Jacked 2005

Curator: This is “Jacked,” a painting by Luke Chueh, created in 2005. Editor: Well, right off the bat, there's this bizarre, almost unsettling vibe. I mean, we've got a smiling rabbit-thing with antlers and a bandage wielding a saw riding what looks like a very unhappy deer. Curator: Yeah, Luke Chueh’s work often explores that space – the dissonance between cute and sinister. It’s like a cartoon character wrestling with some deep-seated angst, rendered in acrylic. I imagine painting that deer was like gazing into my own melancholic soul on a particularly gray morning. Editor: That angst feels performative though. The rabbit seems like a critique of power structures, right? A marginalized figure literally "jacking" or stealing authority, symbolized by the antlers. And look at the deer; its sadness seems like an indictment of victimhood—passive, almost complicit. Curator: Perhaps. Or maybe the rabbit is just as much a prisoner of the situation. Look at the bandage – that head wound suggests an inner struggle, maybe a self-inflicted wound from constantly wrestling with this… role? The saw, potentially a means of escape or further entrenchment. Editor: Escape for whom though? The rabbit or the deer? Does either have agency here? I think Chueh's using the framework of caricature to comment on these unequal power dynamics and the performativity of suffering, it is interesting to read. Curator: Interesting point. For me, I think that we could read into its ambiguity of their combined fates. Is it liberating for both? Horrific? The kind of journey that changes everything and nothing, simultaneously. What kind of narrative do they exist in? Editor: I see it as less about individual fates, and more about a systemic critique made palatable through cute imagery. But I have to concede the success is thanks to its open reading for the viewers. Curator: Indeed, it has the charm and angst coexisting at the very core of our existence. It asks questions rather than shouting out solutions, wouldn't you say? Editor: It certainly initiates questions, specifically regarding the intersections of pain, dominance, and how readily we perform these roles in contemporary society.