Review: GLORY at Living Skin
- Jul 13
- 5 min read
"GLORY: The Gun Range Deconstructed"
Chunbum Park
Brooklyn, NY
2025-07-13
“GLORY” at the Living Skin Gallery is a group show by three artists - Maverick Mura, Seung-Jun Lee, and Shreyas Sanikommu - who deconstruct and re-examine the idea of the gun range in the American psychological landscape. What is a gun range like - as a place of gathering, an architectural and psychological motif, and a signifier of its shadow, the weapon that forever changed the world since its inception? The gallery curators (Austin Kim and Jerome Wang) and the artists state that they are not interested in making the show purely about the politics of the gun, which can be divisive, elementary (since we all know that mass violence is absolutely bad and evil), and subsequently unnecessary. When we filter out the politically charged aspects of the gun range from its dissection, what remains is an intellectual and formal examination, like an academic study of a nude that is conducted in a class environment (without approaching the pornographic territory).
Guns are said to be part of the “American culture” and a way of life; the second amendment allows the keeping of firearms, mainly to maintain “a well-regulated militia,” which was considered key to ensure a free state and people. Guns can be alluring and sexy. They are sophisticated machineries made of glistening, heavy metal holding within them the rounds of lethal injections, accompanied by explosive sound and tactile sensation. A clever novelist in the 90s or the early 2000’s, when women were often objectified, would have described the gun as a femme fatale, or a deadly woman.
How about the gun range? It is said to be a somewhat dark and moody place with dim lighting and cool interior. Safety and professionalism are its top priorities, with training in mind. In many places, the staff check on the mental states of the participants, who undergo a rigorous vetting process and background checks. The moment your gun turns towards the adjacent angles, either accidentally or with malicious intent, the monitor calls you out from behind, and you would be expelled from the premises.
How about the exhibition, which is like a theme park that simulates the experience of being at a gun range without all the bureaucratic procedures and intense scrutiny or precaution? Contrary to an actual permit approved gun range, the exhibition allows a wandering of aim and spirit; meandering is encouraged, and there is no sharp linear path - your eyes and mind are not focused on a single target. The supposed targets, which are the paintings, are also not too distant from the individual booths from where its users would fire their guns.
Practicing with a gun at a gun range, playing first-person or third-person shooter video games like Grand Theft Auto or Call of Duty, hunting deers with a gun, watching movies where the good guy shoots the bad guy with a gun, and watching the policemen armed with guns stroll down the streets… The gun is both a pivotal lifestyle and fantasy in American life and society.
Maverick Mura’s “Black Ice” (2025) is a charcoal drawing on paper (mounted on panel) that depicts an ambiguous situation with deers fleeing from the viewer who is beaming lights at them. Is the protagonist driving towards the deers or hunting the deers with a gun? It’s hard to say, but the image, which is meticulously represented with high contrast and realism, alerts the viewers to the idea of the power differential or the changing of the power dynamics when a gun is introduced into a narrative or a scene. The gun, due to its overwhelming technological advantage and efficiency in lethality, has the power to change the hunter into the hunted and vice versa.
“No Russian” (2023) by Mura is a graphite drawing on paper (also mounted on panel) that is more lightly rendered of a very serious and controversial scene from the Call of Duty video game. The scene involves the American protagonist who is undercover at a Russian group shooting at civilians at a Moscow airport. The level title, shared with the art piece, is a quote said by the ficional Russian terrorist in order to frame the terrorist attack on the Americans. It was heavily criticized at the time as an example of video games providing the ability for us players to break international Genova code level violence in the form of entertainment.
Seung-Jun Lee deals with another kind of macho American lifestyle in his work titled, “Hardcopy Portfolios” (2025). It depicts a DJ taking out a disc with music from his bag or pouch, and the arm is tattooed with complex organic anatomy that clearly originates from Lee’s style in his previous series, named “Pigeonic Abstraction.” In an era where people readily store music on their iPhones, even mp3 players are a rare sight; a CD player is now considered a highly ancient and venerable artifact. The use of a gun involves the feeding of ammunition from a magazine, its loading, aiming, and firing with the tactile feel of the jolt and the gun sound. This highly tactile and analog experience is similar to how a DJ, or a music aficionado, loads a music disc or file onto a player and feels up the music to its appropriate volume, especially in the context of tape, disc, and record media (which are analog).
The metaphorical device of the gun range would not be complete without the targets, and that is what Shreyas Sanikommu delivers with his oil on wood painting titled, “Dusk” (2025). Surrealistically painted, the target becomes an illusion in the sky, a substitute for imaginary foe or violence. The sky is an infinite expanse made of empty air. It is both a tool for infinite release of imagined violence and receptor of such terrible thought, which is forgiven by its imaginative nature.
We all inflict violence upon one another to a much lesser degree in the form of sociopolitical inequalities and in the name of competition. While the resources are limited, we justify the unequal distribution of wealth and opportunities based on how useful we are as cogs to the capitalist machinery. To the white Americans who have been sidelined by the trends of globalization and the technological advancements, the gun proves to be a backup signifier of power and individuality, allowing for resistances of certain kinds.
In video games and movies, as well as in war, the nature of violence, competition, and domination are all interrelated elements. Instead of dialogue as in the UN or a community-based setting, the need for “fun” and entertainment and the need for competition and to differentiate the winners and the losers coincide, encouraging violence upon domination upon competition in these realms of our culture, society, and military.
The show “GLORY” proves to be revelatory and a novel take on the gun range, with the artists and the curators transforming the project space into a theme-park that represents the gun range in a believable manner. Living Skin displaces a symbol of commercialized violence to reshape modes of viewing, taking work off the walls and temporarily replacing a white, mainstream American icon with a unique, outsider take on it by non-mainstream East Asian and South Asian Americans, whose ancestry originate from India, Japan, and South Korea, respectively. The exhibition brings attention to, whilst not hanging from, the shock factor of a gun and its historically emotional and political charge, focusing instead on the gun range, a more nuanced and subtle suggestion of the violence that we all inflict and suffer from one another in the form of sociopolitical inequalities.
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