Jang Pa does not paint bodies so much as split them open. In her art, entrails spill, flesh festers, cavities throb and vaginas bristle with teeth. Through what she calls the “feminine grotesque,” the artist challenges sanitized ideals of beauty as upheld in male-centered visual traditions. Her exposed interiors — visceral, porous and monstrous — recast the female body as an untamed presence, pushing back against its long history of objectification. This outlook is unmistakable in “Gore Deco,” her solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery in central Seoul, which brings together 45 new paintings and drawings. “Because women and other marginalized individuals have long been denied access to the mainstream as speaking subjects, their ‘language’ often emerges not through speech but through body,” the 44-year-old said in an interview with The Korea Times. “I’m interested in how far this body, especially its interior sensations, can be articulated without restraint.” She went on to point out how gendered hierarchies are inscribed at the level of sensation itself. The masculine