4. 76
Due to the fatigue that comes with the uptight living conditions of our grey city, more perseverance
is required to read a single book, from beginning to end, in one sitting. Much to my chagrin, I am
preoccupied with my day-to-day responsibilities more so than my academic research - despite the fact
that I pursue academic studies for a living - and I find myself absentmindedly turning out writings.
Recently, I came across a book entitled Okin Collective, published by ‘Workroom’, which is a company
that assists artists’ independent publishing on a small scale.This book is written by the artist group
‘Okin Collective’ to archive its activities and data from the last 3 years. It’s been a long time since I felt
refreshed and inspired: while reading over it, my accumulated fatigue was washed away, as if I had
exfoliated my dead skin.
It was also a unique experience to become familiar with the artists’ activity through the medium
of a book instead of an actual gallery exhibition.This book is somewhat of an archive that records
their trajectory from the summer of 2009 to recent days. Indeed, reading it gives us a great deal
of pleasure, as it includes various reading resources and references, such as self records, articles
by art critics and journalists, interviews, declarations, photo images - all of which create a more
entertaining reading experience. Moreover, this book can be regarded as an experimental publishing
venture because it targets a more alternative and popularized readership, whereas most independent
publications have a very specified, narrow audience/reader group. Once finishing reading this book, I
strongly felt that I would like to meet the Okin Colletive in person.
Inwang Mountain of Gyeomjae,
andthe demolition of the Okin Apartments
Okin Collective is an artists’ group that was formed in the process of demolishing the Okin
Apartments - an apartment complex that was constructed as a part of modernization project led
by the dictatorial government of former president PARK Jeong Hee. As many are aware, the Okin
Apartments were built in 1969 on the site of a former shantytown.The shantytown had been
demolished by the government to build a civil apartment complex that showed off the fast-paced
*
Okin Collective is an artists’ group, which consists of Hwayong
KIM, Shiu JIN, Joungmin YI, named after the Okin Apartment
complex in Jongno-gu, Seoul. In July 2009, a group of artists
visited one of their colleagues who lived in the complex, which
was set to be torn down soon. It was during this eviction process
that they began exploring the tragedy surrounding the other
tenants’ situation in the name of a redevelopment project, with
traces of those who had already moved out from the complex still
lingering. It was also a way of looking into how the historicity,
speed, and avaricious urban planning taking place in Seoul were
damaging people’s lives. Thus, it was during this time when Okin
Collective was formed.
In the midst of the city’s redevelopment project, no space is
exempt from receiving “death sentences”out of the blue in the
form of forced evictions and harassing situations. What Okin
Collective considers most important is not raising pros and cons
on the redevelopment project, or even the specific interests of
the community members, but rather in broadening people’s views
and attitude about such incidents. Though the collective was
started in one particular place, the activities of Okin Collective
center on remembering multiple “Okin”s which continue to take
place all around Seoul even after the Okin Apartments was torn
down. This can be accomplished by exploring your city, being
kind to others, carrying out your own research, taking part in
entertainment activities, and tenderly bringing together art and
everyday life. As a result, Okin Collective is still pursuing these
activities which they are very concerned about.
The group has had two solo exhibitions since its inception,
including “Okin OPEN SITE” at the Okin Apartments, Seoul
(2010) and “Concrete Island” at Takeout Drawing (2010). For
group exhibitions, it has participated in “Random Access” at
the NJP Art Center, Yongin (2010), “Public Discourse Sphere:
Aftereffects of Neo-liberalism” at Alternative Space Loop, Seoul
(2011), “The R-19 Performance Relay” at Alternative Space Loop,
Seoul (2011), “Life, No Peace, Only Adventure” at Busan National
Museum of Art, Busan (2011-2012), “The Forces Behind” at
Doosan Gallery (2012) and more. The collective has run the Okin
Collective Internet radio station [STUDIO+82] (http://okin.cc)
since September 2010.
okinapt@gmail.com
* *
Kwangsuk LEE is an assistant professor in the Graduate School
of Public Policy and Information Technology at Seoul National
University of Science and Technology, Seoul. LEE earned his Ph.D.
in Radio-TV-Film at the University of Texas at Austin. He worked
as an Australian Research Council (ARC) Postdoctoral Research
Fellow and now is an Honorary Visiting Fellow at the University
of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of five books, Copyleft
Culture: Cultivating the Common (Seoul, forthcoming),
IT development in Korea: A Broadband Nirvana? (London:
Routledge, 2012), The Art Cultural Politics of Cyber Avant-
gardes (Seoul, 2010), Digital Paradoxes: The Political Economy
of Cyberspace (Seoul, 2000) and Cultural Politics in Cyberspace
(Seoul, 1998). As a columnist, LEE has contributed numerous
columns and essays related to digital culture to Korean
newspapers, magazines, and other publications.
leeks2k@gmail.com
Okin Collective,
‘In Between the Poetic and the Political’
Kwangsuk LEE
Professor at the Seoul National University of Science Technology
5. 98
urbanization of Korea. Also, one could take in the entire view of the Okin apartments from the Blue
House, the Korean presidential residence.This is why the landscape of this region is so unique.This
mass of concrete - symbolic of PARK’s legacy of achievement - stands where numerous people had
been setting up home in for a long time. It was, no doubt, unsettling to witness its quaint beauty, the
remnants of fast development, and the memories it contained disappear all at once, in the name of
urban development.The blurred memories of life that were embedded in the nooks and crannies of
the Okin Apartments were doomed to vanish alongside its structural demise, due to the very clear
purpose of urban beautification (i.e. the construction of a new park, providing citizens of Seoul with
an unobstructed view of nature). According to the ‘Han River Renaissance plan’ led by former mayor
of Seoul, Sehoon OH, the Okin apartment complex was designated as a green area and thus subject
to demolition. If expressed in an Okin Collective-esque manner, spaces that were much like ‘hollowed
out furrows’, which we usually encounter in cities and their deep wounds were about to be quietly
filled in and disappear without any notice.
Three artists - Hwayong KIM, Shiu JIN, and JoungminYI - gathered to find out the ways of healing
the ‘hollowed out furrows’ of the Okin Apartments and share the old memories before the demolition
of the Okin apartment. During that summer, the Okin Collective planned a public program entitled
‘Okin-dong Vacance’ that ran for one night and two days with local residents on the rooftop of the
near-desolate Okin Apartment complex 2. As their project garnered more and more attention through
word of mouth, the media, and the internet, the Okin Collective continued to hold improvised
rap performances, a local exploration program called ‘Walkie-Talkie’, and projects such as ‘Okin
Fireworks’. In 2010, as the day of demolition approached, the Okin Collective organized an exhibition
in a space that was practically in ruins, with the intention to remember the ‘hollowed out furrow’
that contained within it, the shackles of urbanization and modernization. Furthermore, it was meant
to record the moments of the artists’ solidarity and collaboration, and to share those memories with
audiences who visited the site.
While the Okin Collective’s various activities were based in the Okin Apartments for over a year, some
media outlets mistook them for a radical artist group who occupied the space without permission. It is
inappropriate, however, to label their actions as ‘squatting’, the unlawful occupation of an uninhabited
building. As a member of the Okin Collective, Hwayong KIM had already been a legal resident of the
apartment before it was torn down.Two other artists had simply joined and collaborated with KIM
prior to the building’s imminent demolition.To them, the Okin Apartment was just a very attractive
place in which to work. It was where the beautiful scenery of Inwang Mountain seeped into the
canvas of Gyeomjae, JEONG Seon1
, the legendary Korean painter to create a mysterious ink-and-
1 JEONG Seon (1676–1759) was a well-known Korean landscape painter, also known as by his pen name Gyeomjae (謙齋: meaning
humble study). He was one of the few known Korean painters to depart from traditional Chinese styles. It is reported that he
frequently left his studio and painted the world around him, as he could see it. Soon, JEONG Seon inspired other Korean artists to
follow suit, leaving a lasting impact on Korean art of the Joseon era. In contrast to most painters at the time, JEONG Seon was not
born in a wealthy family. He was discovered by an aristocratic neighbour who recommended him to the court. Soon he gained an
official position. JEONG is said to have painted daily, with a prolific output until his old age. His paintings are classified as Southern
School, but during his life, JEONG developed his own style: unique brush wrinkles of bold strokes in parallels.
http://en.wikipedia.org
wash painting. And it was also a meaningful site that stored multi-layered historic moments, such
as the history of concrete in the era of modern development, the memories and sorrows of helpless
neighbors whose lives had been camouflaged by the urban redevelopment process.
Being an observer and an explorer atthe sametime
If we were to misunderstand the Okin Collective yet again, we could raise the following question
easily: “Are you all anarchists?.” Admittedly, this is an assumption that is backed by valid reasons.
Nonetheless, while shedding light on urban problems, the group does not employ overly political
expressions.They do not aim to cater to specific art forms. In reality, they are fed up with raising
up the political flag.They do not welcome any kind of labeling or anyone who dared to define their
work and their group. It is their goal to dedicate themselves to their collaborative work and free their
individual creative pathways.They simply aim to keep a balanced viewpoint about urban issues by
maintaining an observer’s distance from the phenomena.The group is actually more interested in
the public gaze and the evaluation of their work from the outside. Even when asked where they are
going, they tend to situate themselves in accordance with any given situation.They state, with great
confidence, that they would think of a specific region or a place as simply being a new resource for
creation. While suspected as being anarchistic, the group strives to focus on sensitivity and sympathy
by distancing themselves from the urban environment and site specificity, working slowly, being
laid-back, hearing carefully, and observing patiently. All of this is, to some extent, correct. But there
are another fundamental aspects about their activities. As a matter of fact, the only point that all
members of the Okin Collective unanimously defend is to raise questions about and be involved in
efforts to secure minimum human and social rights of our neighbors - especially artists - in the city.
This is why the group is seen as politically radical.They have the eyes of an observer that explores the
city, but also the eyes of an explorer that studies the city with great depth.They are also well prepared
for the logic of real intervention and social engagement to connect each boundary and try a dialogue
between the separated areas.
In essence, the power of the Okin Collective is mainly detected “in between the poetic and the
political”, if I may borrow their language. In other words, the border line between anarchism and real
politics.They show the never-ending oscillation between the area of politics and the realm of aesthetic
sensitivity. ‘Operation - for Something White and Cold’, the installation work and performance at
Alternative Space Loop is a work that clearly reflects their artistic attitude standing between those two
worlds.They retained the network of emergency from the audiences and then manipulated audiences’
acts by specific text messages, which led to unexpectedly situational performances. Although
supplied with an object in the shape of a picket for the operation, the participants were waiting for
the operation to commence without knowing exactly, the ultimate use of the picket. As it turns out,
the D-Day was the day it started snowing, and surprisingly enough, the participants used their pickets
to clean up the snow on the steps and street corners, and not to partake in a demonstration.This is
a situation where the political assumptions and emotions that we usually associate with pickets are
reversed.The picket shaped object is generally considered as a tool used for political expression, but
it could also be used as a ‘poetic’ medium. With the picket, participants clean the snow on the street
and enjoy hot street food afterwards.
7. 1312
Their second work, ‘Operation - for Something Black and Hot’ also reveals the similar situation of our
life that oscillates between two extreme edges: the political and the poetic.This time, it stemmed from
the suspicion of whether ordinary and helpless people could react against catastrophic situations
such as the Fukushima disasters in Japan in 2011.They soon realized that there is nothing for ordinary
people to do in the situation of a nuclear disaster. Ultimately, they came up with the concept of
using ‘Gi (Chi, energy)-gymnastics’ to increase self-defense skills for survival.The Okin Collective
encourages us to learn to depend on each other by performing a demonstration of holding hands and
looking into the eyes of strangers. We all know very well that the Fukushima disaster is essentially
a human catastrophe of contemporary capitalism and that its origin comes from ‘the political.’
However, it shows that we have to depend on ‘poetic’ methods such as ‘Gi-gymnastics’ as a solution,
which is also reflective of our ontological circumstances.The Okin collective makes us think about the
ambivalent aspects that exist underneath the surface of catastrophes.
Becoming a bridge betweenthe splits
After the demolition of the Okin Apartment complex in 2010, the Okin collective has resided for
a while in the exhibition place called ‘Takeout Drawing’ in Hanam-dong.They conceived the idea
that they would collect and share the voices from their neighbors while staying in this region, a
region that was quite different from the roof of the Okin Apartment complex under the Inwang
Mountain.They chose the form of the internet radio to talk about civil life with unknown audiences.
The Okin Collective seems to be capable of using high technology resources with the help of outer
collaborations, while keeping an analogue sensibility. While strengthening the accessibility of radio
via the internet, they serviced podcasting for the audiences.Their radio channel was entitled, ‘STUDIO
+82.’ As it referred to Korea’s national telephone code of ‘82’, this Okin radio channel could cover the
whole nation and expand across the entire globe.
Okin broadcasting is different from the highly political characteristics of European community
radio channels or pirate radio channels that hijack the public radio frequency to work with local
communities.They work with core issues such as gender problems, independent production, social
right, surplus and multi-culture - all of which are driven out to the periphery of Korean society.To
develop those issues, they adopted the form of inviting experts of various disciplines, artists, and
members of the social minority and speculating with them about ways to recover basic human rights.
‘STUDIO +82’ by the Okin Collective hoped to play a ‘bridging’ role between separated areas such
as labor, the arts, human rights and women’s rights, all of which have not been connected with each
other. In essence, this radio station functioned as a study room where people tried to explore and
understand the main areas that most people were unconcerned with and indifferent towards.Through
this medium, one could find the shared areas of interest and hear from each other.
Passing through the days of the Okin Apartments of the Inwang Mountain, the spirit of the ‘Concrete
Island’ exhibition in Hannam-dong was carried over to the Okin radio station. Early this year, the Okin
Collective made an installation object by transferring the radio program entitled ‘Hear the ground
sing’ to the exhibition space of the “Wave” exhibition.They ultimately intended to reveal the inter-
relationship between art and medium as well as utilizing the radio station as a medium itself.The day
before recording the radio broadcasting during the exhibition, their installation work is transformed
into a studio.To welcome the guests for broadcasting, the floor of the space, gleaming from the
floor-shining machine, receives the full-on spotlight. Although the light and glaze of the room seem to
stop and fall asleep, it symbolizes that they are always well prepared for real broadcasting ventures.
On the day of broadcasting when guests are invited, their installation object creates an invisible but
numerous network, which reaches out infinitely beyond the exhibition space. In other words, various
comments on the problem of the arts and living conditions, and the social condition of the living,
create several opinion flows outside of the exhibition space.
For the last couple of years, the Okin Collective has built up a good cycle of creation that runs on
occurrences in development sites, exhibition curating, and radio broadcasts, which has no distinct
inside/outside.They are trying to find their own way to survive as an artist in Korean society or within
a city. I look forward to yet another meaningful form of artistic creation that will result from their
sincere and constant efforts to develop creative ideas while wandering about like nomads and never
staying in one place too long.There is still one thing that seems missing. It seems to me that the Okin
Collective generally tries to maintain a certain distance from the audience. It might be derived from
the fear that their work of injecting ideas to the public could be misunderstood as a pseudo ‘public’
art. However, if this sort of mentality stems from practical reasons related to the implementation of
the artwork and not from ideological reasons, it is still necessary to engage in conversations with
unnamed audiences, much like they did in their experimental project ‘Operation.’
10. 1918
21st century humans live a life that is inundated with commodities. Dwellers of metropolitan cities
live while consuming accumulated goods and produced messages. Cities roll away to the cycle of
production and the rhythm of goods - not by human cycle.The relationship of the people is mediated
through all kinds of possessions and electronic exchange systems.1
Minja GU’s works include ordinary objects and conventional behavior that are seen every day in the
city.These objects loyally follow up Jean Baudrillard’s ‘system of objects’, which means that objects
are consumed because they are produced. Plastic bags are used as plastic bags that are blown away
in the wind, and Dunkin’ Donuts disposable coffee cups as recyclable paper cups; electric heater as
a heater that emits heat; a mirror as a mirror that reflects light.They are all used as they are.There
is no deception or twist. Without any decoration, the circumstance and purpose for which the goods
were produced are appropriated.The only intermediary agent that transfers the usage of ordinary
objects to the artworks is that the duration of use has been prolonged ridiculously, and the inevitable
abandonment of the efficiency of objects.
In this regard, Minja GU’s objects illustrate fundamentally different attributes from that of the ready-
made that is formerly known to have become a part of art through its appropriation for a different use.2
Robert Rauschenberg started his Combines series in the mid-1950s in which he employed ready-made
objects like everyday junk from the attic or rubbish dump yard, but insisted on endlessly emptying
meaning through re-placing the objects and painting over them. For instance, bicycle handles, dolls,
cups and clocks lost their initial functionality and existed only as symbols for its utility.3
1 Mark Poster (ed.), Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 2nd edition, p.29.
2 Octavio Paz, Marcel Duchamp: Or, the Castle of Purity (London: Cape Goliard Press, 1970), p.84.
3 Anna Dezeunze, “Unpacking Cornell: Consumption and Play in the Work of Rauschenberg, Warhol and Georg Brecht,”
Surrealism, Issue 2 (Summer 2004), p.4.
Truman Show
Sooyoun LEE
Curator, National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea
*
Minja GU (Republic of Korea, 1977-) works with various media
including photography, video, installation, and drawing based on
personal performances which start from ordinary behavior and
the questions it raises. She graduated from the department of
Painting at Hongik University with a BFA, from the department
of Philosophy at Yonsei University with a BA, and from the
department of Fine Art in Korea National University of Arts with
an MFA. She participated in various residency program including
Ssamzie Space studio program, the Hangar Residency in
Barcelona, and the ISCP in New York.
In 2009, she had her first solo exhibition “Identical Times”
(Space croft, Seoul) and her second solo exhibition was in 2011,
entitled “Atlantic-Pacific co.” (Moore Street Market, New York).
She participated in many group exhibitions: “Taipei Biennial”
(Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taipei, 2008), “Now What” (Space
Hamilton, Seoul, 2009), “Anyang Public Art Project: Odong - Being
Residents” (Anyang, 2010), “VIDEO: VIDEO” (ARKO Museum,
Seoul, 2010), and “Trading Future” (Taipei Contemporary Art
Center, 2011). Recently she was selected as one of the young
artists for the exhibition “New Visions New Voices” (National
Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea, 2013).
http://www.guminja.com/
http://www.atlantic-pacific.co/
guminja@gmail.com
* *
Sooyoun LEE is born in Seoul, Korea 1979. She studied
Linguistics in Seoul National University and recieved M.A in art
history on the theme of “Nam June Paik: performance to video
art, expanding of perceptions.” Her research interests include
contemporary media art, screen studies and performance. Since
2010 she has organized exhibitions such as “Out of the Silent
Planet” (2010) first media collection show from the museum,
“Public Project Chonggye” (2011), “Art of Communication: Anri
Sala, Yang Ah Ham, Philippe Parreno, Jorge Pardo” (2011) and
performance exhibition with Hayward Gallery in London “Move”
(2012). Now She is working on the New Museum branch opening
exhibition, “Collection from NMCA” (2013) which will be held in
12th. Nov. 2013.
12. 2322
On the other hand, Minja GU’s objects, in spite of their being ready-made in her artworks, do not
lose their intrinsic functionality. Atlantic-Pacific co. (2011) shows souvenirs, sake bottles, carpets and
food products that can still function as they are meant to. Objects found in historic places on Atlantic
street and Pacific street have added a function by the memories that are related to their original and
historical significance - that these objects were part of an exchange of goods across the oceans. After
the historical background is inserted, time and memory are added as new exchanging values in the
sake bottles, carpets and food products.The goods have added value that is not really necessary.The
goods are not anonymous, but are part of the context involving specific time, space and people.This
context neither belongs to the artist nor to the viewers appreciating the works.The context belongs
to the Atlantic-Pacific Company, as ambiguously indicated, and to the original owners of the goods
of the company. However at the same time, the company and the owners are also very obscure.
The original owners can be from Chinese mass-manufacturing factories, Malaysia’s small-scale
production places, or Latin American, Canadian, and American shops. After all, however ambiguous
and obscure that may be, through the process of very universal, historical remembrance, the
anonymous goods return to our own context.
The World of Job (2008) captures the re-experiencing of a job searching story of one ethnic local
woman 40 years ago, whom the artist happened to meet inTaiwan. In this work, the essence of job
searching does not change, but is just employed as it is.The problems that are encountered in the
course of job searching, like language barriers, or discrimination, is reality without exaggeration or
reduction. Only the circumstance has changed: 40 years later, it is about a Korean artist job searching
inTaiwan in 2008, but it does not change in terms of the exchange of labor. It seems to have started
from a concrete story, but the story of the ethnic local woman is the story of Korean miners and
nurses who went over to Germany in the 1970s to make money, and also it is the reality of the artist
making one’s way to NewYork in the 2000s in search of better opportunities; it is the story of the
Germanic race who migrated southwards to the Roman Empire for their survival 800 years ago. By
appropriating the narration that happened 40 years ago, the artist arouses the universal empathy of
the human experience that tries to prove the value of labor in an alien society while endeavoring to
become accustomed to new culture and language.
The strategy of appropriating the object’s functionality and context in the territory between art and
reality is the most efficient means to access the masses that is no longer moved by illusion, also often
used by real-varietyTV shows sprouting everywhere. Similarly, the strategy could become a direct
apparatus which take in a context beyond a reality that appears in everyday life. In TheTruman Show
(1998), the creator who created reality by setting up a virtual reality says in a self-mocking tone, “We
accept the reality of the world with which we are presented,” but in spite of that, there always exists a
person who questions the reality, just like the protagonist,Truman, did. Artwork starts from there.
The World of Job, 2008, 10x14x(24)cm, Digital print
Courtesy of the artist
14. 2726
No matter where they might come from, those who explore the art production of Nayoungim
Gregory Maass,1
which seems to proceed as effortlessly as it does aimlessly, find themselves caught
in an inscrutable play of ambivalences. In using the term ambivalences, what I have in mind is not the
traditional question repeatedly posed of artist couples: who is responsible for what in the production
process.2
In the case of NGM,3
their working together and their appearance as a production duo
might well not be a primarily conceptual decision.4
And they are even less ready to accept merely
superficial ambiguities like that of the division of tasks: for these ambiguities can be found structurally
in all their appearances, expressions, and publications—as a self-contradiction, incongruity in terms
of style or image, inappropriateness of means, or simple ambivalence—to a degree that I have only
1 Abbreviated in the following as NGM.
2 Those who ask in such a way usually only want to know how the roles are divided, or how the question of power is clarified
or left unclarifed. Perhaps works by more than one person are always suspect, for despite deconstructionist debates the
picture with singular authorship is still extremely valued, especially when it comes to auction bids, paying, and creating
value. But also when due to the abdication of technical virtuosity as an argument in recent decades, the generation
of artistic ideas has supposed to be authenticated by way of the individual (and his or her breaks, failure, and gaps in
consciousness), at issue are not only questions of copyright, but speculations about genius as a psychical competence that
remains unfocused in the framework of mutual inspiration. Double or multiple authorship can sometimes only be reinstalled
by evoking the modern kitsch phrase of the “fusion” of the opposition between art and life or this or that culture, if not as
a neo-liberal catchphrase of mutual in-sourcing. There’s always something difficult to grasp about production couples, on
several levels, difficult to uncover in their works. Already here, in the case of Nayoungim Gregory Maass a kind of law of
the always absent second goes in force.
3 Here, I would already like to request your understanding for the corporate appearance of this abbreviation.
4 Faced with the blank stares of NGM, which I regularly receive as the only answer to such questions of ideology, well-
loved in art critic circles, I have become accustomed to think nothing more of it. I thought it was something of a local
characteristic to completely ignore all questions that could be seen as tricky or difficult to answer, at best in such a way
that the stupid questioner understands the silence he or she is confronted with as a kind of socially sanctioned mystical
silence, that in still reverence is named profane or sacred site of the unspeakable.
It All, Indefinite Article
On Nayoungim Gregory Maass
Clemens Krümmel
Art critic, curator and art and media history researcher
*
Nayoungim Gregory Maass
Nayoungim studied sculpture in Seoul National University, and
Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts of Paris (The National
Art School in Paris).
Gregory S. Maass, a German artist, studied philosophy in
Sorbonne University, Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts
of Paris, Institute of Fine-Arts in Paris and Jan Van Eyck Academy
in Netherlands. Since 2005 as duo, they work mainly in Europe
and Korea. Their major exhibitions include The Survival of the
Shitest (3bisf Contemporary Art Center, Aix-en-Provence, 2009),
The Early Worm Catches The Bird (Space Hamilton, 2010), There Is
No Beer in Hawaii (Art Club 1563, 2012), and so on.
For more information, please visit: nayoungim-maass.com
* *
Clemens Krümmel is an art critic, curator and art and media
history researcher. In the past he co-curated shows like
“tauchfahrten/diving trips” at the kunstverein hannover 2004 or
more recently “thinking like a stone” at after the butcher in berlin.
He is currently teaching art history at the eth zürich and the
weissensee in berlin. Much too modest he likes to think of
himself as a translator or merely an art critique.
15. 2928
Survival of the Shitest, 2009, 3bisf, lieu d’art contemporain Aix-en-Provence, France
Photo: Jean-Christoph Lett
16. 3130
rarely encountered previously.This begins with the excess of dis-identificatory self-reference in
creative dialogue with the institution Kim Kim Gallery, along with corporate identity and advertising
products and a mania borrowed from Martin Kippenberger for “great” work or exhibition titles.5
The
titles continue the aforementioned logic of interarticulation, for example when pretention becomes
pitiable due to orthographic mistakes (“Survival of the Shitest”, 3bisf, Lieu d’Arts Contemporains,
Aix-en-Provence 2009), popular truisms are parodied by way of absurd inversion (The Early Worm
Catches the Bird, Space Hamilton, Seoul 2010), or when they allow pseudo practical acronyms blown
up to managerial fragments of system theory to become even more ominous (Garage, Car, Fridge,
Snowman –The Purpose of a System is What It Does (POSWID) – Platform at Kimusa, Seoul 2009).
At issue here is clearly not a decidedly arbitrary arrangement of the relationship between the title
and the titled, as once propagated by the surrealists, but—Kippenberger once more—the use of an
advertising space beyond “the work itself” that is also intended to catch beholders and readers in an
amalgam of benign double binds.6
Naturally, the ambivalent aspect in NGM is best sketched by taking a look at what they exhibit. Most
of the works I am familiar with, to the extent that they do not cover innocent surroundings with art
claims, tinker in some way with the parameters of their own semantic object character so that in the
individual work (at least) one contradiction appears with more or less rhetorical clarity.This takes
place on manifold layers. Many works, often produced as series intended for an exhibition, contain
contradictions between the visual knowledge of popular culture and high art, for example when
Sponge Bob Square Pants encounters minimal art morphemes or Matchbox cars find themselves
affixed to mismatched situations with metal profiles that are also of industrial origin. But the auxiliary
material that accompanies the works as well—titles, framing, presentation, commentary—also reveals
contradictions when it comes to these concepts, for example, the question of whether the kind of pop
knowledge used in the exhibition context at hand is really pop or not perhaps arcane and/or loaded
with problems of cultural representation. After hundreds of discussions over high and low, there
is still quite a bit invested in this play of meaning and meaninglessness, so that the art world that
participates in these discussions always seems to agree on new forms of backlash that drastically
undercut critical standards (as the recognition of specifics and complexity), perhaps because within a
market for the purpose of maintaining systemic closure and illusions like permanent innovation and
spiritualized “genius” at issue is its continuous oversimplification, forgetting, and re-inauguration.
Entering a room with works by Nayoungim Gregory Maass —be it in an individual show or a group
exhibition—conveys not only the impression of a heated climate of production, but also the sense of
a search for how to proceed from work to work. In the comprehending act of beholding these works,
a vague trace can be followed without all too much encouragement: it seems as if new antipodes are
5 See Martin Kippenberger, 241 Bildtitel zum Ausleihen für andere Künstler, Cologne: Martin Kippenberger, Wie es wirklich
war. Am Beispiel. Lyrik und Prosa, ed. Diedrich Diederichsen, Frankfurt/Main 2007, XX.
6 They are benign because they usually remain in the blow-up buffer of the art world, whose psychological impositions as
a whole no longer need to be reflected anew. Furthermore, the titles with their often competitive metaphorics can also
be read as simple signals of a lacking desire in the face of the rigid mechanisms of exclusion of the very international art
business they want to enter, but then somehow would rather not.
Hot Mill, 2011, Corner gallery, Seoul, Korea
Photo: Nayoungim
constantly being invented and added to what was just seen. One of the most important here could be
the antipode between the autonomous sculpture and the readymade, or between “can do” or “would
like to do,” when industrially made found pieces are placed alongside difficult to learn traditional
pottery techniques, so that it sometimes seems as the two artists are working with a faux-surrealist
variant of the culture of quotation. As historical definitions of surrealism speak of the “accidental
encounter” of visual components from contradictory categories and the freedom-as-arbitrariness
asserted in this impersonal formulation, with its exploration and authorization of a supposedly
underlying unconscious, one finds oneself asking in the case of NGM as well to what next higher
level their syncretism might refer. Unlike artists who work with a sculptural syncretism like New
York artist Rachel Harrison, who stands in a tradition close to the surrealism of Louise Nevelson and
shapes the inner heterogeneity of the elements of her sculptures in a rather well-tempered way, they
do not refer to a higher level, but rather to the “next” level, wherever that might be.
Rightly so, representatives of so-called “contextual art” have been accused of ultimately practicing
a forced referentialism, when for example they only seem to create forms for presenting surprising,
antecedent historicizations or classifications of anecdotes that belie modernism, without providing
17. 3332
the something specifically artistic of their “own” that was demanded of them. But at the same time,
with such techniques they could at least be credited with making active use of modern achievements
like the artistic license to be elsewhere. For our purposes, it should be emphasized that external
references in the work of NGM—such as scholastic effusing about a cultural junk figure like David
Hasselhoff—are primarily structurally specific references and prove less to be proper references in
an art historical sense. When along the length and width of the entire exhibition, the Hof (sic!, or:
ambiguous allusion to the Korean institution of the beer bar) is handed back and forth following all
the tricks in the book, alternating between the sublime and the banal, between cultural valence and
cultural denial, NGM appropriate the well oiled, available tools of 1980s irony, at least we think we
see ourselves implicated in a shoulder clapping scene of nerdy co-knowledge about this extraordinary
polyvalent and talent-free star.7
But then it becomes clear that the two artists (supposedly both!)
are interested in Hasselhoff primarily as a neuralgic point in the field of global culture; he becomes
worthy of sculpture not due to an act of condescension from the supposed heights of cultural
commentators, who find the man somehow cutely odd and thus in some way relevant for a current
culture of cute oddness, but due to a different quality, his exquisite emptiness as a popular figure with
at the same time an extremely exaggerated rhetoricism, his dependable quality as a walking mise-en-
abyme effect. In contrast to contextual art, which produced and cultivated the currently most common
form of reference—apart from the fact that those referenced are always the others—in NGM there
is almost never a straight thematic reference to be found, a reliance on the direct expressive power
of something that already existed (somewhere)—at least not on the level of so-called content, either
anecdotal or the factual.
The individual works might still provide the impression that the internal contradictions and
oppositions that shape and deny form could be found out more slowly, as the more important
moment is revealed precisely in the act of moving on to the next work.8
It is this rather difficult to
describe moment in which one thinks one has recognized something, to have understand one of the
jagged piles of allegory or the precariously balanced figures.The moment in which one thinks to have
mastered the minimal shift from not understanding to understanding something (and which always
in my case proves to be an error), where one finds oneself caught thinking with the stubborn mindset
of a crossword puzzle solver to be sure that with a bit of patience the next situation of unclarity will
clear up in a similar way. Of course, this is the moment of the greatest ignorance.9
It is the moment of
routine self-deception, in which most of us (myself included) make our way from unsound knowledge
to unsound knowledge in perhaps other, non-art situations, leaping from iceberg to iceberg in a
global warming of understanding. Because NGM gives us such a broad spectrum of conglomerates
of contradictions, referring to one another and become objects, there is the chance of becoming
aware of our own culture of “not wanting to know too precisely.” More than a kind of epistemological
7 Well, irony is actually no longer such a hot commodity: See Clemens Krümmel/Isabelle Graw, “So ist das nun mal. Zur
Ausstellung der Grässlin Collection in den Hamburger Deichtorhallen,” Texte zur Kunst 45 (2002), 189–192.
8 More important, but not decisive.
9 Comparable with that of New York critic Jerry Saltz, who, when faced with (in this case not even so unfamiliar) works
by the artist John Miller, spoke of an “I-don’t-get-it” aesthetics in the Village Voice, because he didn’t understand, but
wanted to give this non-understanding a validity in the system of art criticism.
fitness course that is once more supposed to serve the purpose of education, enlightenment, or
improving of our own ability to adapt, with this art the (beholder) art of surfing on ambivalences
can be learned. Surfing as a movement that activates all the functional contexts of the surfer,
without being about a different goal than somehow staying on top of a production of contingency
experienced as elementary.
A NGM-work like XXX – a dizzyingly literal over-completion of the postulate of the old-hat postulate
of the “subversion of the signs,”10
for publicly in a Korean context the large format neon-version of
the traditional sign for baths, where steam elements are supposed to rise from a signet representing
a basin in harmonious wavy lines, is tipped over, so that now both the bathwater and the sign as the
baby are tossed out—shows however that allusions to primarily popular and vernacular forms of
knowledge play quite an important role.The questioning of the value of such forms of knowledge is
a constitutive component of pop cultural processes of negotiation that still today take place between
agents of various guilds. “Cool knowledge,” one of the least questioned, yet most central positions
in the context of current cultural productions, provides the true fuel of the most caustic minimalisms
and protestant conceptualisms. NGM’s achievement is having recognized this, as well as the rapid
drop in value of particles of knowledge in the context of the Internet, and having transferred it to a
continuously stumbling production of post-industrial conversation pieces.They know that leaving out
“cool” background information—that can prove to be polite expert commentary, arrogant babble, as
art gossip, or as groundless speculation—each reception of own works rules, above all when at issue
is the ambivalent vestiges of the serious and most seriously sculptural.11
The only thing today that still seems even stronger are the comments of the experts, which for its
part has access to several hunting grounds of knowledge. It is by far more than just visual artists
hanging on the infusion needle of cool knowledge, it’s the critics and curators as well.This, at any
event, seems to be one of the reasons why speaking with NGM about their works can be a difficult
undertaking.12
If a fellow critic was recently right at lunch, then there is now a more or less subliminal
edge of quarrelsomeness taking hold in the relationship between artists, critics, and curators, which
was poisoned from the very start. I say colleague, but this is only true in the loosest of senses: she is
now a veritable adjunct professor in cultural studies who actually only writes criticism on occasion,
as she herself admits. And myself? I participate in both criticism and curating, occasionally writing
for hospitable seeming projects and journals, but increasingly I find myself having difficulties in
hiding my alienation from the existence of being a critic/curator. Why the quarrelsomeness, when
beforehand there was at best competition? And why does it remain subliminal?The answer is
relatively simple and seems to provide a good key towards approaching an advanced production
reality like that of NGM.
10 See Just do it! Die Subversion der Zeichen von Marcel Duchamp bis Prada Meinhof, curated by Thomas Edlinger, Raimar
Stange, Florian Waldvogel, Lentos Kunstmuseum, Linz 2005.
11 Vimeo-Link.
12 Happily, I find this all the easier in their absence. A great suggests understanding coolness as a symptomology, if not a
pathology.
18. 3534
The answer that is relevant for NGM’s production has to do with the blurring of the arts et métiers
of the two professional groups. While at the moment especially in the Western world, but by way
of the international art and biennale business also beyond this narrow frame, educational policy
guidelines are being used to proclaim artists as the other, at times the better researchers, in that what
was once perhaps an under-reflected component of artistic work, investigation or research, is now
simply hypostasized as “artistic research” and isolated monoculturally. By definition this can lead to
knowledge, but scarcely to “cool” knowledge.There’s no bad intention required to suspect, in brief,
that this is the constant repetition of fraud under false pretenses, which in the meantime has been
installed by way of higher education policy and broadly generalized, financed, and established.The
interesting thing about this distant banter is perhaps the interpretation of my co-alienated critic-
colleague, according to which the over-emphasization of “research” by thousands of artists, intended
by cultural policy and willingly accepted by thousands of artists, serves on the one hand to pacify
cultural pessimist worries about a “lack of criteria” in the artistic field of production within the market,
because “research” suggests concrete “results.” On the other hand, art in a certain sense becomes
“reskillable,” after what Rosalind Krauss a long time ago called de-skilling in the arts, and outfitted
with a before and after, “finally” granted quantifiability once more.
We know the first wave of such “artistic research art,” which uses “idiomatic discourses” of the 1990s
battle between contextual art and service art, and often in proximity to academies, biennials, and
other interest groups serves other aesthetic trivial expectations in pairing art and research: the file
cabinet with materials on the over hundred artists of the exhibition that in the course of the exhibition
is supposed to be filled up (and in the case of an exhibition like Hans Ulrich Obrist and Barbara
Vanderlinden’s “Laboratorium” (1999) is largely empty, but somehow impressive).The book cabinet
with references to everything that is precious and dear: the nomenklatura of Foucaultdeleuzeguattar
ibataillearendtagambenrancièrežižeklatour, furnishing with worktables, video booths, photocopiers,
internet stations as administrative aesthetic of institutional critique with unlimited claim on the time
of the co-producing receivers.
This could be dismissed as an almost necessary tribute to the trend towards massification in all
sectors of the art field, the unavoidable consequence of the increased competitive pressure in
immaterial economies. At any event, it generates a quarrelsome mood among critics, curators, and
artists, because in the meantime the realization has been made that they are all farming the same
field of research. Alongside the obvious (and yet so unclear) activity of criticism itself, art critics (and
I still count myself as one of them) have a two-fold task as researchers: as discoverers they seek
out new (or unknown) artists or artistic subjects, and as meta-discoverers they find out and present
what the artists have discovered. Alongside (or besides) finding art good or bad, under the pressure
of huge competition in terms of information they develop into meta-artists, while artists in contrast
become informal critical truffle hogs working the same forests. But it would be hackneyed to accuse
both sides of economic opportunism.
NGM’s works, interventions, and other activities are not intended to ameliorate such smoldering
conflicts.Yet unlike most of their colleagues, based on the awareness of the mixing of the guilds
they have already been saturating a body of work with visual and linguistic rhetorics for a long time,
whereby nobody would ever think to call this “research.”This certainly does not mean attributing
them once more with the merely specifically instinctual-artistic or accusing them of occupying the
remaining open spots in the art field, as done by so many others. Instead we need to attest that the
“art with a capital A” that NGM create in ever new rhetorical tricks without any great camouflage,
should not be described with a single kind of irony, that it not only practices a pretentious self-
reflexivity, but above all exposes it, in clear awareness of all risks and traps.
Matching Matchbox, 2010-2011
Photo: Gregory Maass
20. 3938
QUESTION
Who refuses to use mobile phones, prefers to walk everywhere rather than drive, likes ‘spectacularly
trivial’ things made of plastic1
, sees himself as an ‘intruder’ and ‘meddler’ with art2
(who, none
the less, through his energy and ability to bring people and ideas together has animated a whole
generation of creative people),and who, in theeccentrically fashionable way he presents himself,
looks half way between a Buddhist monk and a pop star?
ANSWER CHOI Jeong Hwa, the Seoul-based artist, thinker, designer, facilitator and producer
Taking all this into account, it is not surprising that CHOI Jeong Hwa is seen as the pioneer of a
completely new way of looking at art as well as how it relates to life at large. Sometimes, in doing
this, he has irritated people and has even been accused of ‘not being original’ because, like Marcel
Duchamp or Andy Warhol before him, he has transformed into art images or objects which have had
another life in the everyday. In this, and many other respects, he has had a decisive impact on Korean
culture.
1. LOSING ART3
Long before chubby PSY (Jaesang PARK) had, in his virally popularYouTube hit, satirised the dorky
fashions and high life of Gangnam, the affluent, aspirational ‘downtown’ of Seoul’s south bank
where he was born, CHOI had been working on a very different, opposite style.This is based on
the cheap, dazzlingly colourful, everyday materials found in the street markets of the working class
1 CHOI Jeong Hwa, email to the author 17.01.2013
2 CHOI Jeong Hwa, Creators’ Project interview, http://the creatorsproject.com/creators/choi-jeong-hwa
3 I would like to thank Heejin KIM, Dongguk LEE and Samcheol PARK for their kind permission to read and quote from their
unpublished articles on the work of CHOI Jeong Hwa. These were written in 2009 at the time of the Seoul Design Olympic.
Gangnam Style
David S. Elliott
Curator, writer and former director of Mori Art Museum
*
CHOI Jeong Hwa (Republic of Korea, 1961-) studied fine art in
Hongik University, Seoul. After he received a grand prize at the
JoongAng Fine Art Prize in 1987, He started to participate various
international art exhibitions including São Paulo biennial 26th, “Let’s
Entertain” (Walker Art Center, 2000), Gwangju Biennial 2002,
“Happiness” (Mori Art Museum, 2003), “Secret Beyond the door”
(Venice Biennial, 2005), “Plastic Garden” (Minsheng Art Museum,
2010) and most recent solo exhibition “KABBALA” (Daegu art
museum, 2013). He has been involved with public art installation as
well as his own art spaces like OLLO OLLO Bar, OZONE Club, space
SALand Space Ggooll.
www.choijeonghwa.com
* *
David S. Elliott (UK, 1949-) is British curator and writer. He was
the director of Mori Art Museum as well as Moderna Museet in
Stockholm, Istanbul Modern in the past. He curated a show such as
“Art and Power: Europe under the dictators 1933-1945” (Hayward
Gallery, 1995), “Bye Bye Kitty!” (Japan Society, 2011), “The Best of
Times, The Worst of Times. Rebirth and Apocalypse in Contemporary
Art” (1st Kiev International Biennale, 2012). He gave lectures at
Humboldt University in Berlin and Chinese University in Hong Kong
and Toshiba Lecture series in London. His essays were published in
History Today.
21. 4140
neighbourhoods of Gangbuk on the north bank of the Han River that runs through the capital.
In deciding to do this CHOI was not making an overtly political point, although his sympathies
undoubtedly lie with popular culture and the people who create it. He was more concerned to
establish a kind of truth through art that reflected his own thoughts and experience. But he was
unable to do this with the methods he was taught at Art School and had to shed previous learning so
that he could take a different path.
CHOI was born in Busan in 1961 but had to constantly change elementary schools (eight times in
six years) because his father’s work as a career soldier meant that he had constantly to be on the
move.This, however, was not the normal military childhood. His father and eldest uncle were devout
Buddhists and he was the eldest of five siblings. Of this time he remembers ‘… my father always
offered rice and soup to beggars… and I hung out with many monks… everywhere we moved, I
stayed in Buddhist temples and lived with the people there.’4
His father also occupied the honorary post of Chief Secretary for the venerable Cheongdam, a highly
regarded Soen monk who had been one of the reforming spirits within Korean Buddhism.5
CHOI was
taught to live strictly according to the Buddhist code of ethics that included the belief that everyone
had the potential to become a Buddha.There is little doubt in my mind that such an inclusive idea of
grace was, much later, strongly to influence CHOI’s conviction that everyone had the innate capability
of being an artist. In CHOI’s case the origin of this kind of thinking is rooted in Buddhism rather than
in the more well-worn path usually expected in the West-the utopian romanticism of Joseph Beuys.6
Before CHOI enrolled in the prestigious Art Department of Seoul’s Hongik University in 1980, he had
imagined embarking on a literary career and had studied classical Chinese calligraphy.The rendering
of Chinese characters has been described as ‘the written form of divine sounds,’ and it seems that
CHOI has tried to express the same kind of feeling,visually and physically throughout his work.7
CHOI had not yet travelled outside Korea and his interests in art were primarily local: the rich, often
shamanistic, imagery of folk art, or Jogakbo, brightly coloured traditional Korean patchwork cloths
and quilts. His favourite artists at this time were the scholar, calligrapher and ink painter Jeonghee
KIM (1786 – 1856), a man who contemplated the totality of relationships within the world as much as
making art, rather in the same way that CHOI now does; the painter Saengkwang PARK (1904 – 1985)
4 See footnote 1.
5 Soen Buddhism in Korea is related in approach to the Chinese Ch’an and Japanese Zen schools of Buddhism.
6 At the beginning of the 1970s German artist Joseph Beuys (1921 – 1986), echoing the sentiments of the German Romantic
poet Novalis (1772 – 1801), stated ‘Everyone is an artist.’ This idea was one of the founding tenets of Beuys’s theory
of Social Sculpture that, in the tradition of Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897), regarded the whole
organism of society as a large artwork.
7 This expression was used by Dongguk LEE, Curator of the Seoul Calligraphy Art Museum, when discussing how Gather
Together a large installation of plastic rubbish that CHOI brought together to cover the surface of the Jamsil Stadium at
the time of the Seoul Design Olympiad in 2009, created a strange harmony between seemingly disparate elements. A series
of related exhibitions added to this impression. He said that CHOI’s approach ‘was perfectly matched to calligraphy,’
unpublished essay, 2009, CHOI Jeong Hwa archive.
Super flower, 1995, 470x420x195cm, Mixed media
22. 4342
whose exuberant late works explored the fusion of shamanism and Buddhism in traditional Korean
folk religion; and the Fluxus provocations, robotic combines and video installations of Nam Jun PAIK
(1932 – 2006), a world famous artist born in Korea who spent most of his time in Europe and the
USA.8
As a student CHOI remembers that he was ‘… indifferent to all kinds of academic work and
information about art … there was nothing more important [for me then] than to earn a living.’9
He regarded himself as little more than ‘a skilful art instructor’ and started to become increasingly
frustrated with the narrowness of what he was being taught. Although his lecturers talked eloquently
about Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys,artists who in their choice of materials
and imagery or social ideas could be regarded as kindred spirits with CHOI’s later work, they seemed
remote, historical figures and he showed little interest in them.10
Even the minimalist Mono-ha group
of Japanese artists who were then all the rage he simply ‘… did not understand.’11
He supported
himself by teaching students cramming for art college exams; in 1982 he left the university and
enlisted in the army.This gave him the breathing space he so obviously needed to think things
through.
In 1985, after coming out of the army, he made a first trip to Japan and was immediately attracted
not by the art, the famous street style,nor even by the manga, then at the highpoint of its quality and
production.The radical innovations of Tokyo fashion designers such as Issey Miyake,YojiYamamoto
and Comme des Garçons are what caught his eye. Design cannot exist without people to use it
and the new forms he encountered in Japan changed the way the world looked to him. ‘They truly
shocked me,’ he said.12
This trip to Japan was obviously an epiphany. CHOI now started to feel related to the present, he
realised that art was actually an important part of contemporary society, and began to engage with
a broad swathe of culture from all over the world. But most critical for his development was the
influence of what he saw around him as he walked every day from Hongje-dong, where he lived,to
his studio at the university: ‘Going to college on foot, I discovered that art was not taught in school
but outside it. I was impressed and excited by the different things I saw in back alleys, traditional
markets and construction sites, as well as by the lives of A-Zoom-Ma, ordinary middle aged women
who have survived hard lives. I admired their aggressive positivity.’13
Returning to art school, CHOI now seems to have made the decision to graduate as quickly and as
8 CHOI Jeong Hwa. See footnote 1.
9 CHOI Jeong Hwa, ibid.
10 Ibid. CHOI wrote that although he was vaguely aware of the existence of such artists, they seemed irrelevant to his own
situation and for reasons of language and his lack of interest he did not understand the ideas underlying their work.
11 CHOI Jeong Hwa, ibid. Korean artist U Fan LEE (born 1936) was one of the leading figures of Japanese mono-ha, which
remains very popular in Korea.
12 CHOI Jeong Hwa, ibid.
13 CHOI Jeong Hwa, ibid.
painlessly as possible. He turned his back on the worthiness of his art instructors and started to make
‘illustrations’ using crayons and acrylic in a hybrid style, somewhere between the then fashionable
Japanese minimalism and the new wave of European figurative painting. His description of why he
decided to do this sounds calculated, even cynical: ‘The works I created in 1986 and 1987 were made
to receive prizes…’14
He had by now fully understood how the art system worked and was prepared
to exploit its weakness in order to create a more open opportunity beyond it. In 1987 he was awarded
the prestigious JoongAng Fine Arts Prize.
CHOI graduated from university immediately after this, burnt all his previous work, stopped making
‘art’, and threw himself into interior design, working on outlets for Ssamzie, a new Korean fashion
brand, as well as on designs for books, posters, theatre and dance productions.This was all done
under the umbrella of the Ghaseum Visual Development Laboratory; the neologism ghaseum,
which he still uses, was derived from the hangul characters for mind, heart and breath that, when
taken together, connote the source of feeling or emotion. For CHOI art now became the creation of
a protective shell or framework within which people could develop their taste and begin to realise
dreams and desires that they never suspected they had.
2. CREATIVE SPACES
At the beginning of the 1990s CHOI began to design his first creative spaces that immediately
attracted a huge following of young culturally engaged people.The OLLO OLLO bar opened in front of
the Ewha Women’s University in 1990 and he staged there series of talks and exhibitions on interior
and exhibition design as well as on the programming of performances.This was followed in 1991 by
the OZONE club and bar on Jongno 2-ga which also had a similar programme and ambience.15
The
much smaller café and bar SAL in the Daehak-ro district that ran between 1996 and 2007 was also an
important artists’ hang out. Its name denoted living but could also refer to flesh, sex and death.
With their imaginative combinations of cheap plastic, recycled wood and market kitsch within rough
carapaces of raw concrete or brick, these spaces created a wholly new style of shabby chic which
continues to the present in Ghaseum, his labyrinthine café, bar, gallery space and meeting rooms that
ramble over a whole block on Nakwon-dong.These new kinds of space have had a decisive impact
one merging generations of young artists and creators working in design, theatre, music, dance,
film, performance and installation. CHOI had begun to establish himself as a producer, thinker and
facilitator, as well as an artist and designer.
Painter, installation and performance artist Sookyeong LEE remembers the excitement of this time
when she herself was just beginning to find her way ‘… lots of young artists used to gather in Jeong
14 CHOI Jeong Hwa, ibid.
15 The interior design of OZONE still exists on this site
23. 4544
Hwa’s place. He generously shared experimental films and up-to-date art books and magazines with
younger artists. I think I learned about contemporary art not from school but from him.’16
One of the first exhibitions at OZONE was a two man show of the work of MurakamiTakashi and
Nakamura Masato, young Japanese artists of the same generation as CHOI who were also dissatisfied
with the blinkered artiness of what they had been taught and wanted to work with new materials
and imagery. Over the next few years, unaware of how each other were thinking, both CHOI and
Murakami were both to experiment with plastic inflatables and trashy, generic images of flowers, yet
their motives for doing so were radically different. At that time, Murakami was critical of the ‘Disney
fication’ of Japanese culture and in the figure of Mr. Dob presented a super-sized inflatable of a
hybrid somewhere between a self-portrait and a malevolent, Big Brother Mickey Mouse. In the series
of painted and plastic images of anthropomorphic flowers started in the mid-1990s, Murakami was
exploring what he described as Superflat, a conflation of the flattened spaces of traditional Japanese
art with the undiscriminating commercialisation of contemporary Japanese culture.17
CHOI has always maintained a more celebratory attitude towards popular culture, and kept relatively
clear of the dark taste for Japanese otaku that strongly influenced Murakami.18
His earliest inflatables
in 1992 were based on floral advertising balloons seen on the street. He asked the manufacturer to
produce the same product for him but with an on and off timer so that the balloons would appear to
breath by inflating and deflating.This is essentially how all his inflatables have been produced to the
present.
CHOI’s works seem playful, yet they also make strong comments about rampant materialism,
unchecked urbanisation and the alienation from nature that results from this. ‘I feel strange,’ he once
said, ‘when I see a real tree or flower. Nature as such is so rare in Korea these days that I’m actually
afraid when I encounter it. I’m afraid of the “real.” Maybe all I can deal with is an idea of nature
immune to destruction, so I make an artificial one to look at and enjoy.’19
A different, but similarly
ironical, sense of alienation intrudes in Mother, presented at the São Paulo Biennial in 2006 where the
inflatable is a found object, a full size naked woman sold as a sex toy who lies awkwardly spread-
eagled on the floor. ‘She’ is overlooked by the serene smile of the garishly coloured figure of a
goddess.
3. KOREAN BEAUTY
Regarding himself as ‘an intruder’ who ‘messes round with art,’ CHOI remembers that he chose to
16 Sookeong LEE, email to the author, 14 July 2012.
17 Murakami Takashi, Superflat, Maddora Shuppan, Tokyo, 2000.
18 Otaku describes the geeky, largely male, often violent and pornographic fantasy subculture propagated amongst Japanese
teenagers since the end of the 1970s in manga [comic books], animé[animated films], computer games and role play.
19 CHOI Jeong Hwa, interview with James B. LEE, ‘Flim-flam and fabrication: an interview with CHOI Jeong Hwa, Art Asia
Pacific, Vol 3, no 4, 1996, p. 66.
use plastic ‘… because it does not decompose and is recyclable.’20
Perhaps he found in this humble
yet long lasting material an equivalent to the Buddhist cycle of birth, death and rebirth. He regards his
work as part of an interactive process of inclusion and transmutation in which he is able to obliterate
differences between nature and artifice, the real and the fake while, at the same time, allowing others
to project feelings of insecurity, alienation and beauty into it.
It is not so much the material of his work itself that is important to CHOI but its possibility to resound
clearly with simple spirit energy, untrammelled by pretension or ‘artfulness.’ In this approach CHOI
is hearkening back to the ethics of early Chinese painting - to the writings of Gu Kaizhi (c. 344-406),
a celebrated artist who claimed that the spirit of a painting was more important than its appearance.
These ideas were further developed two hundred years later by artist Xie He in his influential manual
Six Principles of Chinese Painting.21
Although CHOI could never be described as gifted in his command of European languages, from
the late 1980s he had begun to absorb influences and ideas from many different sources. Friedrich
Nietzsche’s mystical writings on taste, judgement and feeling reinforced his own developing ideas
on aesthetics, while Marxist sociologist Henri Lefebvre’s revolutionary credo that everyday life was
becoming like a work of art itself could also be adapted to his inclusive sensibility.22
In his quest for a contemporary form of Korean beauty based on the synergy between seemingly
disparate ideas, influences and objects, CHOI has invented a completely new aesthetic vocabulary,
exploiting the mimetic nature of Korean words to describe the particular characteristics he wants.
In this, words such as Singsing fresh, Saengsaenghwalhwal lively and vigorous, Bbageulbbageul
bubbling and boiling, Jjambong hotchpotch/mess, Saeksaek peaceful and Wageulwageul swarming,
occur regularly as both as titles and descriptions.23
CHOI first started making his mature work using plastic and other cheap materials found in local
markets and junkyards. He also used toys or models as templates.24
His affection for tin toys of the
1950s and ‘60s is evident and provided inspiration for the humorous jerky presence of his inflatable
The death of the robot - about being irritated (1995) as well as for RoboRobo, a children’s playground
with swings, slides, climbing frames and an illuminated RobotTower designed in 2003 for the newly
builtTokyo district of Roppongi Hills.
20 CHOI Jeong Hwa, see footnote 2.
21 GuKaizhi’s important theoretical books are On Painting (畫論), An Introduction of Famous Paintings of Wei and Jin
Dynasties (魏晉勝流畫贊) and Painting Yuntai Mountain (畫雲台山記). The most fundamental of Xie’s Six Principles
(绘画六法) is Spirit Resonance or vitality. See Heejin KIM, ‘CHOI Conveys the Spirit of Life,’ unpublished essay, 2009,
CHOI Jeong Hwa archive.
22 Samcheol PARK, “I play ‘well’ therefore I am,” unpublished essay, 2009, CHOI Jeong Hwa archive. In this essay PARK
discusses Nietzsche’s ideas on pleasure and taste in ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-85) and how this related to CHOI’s own
concept of taste. PARK also mentions Henri Lefebvre’sideas about how everyday life was becoming art as set out in his
book ‘Art and the Everyday World’ (1968).
23 Samcheol PARK, ibid.
24 CHOI has a large collection of such toys and objects as well as a large photographic library of possible source materials.
Part of this is available on his web site.
25. 4948
Funny Game (1997), a dramatic example of CHOI’s playful appropriation of found material,25
is an ever
changing installation of recycled, just-over-life-size mannequins of traffic cops. CHOI exhumed these
literally from the pits in which they had been buried after the police had decided no longer to use
them.This work still continues to appear as part of much larger installations.The synthetic, at times
syncretic, environments he now produces veer between the sinister, the threatening, the hilarious
and the sublime.Truth, an exhibition installed in the Red Cat Gallery, Los Angeles in 2007, puts these
cops together with different decorative elements of flowers, trees, furniture, chandeliers, masks,
fashion mannequins, figures, vegetables and gods to create new forms of life just as if CHOI were
running some kind of crazy Frankenstein laboratory.
In CHOI’s persistent, bitter-sweet search for ‘how the natural and artificial can be combined in
harmony’, flowers made out of different kinds of plastic material have become established as a
dominant motif.26
They were the topic of Super Flower (1995), his first giant balloon tulip as well as
his first book for Ssamsie (1998).They appear in his work as both inflatables and as large cast plastic
objects. A long, slowly deflating, then expanding, multi-coloured wreath of flowers led the way up
the entrance spiral of the newly built Mori Art Museum inTokyo in 2003; large replicas of Roses of
Sharon adorned Seoul’s Gwanghwamun Gate in 2008 in commemoration of the sixtieth anniversary
of the founding of the Republic of Korea; in 2012 a twelve metre wide blossom of a Golden Lotus
inflated and deflated in front of the National Monument’s phallic column on Kiev’s central square,
later it was to move to the entrance of the Mystetskyi Arsenal where, to mark the opening of the First
Kiev International Biennale of Contemporary Art, it throbbed and bounced under the silhouettes of
a venerable monastery’s glittering golden domes. Indeed, these works make such an impact on the
viewer that they appropriate as part of their orbit everything around them, natural or man made.
The context is perceived and remembered as much as the object itself.
Humorous, reckless and sometimes provocative, CHOI’s work started to make waves. Nothing quite
like it had been seen in Korea before and its critical ‘anti-art’ position was not so dissimilar from that
of the young British artists who, at the same time, were starting to make an impact in the UK (YBAs).
Increasingly, CHOI has moved away from showing his work in dedicated art spaces and prefers to
work outside.27
Along with this, the participation of many people by helping put the work together
has also become an important element within the whole operation.This process is often referred to
in their titles. GatherTogether, made out of about 1.7 million pieces of plastic garbage, transformed
the outside of Seoul’s old Olympic Stadium. In Time AfterTime, made in London to coincide with the
2012 Olympics, five thousand plastic sieves covered the discoloured concrete columns of the Brutalist
South Bank and two thousand balloons added a carnival atmosphere to the surrounding trees. CHOI
25 The title of this work is taken from Austrian film director Michael Haneke’s Pinteresque psychological thriller Funny Games
(1997).
26 CHOI Jeong Hwa, ibid.
27 CHOI Jeong Hwa: ‘I like doing things outside art museums. I dislike the whole pay system of museums and prefer working
and interacting with people outside.’ See footnote 2.
often refers to this necessary transfer of energy between people which is an outcome of this by
saying ‘Your heart is my art! What you see, what you feel - that’s my art. I help you feel and you find
the art yourself… [You see] the same kimchi tastes different in different mouths…’28
Contemporary writers, such as Jared Diamond, who have been rethinking the causes and effects of
transcultural development, have also fitted into CHOI’s desire for synthesis. Diamond’s 1997 Pulitzer
prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel:The Fates of Human Societies, which CHOI strongly
recommended that I read, provided the title for a chaotic labyrinth of cheap, brightly coloured plastic
sieves and buckets that he constructed on the roof of KIMUSA, the former Head Quarters of the
Defence Security Command (the Korean ‘CIA’), a historic building with many associations with Korea’s
painfully divided present and past.29
28 CHOI Jeong Hwa, ibid.
29 CHOI Jeong Hwa, conversation with the author, October 2009. The Kimusa building is now slated to become a part of the
National Museum of Contemporary Art.
Time after time, 2012, Hayward gallery, London
26. 50
I remember, about ten years back, sitting, listening to music in CHOI’s house in Seoul and hearing for
the first time the cabaret opera of TheTiger Lilies, an English, Brechtian, post-punk group by whom I
was so impressed that I searched them out and have since started to work with them. I think that the
same intuitive ability to create synergy has been repeated by CHOI with different people in various
places since he first seriously started to work as an artist and has become an integral part of his work.
He is obviously a genius in bringingideas, things and people together.30
And over the past three years he seems to have been constantly on the move, presenting exhibitions
and large, site specific projects in such diverse places as Sydney, Shanghai, Berlin, Hong Kong,Tokyo,
Kota Kinabalu, St. Moritz, Brisbane, Los Angeles, London, Kiev, Krasnoyarsk and Prague as well as in
different cities in Korea.
In its own way CHOI’s particular Gangnam Style has gone virally global. Brightly coloured, hospitable,
yet complex and always with a humorous and thoughtful edge, the work of CHOI Jeong Hwa radiates
a critical liveliness that challenges conventional ideas about the boundaries of art. If it is to be wholly
appreciated in all of its many different manifestations, this work demands new ways of thinking about
art as well as new words to describe it.
Berlin - Hong Kong, January 2013
30 The music in question was Shock Headed Peter (1998) for The Tiger Lilies’ inimitable performance of the nineteenth
century German children’s cautionary tale Struwwelpeter. They wrote and performed for me Cockatoo Prison - a Grand
Opera of Crime and Punishment - for the 17th Biennale of Sydney in 2010 of which I was Artistic Director. CHOI also
participated in this with a floating red Lotus Blossom in the Royal Botanic Gardens and a large, site-specific structure of
green plastic sieves situated between the two ‘sails’ of the Sydney Opera House.
28. 5554
Two people shake hands—this form of greeting is customary in many countries, principally in the
West. It is an expression of openness and mutual respect. Upon a first encounter, the physical contact
creates a certain closeness, yet preserves the necessary respect.The handshake thereby numbers
among a multiplicity of rituals which help to organize our daily life, mostly in an unconscious manner.
Conventions have an enduring effect on our association with our fellow men; they regulate the
manner in which we communicate and live together.The Korean artist Kyungwoo CHUN is interested
in these relationships and makes them the theme of his works. From time to time, everyday activities
and gestures are the point of departure for performances which he has been initiating for more than
ten years now.These are temporally limited processes which may be carried out by individuals or
groups. As a rule, the public is actively involved.
During the summer of 2009, the performance Greetings was carried out for the first time in the
forecourt of the Bremer Kunsthalle. A total of twenty persons were asked to select from among
the participants a partner who was unknown to them.Thereupon they were supposed to share a
handshake for a period of twenty minutes. In addition, their hands were wrapped in plastic foil and
firmly connected with each other.There were no further instructions. With the simplest of means,
the greeting was transformed into a moment of unusual closeness and intensity. What was crucial
for Kyungwoo CHUN was not the subjects of the conversations which took place. Instead he was
concerned with a conscious perception of the mutually shared time.The participants were supposed
to experience with their own bodies the manner in which they approach a stranger—how they behave
when they talk together for the first time; how it feels when one’s gaze is returned, when one feels the
warmth of another hand.
Already two years earlier, Kyungwoo CHUN had carried out a performance which adhered to a
comparable concept but was more intensive in its impact. Versus could be seen in various countries
and cities from 2007 to 2012, among other places in NewYork, Barcelona, and Zürich, and has
now come to a conclusion in Seoul.The procedure was identical each time.The participants were
requested to sit down upon two benches placed opposite each other.They were supposed to place
Silent Dialogues
Thoughts about the Performative Works of Kyungwoo CHUN
Ingo Clauß
Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst
*
Kyungwoo CHUN (Republic of Korea,1969-) was born in Seoul.
After his first study of Photography at Chung Ang University in
Korea (1992) he moved to Germany, where he studied and started
to work on his art projects in Europe and Korea. He has for many
years now been initiating performances in which the audience is
actively involved. Kyungwoo CHUN attained international recognition
through his portraits, many of which have a characteristic blurriness
in their movements- the consequence of extended exposure times.
As diverse as the artistic approaches seem at a first glance, CHUN
considers both the performances and the photographs to be in equal
measure “visible manifestations of that which is not visible.”
He is the recipient of the Hanmi Photography Award from the
Museum of Photography Seoul (2007) and the winner of the Public
Art Competition in Bremen (2008). The artist’s work is represented
in major museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts,
Houston; Gemeentemuseum, the Hague; Museet for Fotokunst
Odense (DK); the Museum of Photography in Seoul; and the National
Museum of Contemporary Art of Korea, among others. Furthermore,
he has realized numerous performances with the participation of the
public in many cities including Seoul, Barcelona, Berlin, Liverpool,
Lisbon, Bremen, Copenhagen and New York.
Kyungwoo CHUN lives and works in Bremen and Seoul.
www.kyungwoochun.de
* *
Ingo Clauß is a curator at the Weserburg Museum für moderne
Kunst, Europe’s first “collector’s museum.” He is particularly
interested in the influence of pop culture on contemporary art
production. Exhibitions such as “Kaboom! Comics in Art” or “Urban
Art” have shown new developments in this field. In addition, Claußs
has curated several solo exhibitions, most recently for mail art pioneer
Ray Johnson.
29. 5756
Versus, 2011, Times Square, New York, USA
Photo courtesy of the artist and Gaain gallery, seoul
their head on the shoulder of their respective partner and to remain in this position for fifteen
minutes—wordlessly, their eyes closed, and with as little movement as possible.
Viewed from the outside, the group seemed to be an island of calm and contemplation. AtTimes
Square in NewYork, the performance stood in remarkable contrast to the vast city with its loud
traffic and numerous pedestrians. But what appeared at a first glance to be harmonious and could
be misunderstood as a communal reconciliation in fact represented a genuine challenge for the
participants.The physical contact required by the artist generally occurs only among friends and close
aquaintances. In the case of strangers, one is always inclined to be discreet and automatically to
maintain a certain distance.
Whoever was ready to become involved in this sort of a violation of borders had the opportunity of
experiencing the person sitting opposite in a special manner. But that was not all. As time passed,
one perceived not only one’s partner, but also oneself with increased intensity.There was a growing
sensitivity to one’s own body odor, to the slow rhythm of inhalation and exhalation, to the heartbeat
felt in the ear, and to the tiring burden imposed by the limbs of the body. Many people had a positive
response to the intimacy of the encounter, while for others the situation was linked to an extreme
inner tension.These diverse reactions and sensations are also one of the reasons why Kyungwoo
CHUN repeatedly realizes his performances in various countries and cultural contexts.
The work Versus is inspired by the Chinese character “Ren” (人) and is translated as “human being.”
The form of the character resembles a walking figure but can also be viewed as two persons
leaning against each other and thereby maintaining their equilibrium.This concept is the basis for
the performance. It presupposes that everyone needs a counterpart in life, someone in whom one
recognizes oneself as a human being with all one’s strengths and weaknesses, individual emotions
and desires. An encounter with the Other is always a confrontation with oneself.The art of Kyungwoo
CHUN is exemplary in this regard.The very presence and cooperation of the participants already
gives rise to a space of thoughtfulness which endures for a short while and then disappears forever.
Photographs, videos, and stories document these moments only to an insufficient degree. But the
experiences leave behind multifaceted traces in the memory and hence can continue to have an
impact.
At the latest since the avant-gardist movements of the nineteen-sixties and -seventies, performances
as a form of artistic action have been an integral part of the international production of art. One needs
only to call to mind the Happenings of Allan Kaprow, the numerous festivals and concerts of Fluxus,
and not least of all, the projects of Joseph Beuys along with his famous, often misunderstood dictum
“Everyone is an artist.”The dislimitation of art, individual participation and social sharetaking, and the
interrelationship of art and life are only a few important keywords in this context. Various aspects of
Kyungwoo CHUN’s performances are related to these historical positions. And yet his oeuvre resists
a classification within this sort of developmental line. Instead his performances have their origin in a
special form of photography with which he has meanwhile gained international recognition.
Since the mid-nineteen-nineties, Kyungwoo CHUN has been working with photographic series as
well as individual images, mostly portraits, all of which are characterized by a relative blurriness.This
effect arises through an unusually long exposure time of sometimes several minutes all the way to
hours and even days.That which, at the beginnings of photography during the nineteenth century,
was still necessary for technical reasons is now the outcome of a fundamental artistic consideration.
Kyungwoo CHUN does not seek the “decisive moment” in his pictures. Nor is he concerned with
a supposedly documentary image. What matters to him is the experience of time and duration.
Photography is a suitable device in this regard.
Sometimes the people whom he invites into his studio are requested to talk about something
personal during the taking of the picture—about their daily routines (Six Days, 2003), or about their
mothers (In/finite, 2006); it may be that a person who has been blind from birth is asked to imagine
how he or she might look (Believing is Seeing, 2007). In most cases, no words are exchanged.Thus
there arises between the photographer and the portrayed individual an extraordinary interconnection
characterized by mutual perception, concentration, and reflection.These are silent dialogues which
inscribe themselves into the photographs in densified form, and which may be sensed subsequently
by an attentive viewer. CHUN himself speaks of “performances for photography.” Against this
background, it seems a logical step to expand his personal experiences and encounters within the
studio into public actions. Indeed, it is no longer possible to distinguish clearly among the media
30. 5958
which he utilizes. Performance, video, photography, and installation are interrelated in many different
ways; they mutually determine each other and sometimes give rise to hybrid forms.
For example, a new video work is based on a performance. Perfect Relay; Citius, Altius, Fortius (2012)
was created on the occasion of the Olympic Games in London. Differently than the title and context
would suggest, the theme is not extreme atheletic performance. On the contrary, this is first of all a
matter of a quite commonplace action which is disturbed by a simple but significant alteration and
is thereby experienced in a completely new way. Kyungwoo CHUN invited children from various
countries to write in their native languages the familiar motto of the games, “further, higher,
stronger,” on a piece of paper.The pen was passed around like the baton of a relay race until it was
finally returned to the first child. A special difficulty, however, was that the children were supposed
to write with the “wrong” hand.That which normally would have been possible in an intuitive
manner and with little difficulty now required enormous concentration. Mistakes crept in, and the
writing could not always be easily read. Kyungwoo CHUN thereby thwarted in a subtle manner the
ambitious striving for perfection and the ceaseless will toward accomplishment. Shortcomings and
errors sometimes serve as productive impulses, not only in the realm of artistic work.They can be
the start of innovative realizations and creative processes. Perfect Relay thereby generates a powerful
image of tolerance which indicates an alternative to the principles of our society glorifying relentless
achievement. Competition is replaced by exchange and affiliation within a community.
The most recent work, Gute Nachrichten (“Good News,” 2012) was able in this sense—past various
national borders, cultures, and time zones—to bring together people from Seoul and the Free
Hanseatic City of Bremen.These are the two cities in which Kyungwoo CHUN has lived and worked
for many years.Twenty citizens of Bremen were requested to name a piece of good news which they
would gladly receive. From these wishes, translated into their native language, twenty Koreans in
Seoul selected the one with which they could identify the most. On the day of the performance, the
participants encountered each other for the first time via a live video link without, however, speaking
with each other. One after another, the Koreans called the personal mobile phone numbers of the
German partner whose wish they had selected, and who thereupon let fly a paper airplane and thus
symbolically sent the good news on its way. At this precise moment, the partners saw each other, and
only they knew what was the wish which connected them—independently of age, gender, and social
situation. Here as well, self-recognition is not a one-sided process.
The oeuvre of Kyungwoo CHUN explores the preconditions which allow human contact. His works
are deeply rooted in humanism and combine concepts of Western and Eastern philosophy. Kyungwoo
CHUN is not concerned with a simple-minded world view filled with harmony and uniformity. His
works transform a silent gesture into art and acknowledge there in the value of randomness.They
show people with all their differences, contrasts, and weaknesses—qualities which are not necessarily
supposed to be overcome, but whose contradictions should be considered to be a precious
abundance.The task of art, as Kyungwoo CHUN understands it, accordingly consists of sharpening
our perception, of altering our awareness, of sensitizing ourselves to the thoughts and actions of
others, and thereby of considering a transformation of ourselves to be possible.This endeavor
sometimes begins with a handshake.
Perfect Relay, 2012, Video stills
Photo courtesy of the artist and Gaain gallery, seoul
33. 6564
What do a movie theater, house of mirrors, shadow play stage, show window, astronomical
observatory, and various monuments and festivals all have in common?They are spaces that are
removed from our tedious and trite “daily life.”They are special and fun, overcoming “living,”
“usefulness” and “commonness,” marvelous and fascinating. Moreover, they are meeting places for
events, objects and situations that stimulate us in brilliant and spectacular ways by altering the given
environment through various scales of technology, in small and large ways. But the most significant
common characteristic is that these spaces are inhabited by images that are always temporary. In
such places dwell only the specific moments, not the immortal beings.The images there can only
exist as long as the duration of the screening or performance, or appear when a surface is lighted,
only to disperse shortly after. When the lights go out, the images also disappear.They keep changing
every instant, transforming and flickering at the speed of light by the hour or by the second.
It is easy to have such thoughts when looking at the works of Changwon LEE. Of course, these
thoughts do not belong to the dimension of understanding the critical concepts in the works, or of
developing a cultural-critical discourse concerning such spaces by using a critique of his artworks.
Rather, they fall within the more concrete dimension of materials, subjects, forms of expression,
techniques, the environments of the works created by the artist and their effects, and the perceptions
to be experienced by spectators.That is, LEE’s art is a world of ephemeral illusions made with light
and materials of reality as in a shadow play or a magic lantern show, a moment of an event taking
place in space, and an aesthetic experience for the spectator, who is captured by the artist’s use of
special forms and aesthetic techniques.
Images of Other Relations
Changwon LEE graduated from the Department of Sculpture at Seoul National University in 1998,
and went to the Academy of Fine Art Münster in Germany to study in 2000. He has recently returned
to Korea after studying and working in Germany for 11 years. We need to note this personal history
because his work is characterized by a convergence of the two-dimension and three-dimension,
The Art of Changwon LEE Builds
a “Parallel World”
Re/Birth of Light and the Shadow Image
Sumi KANG
Aesthetics, Art Critic, Professor of Dongduk Women’s University
*
Changwon LEE (Republic of Korea, 1972-) earned an MFA in
sculpture from Seoul National University and studied Fine Arts at the
Kunstakademie Münster, Germany. He currently works and lives in
Korea.Using unsculptural materials of optical principles - light, shadow,
reflection or reflected light, he is interested in metaphorically or
indirectly revealing what lies behind a subject or social phenomenon.
Recent solo exhibitions include “MAM Project 017: Lee Changwon”
(Mori Museum, Japan, 2012) and “Other Selves” (Alternative Space
Loop, Seoul, 2012).
* *
Sumi KANG (1969-) is a Korean art critic and aesthetician; She is a
Professor of Art Theory at Dongduk Women’s University in Seoul. A
specialist in Walter Benjamin, contemporary art and the philosophical
history of art. She has published The Art of Criticism (2013), Aisthesis:
Thinking with Walter Benjamin’s Aesthetics (2011), The Wonderful
Reality of Korean Contemporary Art (2009), Rediscovering of Seoul
Life (2003). Her representative essays are Image-Space. Walter
Benjamin and Contemporary Art (2013), The Configuration of the
Visual Arts Images for Sustainable Community I/II (2012/2010).
