just Gou it
peggy gou, art, and the art of parties
I’ve always been one for models who ventured out into other pursuits. Those who DJ after walking shows, mixing tracks from nights at Berghain. Dark synths, early 90’s stuff. Obscure Chicago house that rubbed their highs right.
Every so often, the opposite happens. DJ’s will venture into other pursuits. One fan favorite is Peggy Gou. Not only has she released lines of her own clothing brand, Gou Goods, but recently she collaborated on a work of art at Lotte Museum for the 3:45 dreamer exhibit.
Most of the show includes immersive works that play with the idea of dreaming at 3:45. A time when morning and night make out in the corner of the world where you don’t know if you should sleep or wait for sunrise.
Though most of the pieces felt like wastes of commissions or grants, I was most impressed with Gou’s work, which featured unreleased music alongside a light instillation that brought me back to all the times I ever went out.
Parties, throughout the years, used to be ten, and when I was in my early twenties, it was six, then four, and now two, because I find so much comfort in two, and with the pandemic, parties come far and few in between. Company is changing. Who we keep is always changing. I think the hometowns that haunt us and how we carry them have this urge to meet other origins, to find common grounds, same stores, survival, essentially.
Peggy Gou can do no wrong. Hailing from Incheon, she first made her mark in the music scene in London first, then Berlin. Now she is everywhere. Ibiza. Dubai. Two nights in LA to start 2022.
Fran Lebowitz said that you should have fun in your twenties, because if you’re not having fun now, you’re not going to have much more fun later. Fun is hard to achieve when you used to meet boys in bars, dance with pineapple tequilas, step out into the cold for a 3AM taco just to catch the 6AM train to regret and forget the decisions you’ve made while still trying to make it to brunch from a siesta-ish nap at home, yours or his. People. Bunches of bodies. How they hide and blink under strobes or disco balls.
Of course, I also find fun in literature and films, a good charcuterie with a wine bought because of its design and not for its taste. Someone once brought a bottle of white when we were making budget spaghetti and meat balls. She bought it because the little film that wrapped itself around the bottle looked like a drawing from the New Yorker. Parties are now people of two or three. Creating little joys before curfew. And it’s in these parties that I see how different my verbs have changed. To drink. To serve. To laugh. To tell secrets. To share, what I hate and what I love. What happened to dancing? Singing? Shot-gunning and double-fisting? Where are the crowded rooms and the need to sink into the walls? To find solace in a stranger and keep a kiss in the dark? What happened to me?
With her fun synths that can be dressed up or down on the way to work or drunk on the dance floor, her music can assimilate so easily, weekday, weeknight, in company, in solace.
The haze of the installation along with the lights that began to aid my night vision. I saw my friend in the dark, the light in his eyes. The need for music and company and poor decisions. To learn, to grow from the dark. Because we learn better, drunk and faceless, to wake up to the new day’s face and see how much has changed, how many verbs conjugated or forgotten to be who we are when we stand in front of the bathroom mirror or on the 2% battery life of the camera on our phones.
