As airline passengers strapped into our designated areas, we’re, in some ways, rendered helpless. Our motion is severely restricted, and the little selection we’ve over what we eat and watch, and even after we relieve ourselves, is essentially illusory. Whereas flight attendants may ostensibly be there for our consolation, they supply it strictly on their phrases, or a minimum of, these of the corporate they symbolize. Put a foot flawed, and Younger-Eun, with the security belt, may simply choke you with it.
Michelle Im, “Young-Eun (怜恩)” (2025), ceramic, epoxy, acrylic, enamel
Set up view of Michelle Im, Hiya, Goodbye (2025) at Dimin (picture courtesy the artist and Dimin)
Left: Michelle Im, “Hyo-Soon (孝順)” (2025), ceramic, epoxy, enamel; proper: set up view of Set up view of Michelle Im, Hiya, Goodbye (2025) at Dimin
Michelle Im: Hiya, Goodbye continues at Dimin (406 Broadway Flooring 2, Tribeca, Manhattan) by July 11.
