Kwon Yeong-jin (Art History)  

Choi Hae-ri’s works are composed of contrasting themes scattered sparsely on a single canvas; these themes imply life and death, the natural and the artificial, life and artificiality, above the grave and under the grave, ocean and underwater, this space and another sphere, this life and the after-life. These are concomitantly overlapped in one or on extended screens, as the artist herself refers her works as ‘multi-layered paintings’. Choi attaches semi-transparent silks in two or three layers to a quadrangle frame and these multiply-layered canvases display a collage of images, taken from different scenes.

Choi reconstructs cut-out images of animals, plants, landscapes and daily life objects and places them into non-contextual backgrounds in hyper-real or surrealistic way. This methodology is applied to her other photographic works and to the multi-layered silks paintings. Choi has stated that she first creates basic drafts by putting together images in a computer program, including images of the silk paintings drawn in a traditional oriental painting style. The screen shows the discrete animals, plants, natural landscapes and objects as slices of daily life in a vast space; but her works are absent of any human figures. The distinction between her photographic works and the silk paintings is that the former rearranges certain motifs (images) in totally dissimilar contexts placed in unfamiliar spaces, while the latter places images in a vast empty space, absent of background. In the silk paintings, the individual image is relatively small, making the background space seem boundless, of infinite space and of unknown time.

In this solo exhibition, Choi explores the world beyond our present realm, unseen but nonetheless existent, betraying physical sight. The exhibition begins with a painting of the dark side of the moon; this moon escorts us to other works that are in pairs of contrasting themes and then finishes with another moon painting showing the front side, revealing the previously-unseen side. Using this motif, this exhibition itself becomes a symptom that verifies the other world beyond, constantly revolving with the recurrent cycles, elapsing from our recognition.

The <Invocation Bound> series is comprised of two works, which insinuate extraterrestrial time and space, a parallel juxtaposed with the space in which we currently live. The <Expulsion> and the <Repatriation> portray a space that ushers us into the realm of the death, crossing over the threshold of life to the Beyond. The diptych <Passage> shows juxtaposed images of an eclipse on a water surface and gusts of wind with an ocean storm as the stem of all these phenomena. The video image that begins and ends with the moon image resembles the cyclical structure of the exhibition space itself. The fragmented motifs that burst out here and there in her paintings are shown in a series of visual images.

Choi Hae-ri’s works intrigue our imaginations because she reiterates multi-dimensional images that are inserted in a scanty, reverie-like, uncertain landscape. Choi contrasts images surrealistically, often deviating from the context. Choi also freely integrates both oriental and western painting techniques by applying lighting installments to her silk paintings. Choi’s works are a hybrid of traditions, renovations and techniques: the mixture of installation methods, painting techniques of both western and oriental traditions, the versatile adaptation of photographic images, collages and oriental coloring styles.

First, we see slumbering animals, indifferent to our gazes. They wander an imponderable space in a slow, lazy prowling, seen from the back or the profile. They steer our gaze into the inner side of the screen (canvas) where the neutral landscape imparts a dream-like uncertainty. The landscape is cut off from any contextual explanations; glaciers, volcanoes, frozen waterfalls and tropical trees intermingle side by side, making confusion. Jellyfish and koi swim alongside vivid tropical fishes in a carefree atmosphere.

Choi deliberately omits any hints for the background, expurgating boundaries between reality and imagination, this life and the after-life, chronological and spatial contexts. The multiple-layered semi-transparent silks gives images clear-cut borderlines like photographs, but this clarity changes with the layering of the silks, obscuring where and in which dimension they lie. The postures of the animals coquettishly direct our gazes into the in-between layers and beyond the canvas. They resonate with an air of a drifting, wandering mood set in an unrealistic, hallucinatory space, which is augmented by projected lighting.

Where are they really and where are they heading? This is a multi-layered, multi-dimensional world, but which time and space? The absence of human figures on the canvas maximizes the roles and positions of the viewers. In which time and space, then, are the viewers? Perhaps where we’re standing may be another version of Choi’s world: full of multiple meanings with the obscured time and space that Choi articulates. While viewing her works, we wander and loiter in a vast space just like the animals we view, endlessly attempting to reach the dominion beyond, previously unseen and hidden, but now naked before our own eyes, triggering our imagination and thoughts.

We can easily trace Choi’s inspiration from the quantum mechanics multiverse theory, notions of life and death and the funeral or burial rituals that connect this life and the after-life. The <Invocation Bound> shows two screens connected by a motif of a big-bang-like planetary collision. The left shows a frozen volcano while the right is the painting of an erupting volcano, the two being juxtaposed. An empty bed (the sleeper being elsewhere) and the ox  gazing on the surface of water rouse a sense of witnessing another dimension of the universe, as reflected by mirror the or the water surface. The clothes flying by the erupting volcano is a motif associated with the rites that invoke the dead.

The <Expulsion> and the <Repatriation> appear to be set in an interior space with scattered objects, evoking remorse for someone’s death. The canvas is absent of human figures, yet the objects are clearly meant for prayers for his or her well-being in the next life. In the lower section of the <Expulsion>, one finds a small triptych with a portrait of Darwin in the central panel and holy icons of the Catholic Church to the left and right. The clouds gathering around and into the inner area are connected to the mirror lying horizontally, which reflects bamboo branches scattered and blown by a wind.

The <Repatriation> is embedded with objects of funeral rituals. The wooden box is associated with a coffin and is placed next to a shovel with soil. There are also coins for the dead for his or her last journey, ritual dishes (to be used in the after-life), rice and salt (another death–related motif), strapless shoes aspiring for a comfortable journey to Hades, hemp clothing for shrouding the corpse, and coats used when invoking spirits. These funereal utensils and motifs are deeply associated with death, but they also convey a certain idea of a new beginning as opposed to connoting a helpless finale. The waterfall-window or the red planet with its dark mist suggests this new beginning. The existence expelled and cast out from life is summoned to death, but what Choi has collected are motifs aspiring to a new birth. She presents these motifs and objects at the exact moment of death (possibly to the dead him/herself), and, conventionally, death was simply condensed to the ultimate darkness, regarded as something fruitless and barren.

  Choi implies spatial depth by overlapping silks in layers, but the obscurity in her spaces is even more intensified through a variety of motifs. For example, the scenes of the flow of the aurora (projected behind from the canvas and upward), the Big Bang explosion that connects the two divided canvas and the clouds (or mist) surging from behind the canvas all blur the spatial division, with the help of the lighting installations projecting onto the canvas from behind. The lighting fills in the individual layers and the layers of space.

Choi is versatile in integrating heterogeneous space, time and images. In some works, she creates a fictional extraterrestrial space with photographic images taken from a zoo. She grasps after the most drastic momentums in life with her desolate funereal utensils, obscuring time sequences. Choi’s images are vivid and clearly drawn like photographs; they are so realistic yet seemingly frozen corpses, at the same time. Choi creates obscured time and vacuum-like spaces, in which life is inhibited and at the same time prolonged while the massive explosion foretells the new birth of a universe.

  The clear-cut images floating in the vast yet abandoned space and the obscure images flickering from the light projected from behind the canvas lure us into the inner reaches and beyond of the canvas. The small objects are arrayed and scattered in a semi-transparent space; they may be what we could see when thrust into another space via a black-hole, like a time-machine. Or, perhaps these images are what the dead may see or pass when they leave this world for another realm.

  On thresholds of life and death, many pictures come and go in our minds. Choi has, perhaps, captured those images in vivid tones like cut-out photographs, as if carving those images on one’s soul. She sparsely scatters images in such an unrealistic, incomprehensible way in a vast, desolate space, and these images exist like a hallucination of hyper-time conceptions. Finally, Choi provides a full visual passage through which we can experience the epic of life/death and creation/Doomsday with the poetic impulse and transcendental hallucinations that she creates on her canvases.

*한글 원문은 송은갤러리 홈페이지 참조
Please refer to Songeun Gallery website (http://www.songeun.or.kr) Korean

The title of Hong’s solo exhibition is ‘boundary’, connoting a physical limit that divides one material from another material and one realm from another realm. These physical boundaries create mental boundaries as well which means limitation or suppression. We encounter numerous boundaries in life and are frustrated and disappointed when running into them. However, as humans, we also profess a constant determination to overcome such boundaries. When we run into a limit or boundary, the situation in itself creates a certain inferiority complex, which is a major motif in Hong’s works.

I do not simply stop at portraying the inferiority complex, but try to visually depict the painstaking process of overcoming this kind of situation. It is true that I start from the inferiority complex; but I ponder on why I have failed, and intentionally expose the modifications or improvements that I made at the surface. (Artist Statement)

The inferiority complex that occurs at or is born onto a mental boundary relates to the overall concept of Hong’s works, sculpting processes, formal aesthetics and attitude toward art.

We notice that his chosen motifs are fisheries, crispy donuts or other everyday objects which are easily encountered in daily life. This exhibition at Gallery Skape shows the ‘Dragon Ball’ character series, which is new for this time, but is still aligned with the concept of his previous work.

Even in an era of contemporary art that offers seemingly easy, soft and light-hearted images, the distance between everyday life and art is not shortened. The issue of communication is important for an artist because art has failed to penetrate into daily life, has failed to become more than an art-image, even with the bombardment of ‘pop art’. Hong’s ‘easy’ images should be studied from the perspective of the absence of communication, born into the boundary or in-between area of pop-art and the general audience or daily life, rather than ‘extreme pop’ or ‘pop satire’. ‘Dragon Ball’ is the world’s most commercial cartoon, and Hong selected this comic character image as a model for sculpting, easily accessible even without conceptual or contextual approaches.

In this respect, Hong reveals the commonplace or daily life situations that manipulate the boundary between art and non-art. Here, the inferiority complex is repeatedly looked back upon and protrudes into the birthplace of the boundary itself. To Hong, a boundary is explicit not just in the conceptual realm but also from a formal perspective, only in a stronger hue. The formal boundary of a sculpture is its surface, and Hong’s identity is clearly revealed in how he handles this surface. He places colors on a resin processed sculpture, and polishes the surface numerous times. Here, he denies the formal boundary of sculpting by wearing down the perfectly polished surface.

What is interesting is that this process of ‘denial’ reveals the inside of the sculpture, converging and reintegrating the inner and outer realm of the surface, placing them into the visual field. From this exhibition, Hong indicates that the physical (formal) and mental boundary of art and non-art equally influences the artist and the audience, exposing his desire to overcome such a boundary by the sculpting processes. Hong chooses familiar, trivial themes and portrays them as meticulous and pain-staking sculpture; this exhibits the boundary of pop art in contemporary art that yet denies a simple interpretation and is clothed in complex, abstruse concepts.

Sim So-mi (Curator at Gallery Skape)

*한글원문은 갤러리 스케이프 참조

<Seoul Design Now>  

Seoul Design Now gropes the past and present of Seoul with the designers’ insights. In general, the term ‘design’ means visualizing something, and the producer of design is called as  a ‘designer’. Then, how the designers perceive and understand Seoul? This exhibition started from this simple question and aims to convey designers’ thoughts, practices and works. The end-result goes further than simple collection of design materials. Rather, they wish to portray the design process itself, including how they perceive and understand the city. For this, the designers voluntarily placed themselves in various artificial environments, experimenting with communicative and susceptible design works. We name this process as a ‘design research.

In fact, Seoul is a complex city treasuring ancient, pre-modern, modern and post modern revolutions and remnants. Seoul greatly motivates designers with their rich visual contents and historic significances. In this respect, Seoul fascinates and enchants designers. There are 7 teams, composed of designers, architects, artists, design researchers and curators, voluntarily dived into the heart of Seoul. They attempted to grasp the true identity of Seoul with their unique approaches with creative insights. They portray the artificial yet genuine faucets of Seoul and wish to unveil the true meaning beneath the unseen. They materialized their pursuing of Seoul as design materials. The themes of 7 design teams for their three months researches are: historic transformation of Seoul’s APT: the college life imbued with cultural and economic features: historic, cultural and geographical significances of Wonseo-dong: private memories with Seoul Station: city’s uniformed patterns of life and Halloween stories: and recycling of wastes.

1. Apartment, the modernity in Everyday Life

2. Life and Culture in College Town[L1]       

3. Once Won-dong, Now Wonseo-dong

4. Narrative Landscape

5. The city, invisible and invincible [L2] 1.2

6. How to be a Seoul Citizen without losing your soul  

7. Riding with Recycling [L3]  

Wonseo-dong is only a 10-minute walk from Daehakro, Jongro or Insa-dong. Originally, this region was named Won-dong, but during the Japanese colonization, it was renamed Wonseo-dong (west of Won-dong). The Japanese Viceroy renamed Changdeok Palace and Changkyeong Palace as Chang Kyeong Garden as an act of disparagement and Won-dong was renamed Wonseo-dong, meaning ‘west of Chang Kyeong Garden’.

As the name implies, Wonseo-dong cherishes the historic remnants of Korea. The place in which women washed laundry on the upper of the stream that flows into Changdeok Palace, the age-old store signs of barber shops or cleaners are the tangible evidences of history. The cohabitation of Japanese-style houses, traditional Korean houses, western-style houses and contemporary villas reflect not just the transformations in architectural styles, but also the changes in regimes, economy and culture.

In Wonseo-dong, one can glimpse the past, the time when the district was originally called Won-dong, and its present as Wonseo-dong. The ancient old times and the contemporary digital era are indelibly blended with the remnants from the past. This place will continually remain the same as it is now today. Four artists have captured the present of Wonseo-dong through various perspectives. The Once Won-dong, now Wonseo-dong unfolds the whole history of this region.

Shin Jisun, Wonseo-dong Villa 8 Magnificence

This work is an advertisement for a fictional tour in which site-specific features have been spotted and portrayed via the artistic imagination. Here, viewers can see the sights of unseen, not well known spots or unnoticed objects that have been placed in our surroundings.

Jang Seok-joon, The Sky

In this work, Jang enumerates familiar images, things one has seen once before, but that are impossible to recall where or when. These images are accessible everywhere, anywhere, any time. They all seem similar, crowded and intermingled on one screen then turned into the sky of the exhibition space ceiling. One can always look up at the sky, but one simply forgets to do so, and eventually, the sky is forgotten. Jang tells the story of objects that are constantly around us, but that are never noticed. He portrays the numerous repetitions and oblivion of the trivial.

Min Ji-ae, Swapping Doors

Min displays a media work that covers the perpetual spectrum of time. This work unfolds the various spectrums and layers of time that are blended together in Wonseo-dong. Viewers can see a one-year-old front door attached to a one hundred-year-old house, a newly-built house with 5-decade-old columns.

Yoon Ha-min, Electric Lady-Land

Yoon has created a collection of store signs, old photographs, souvenirs and people’s images that are all related to Wonseo-dong. These images are combined in random, multiple ways. The original features of Wonseo-dong have lapsed into erratic combination of images. Yoon blurs the boundaries of images that resided in memory, and forgotten or unseen images of Wonseo-dong.

Apartment, the modernity in everyday life

Apartment, the modernity in everyday life is integrated research that traces how Seoul turned into a forest of sky-rise apartment buildings. Within only four decades, Seoul has turned into a completely different place than it was before. The first section examines how the apartment has become the standardized housing model for Korea’s middle class. This section will explore the evolution of Korea’s apartment features beginning from Mapo Apt., Hangang Mansion, Yeouido Model Apt., the mega-scale apartment complexes in Kangnam and the Apartment & Stores compound. It also displays how the new-middle class in Kangnam established a unique lifestyle, with experimentation on interiors and latest trendy objects, and how their housing culture soon expanded to the entire Seoul metropolitan area.

Section Two has a somewhat different tone in the transitions of the apartment, examining the older apartments in Kangbuk, especially Dongdamun Apt., Hoehyeon Model Apt., Jeongneung Sky Apt., Saint Joseph Apt. and Chungjeong Apt. These were strongly encouraged as alternative models for multiple populations. The dominance of this model was soon diminished with the rapid rising of the next generation apartment models. These still stand in the corners of Seoul regions like pale ghosts, recalling a certain nostalgic aura for early modernity in Korea. In that sense, they could be called ‘living museums’ of Seoul. Section two will trace the ‘past of Seoul’ which passed into oblivion with the flow of development.

How to be a Seoul Citizen without losing your soul

Currently, Seoul is in the midst of renovating with a focus on public art and public design, yet residents have the strange feeling of losing something precious in this storm of rebuilding and remodeling. If we are able to realize the slogan ‘make Seoul beautiful!’, will we truly be happy? The design group “Vaeban Family” took root from this doubt, and questions how one’s soul can keep a steady course in the chaos of rebuilding and renovation. This project carefully examines what it means to design Seoul and how the people of Seoul voluntarily appropriate their space into a sustainable life.

The City, invisible and invincible
The City, Invisible and Invincible unfolds the common, everyday sights of Seoul that might give viewers and uncanny feeling when they protrude on the conscience. This exhibition is composed of two parts. The first is Toward Seoul 0/53/70 which questions how the specific features and cultures of Seoul caused uniformed patterns in the movement of its citizens. The other part is Halloween Stories-Seoul, which puts forward objects that betrayed those patterns of rules.

Heading toward Seoul, 0/53/70

In an apartment, people live within and go to sleep facing the same walls on every floor, and every floor has the same interior structure. In bedroom communities, commuters head toward the same directions with their fellow residents. All desire to work in Seoul. Perhaps Seoul delimits our movements and courses into a few directions. Where then does this tendency of ‘Toward Seoul’ come from? With Heading Toward Seoul, 0/53/70, the original street plans for the area of Gwanghwamun, Yeouido and Kangnam are traced. When the Chosun Dynasty was first established, the structures of Seoul (Hanyang, as it was known at that time) reflected Confucian perspectives in city building as is mentioned in 『Zhouli·Kaogongji』. This principle was applied in the old city of Seoul, while the Yeouido and Kangnam regions reflect cultures that are inclined toward development. These processes question the square shapes of the buildings and the square, uniformed patterns of city life that only emphasize efficiency.

Halloween Stories-Seoul
Every city has its own ghost stories. They are told over and over, and these urban legends have taken on a reality of their own. These stories are told for amusement, but at the same time, they connote the shames, aspirations and fears that are built while living in a city. The ‘thumping ghost’ reflects the extreme competition among teenage students. A student pushes another student off a rooftop to become the top-ranked student in their school, while the ghost of the victim seeks for revenge making a thumping sound. (The victim died as its head stuck the ground, so it cannot walk on its ghostly feet but bumps along head downward, which explains the thumping sound.) In another story, it is told that the victim will die by sleeping with a fan on, so no one bought a fan without a timer. The trivial objects of everyday life can be turned into objects of fright. Halloween Stories-Seoul captures and displays the objects told of these urban tales. These objects are familiar yet strange; just like Seoul, and just like ourselves. 

Today’s cityscape is embedded with iridescent neon lights, skyscrapers, provocative images of mass media that trigger human desires. The neon lights that once dominate the night disappear in the morning, and the absence and deficiency replace desire. Modern people’s desires are born onto and attracted to the artificial and superficial lights like a dayfly is driven to a light. Our desires are created and abolished repeatedly. Sungsoo Kim captured and visualized the phenomena of material civilization and underneath its surface. The <solist> is his solo exhibition, showing works that portray the ever distant split between the surplus and estrangement of today’s world, juxtaposing human figures with buildings.

<Metallica> series are motivated from the glass pyramids in the Louvre. <Metallica> stemmed from the work <Façade>(2001) that collate windows of a concrete building, and this motif is extended to the <Neon City>(2006), views of the neon light on the skyscrapers, then <Metallica>(2007), a glass pyramid structure. The glass pyramid was inspired by the ancient Egypt civilization that symbolizes the perfect ideal and the aspiration toward the Idea. The glass pyramid could be created with the collaboration of the concrete-the symbol of industrialization-and capitalism, with the help of the latest technology. Earlier on, Walter Benjamin had uttered that he empirically found out that the concrete architectures of industrial society tends to feature historic restoration with the utopian aspiration and help from the new technology. In this respect, the glass pyramid is historically linked to the new-utopia by retrieving the ancient pyramid, clothed with the fantasy of a metropolitan city, which is full of glasses and concrete buildings, to be the ideal city. Kim sought symbolic metaphor with his <Metallica> works portraying the mega-scale of collective desires of modern society that are tamed with capitalism.

The concrete frame structure of the glass pyramid in the Louvre is shown in grids in Kim’s <Metallica>. The fundamentals in the concrete building’s frame structures are grids, like the grid features of windows. The repeated glass motifs in his work are filled with artificial and strong tints that disobey penetration of gaze. What Kim sought with his glass windows is the state of uncertainty and mystery of modern society that fails to grasp the depth and substance of a subject or an object. Kim expresses frustration of losing transparency and patency of modern society by portraying the concrete and glass structures with thick pigments. Here on, Kim’s narrative is much more concretized. You cannot gaze out through his windows; the visual sense is blocked, resting only on the surface of the grid structures. In other words, the gaze is sealed on a canvas surface itself. This portrays the status of the modern desires disclosed and unveiled, symbolizing the discord, fission, alienation and detachment of the outward and inward. The grid structure of the <Metallica> horizontally and repeatedly expands the modern society’s desires, erasing any depth and capturing the faucet of modern society that preys on desires.

The surplus of desires toward the material civilization hovers on the surface of the <Metallica> and stimulates and provokes the visuality of the modern cityscapes. Kim’s portraiture series <Melancholy> attempts to reach the beneath of such phenomena. The gaze of solitary figure in a huge canvas reaches nowhere. The slick texture itself is filled with full physicality yet the glass-like skin is easy to break and intangible. This work arouses the empty and split subjectivity in the modern society, clothed with the exaggerating spectacles shown in the <Metallica>. When we examine the <Melancholy> series, we can find out the figures are wearing strife patterned clothes, interestingly enough, connected to the grid structure motif of the <Metallica>. While the grid motif of the <Metallica> phenomenologically portrays the modern society, the grid in the <Melancholy> exposes the traumas from such phenomena, hidden and estranged from the outward, surface. The figures’ facial expressions have air of absence, disorientation, alienation and emptiness, and the strife patterns repeatedly reproduce such helpless feelings with melancholic hues.

The concrete/glass pyramid and frame structures are the keen example of the artificial superficiality of modern capitalism with its infertile banner on utopianism. The extravagant and vivid colors of his portrayed figures disobey their inner states of mind that emanate emptiness and disorientation. This symbolically implies the detached, isolated real from the traumatic reality. What Kim seeks with his works is the more and more estranged subjectivity of an individual. Kim goes further than simply revealing the demand of the modern era, or the inside of the suppression or the outburst of oppression, his works relate themselves with the restoration of the fundaments in the humanity.

Somi Sim (Curator at Gallery Skape)

 *한글 원문은 www.skape.co.kr 참조