Venue: The Art Center, Center of Academic Resources, Chulalongkorn University, click here for direction

Participants:
- Invited Artists: Jarrett Min Davis, Gi-ok Jeon, Jitti Jumnianwai, Krisaya Luenganantakul, Pinnuch Pinchinda, Jittima Sa-ngeamsunthron, Kitikong Tilokwattanotai, Boonpan Wongpakdee
- JeOn Art Booth Members: Ae-Ja Chun, Min-Hee Jeon, Tae-Soon Jeong, Sabina Kim, Young-Ai Kim, Kyoung-Ae Koo, Helena Lee, Young-Hwa Lee, In-Suk Park, Sunny Park, Sasivimol Sontitham, Suchada Tunlayapornchoti

Curator: Jeong-ok Jeon

Events
- Opening Reception:
April 5, 6pm-9pm (Open to Public)
- Gallery Tour with Artist & Curator
April 5, 7pm (Open to Public)

Return to Intimacy attempts to expose artists’ experience of images, sounds and impressions encountered in their everyday life and show how they employ the experience in their art. Based on the acquisition of seeing, hearing and feeling in their lives which becomes a driving force of creation, the featured artists’ works share themes around art and life, and include treatments of imaginary landscapes, childhood memory, cultural identity and nature. They focus on presenting the artist’s inner voice and his/her surroundings through craftsmanship and artistic sentiment. This exhibition also encourages audiences to see the intimate association between art and life and find a simple truth that the beautiful moment emerges when art and life become one.

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View Curatorial Essay English Thai
View Image of Art Work
Hosted by The Art Center, Chulalongkorn University
Presented by JeOn Art Booth

By Lee Dae-beom, Art Critic

Artist: Mioon
View the Video

Drawing for Aside of Audience | 2008 | 3-channel Video Installation | Variable Size | 18min

The audiences cannot face each other. Their eyes may meet by chance, but in that moment they avert their eyes, relying on their visual systems. If two people are facing each other, one of them is not a spectator, but one may be a performer acting out the role of the audience. Let’s talk about the moment when this natural assumption turns out to be wrong.

Exhibition View | Gana Forum Space | Seoul | 2008

As a viewer, I enter an exhibition venue with three screens. I go there to see something projected onto the screens. When light is projected onto the screens, some shapes appear with the hum of many voices. I think it is time to see a work of art, but suddenly 100 viewers are seated in front of me. They immediately face me. Of course, assuming I am a viewer, they could not be an audience. Therefore, it is easy to conclude that they are performers acting out the role of viewers.

Exhibition View | Gana Forum Space | Seoul | 2008

Performers emerge in the place where viewers face viewers. The place where the performers appear is the same screen as where I see viewers. They are performers as well as spectators. Sometimes, one, two, or three people appear and reply to some questions. They make an aside to the audience that the other characters are not supposed to be able to hear. When they are performers, they no longer respond to the other characters, but if they remain as viewers, they respond to the performers’ comments. The figures projected onto the screens are actually all performers and thus cannot hear all the comments there. If this is so, to whom do they respond? Are they perhaps responding to something that is being commented on in my own mind?

Exhibition View | Gyeongido Museum of Art | Korea | 2008

I myself may not have a chance to appear because the other performers are continuously appearing. An intersection among the performers, who are busy commenting on their own answers, is captured. I stand on the stage as a viewer but discover that there is room to escape from my comments and to capture and traverse the intersecting point. In that moment, I become an actor and the 100 performers turn into viewers.

Exhibition View | Gyeongido Museum of Art | Korea | 2008

In this exhibition, viewers (performers) face performers (viewers) through a continuous play of changing roles. This being said, it is worth noting the intersection point between performers. It is a point of viewers and also a point where viewers become performers and also a spot where viewers face viewers. What do the performers comment on? Judging from their comments, they seem to act out the role of artists. Assuming they are artists, they talk about their work, the matter of communication between art and the audience, their attitude towards their work, their work which is to be shown to viewers, and their pride as artists.

Video Still of Aside of Audience | 2008

They remark about their agonies and thoughts as artists in their brief comments. If pursuing the intersections between these comments, we may reach a certain socially accepted idea about the profession of an artist. If collecting information away from this idea, we may approach a new semantic network. This is the information presented to the viewers who visit the venue. Perhaps, most of them are involved in the art scene. (The performers in the work have nothing to do with art.) While viewing the acting by performers as viewers, they also are aware that they face viewers as performers.

Exhibition View | Gyeongido Museum of Art | Korea | 2008

The exhibition title is An Aside by the Audience, not by An Aside by the Performers. If the viewers are unable to hear and only the performers know of the situation, this is no longer a performance. It is just a feast for the performers. Mioon seems to think that artists mutter an aside like the audience. The performer’s seriousness in interviews overlaps the words of An Aside by the Audience.

*This article was originally published on Wolganmisool, monthly art magazine in Korea, on Mioon’s exhibiton at Gana Art Space from Feb 25 to Mar 6 2008.

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Aside of Audience – Interview Questionnaires

Setting up a Scene :

You are an artist.
- a painter, a sculptor, an installation artist, or a video artist. Suppose that you are an artist; imagine the look of an artist and briefly answer the following questions in about one sentence.

Interview Questionnaires :
1. What kind of work are you doing now?
2. What’s your direction and approach to life as an artist?
3. What do people seem to think about you as an artist?
4. Do you think your work can be understood by all?
5. What kind of impact do you want to make on people as an artist?
6. What do you think about posthumously recognized artists?
7. Do you have a strong interest in other people? Do you love them?
8. Do you think you are special compared to the general public?
9. Do you think artists must serve society in some way?
10. What’s your opinion on the fact that only a few people enjoy art?
11. Are you happy when you work?

* Used for this video installation Aside of Audience, the above questions were asked in the interviews with those nothing to do with art after supposing they are artists.

Venue: IA&A’s Hillyer Art Space (DC), click here for direction
Arists: Soun Hong, Chakraphan Rangaratna, Ding Ren, Eric De Leon Zamuco
Curators: Jeong-ok Jeon & Jammie Chang

Events
- Opening Receptions:
Sept. 3, 6pm-9pm (Open to public)
Oct. 1, 6pm–9pm (Open to public)
- Artist Talk:
Sept. 4, 2pm–3pm (Open to public)
- Art-making Workshop in collaboration with Children’s Art Studio:
Oct. 2, 1pm-3:30pm (RSVP. Limited seats open to public)
- Youth Lecture Program in collaboration with OpenArt Studio:
Oct. 16, 11am-12:30pm (RSVP. Limited seats open to public)
- Thank-You Gathering for Puzzling (a) Space VIPs:
Oct. 22, 6pm-8pm (Private)

Puzzling (a) Space is a site-specific exhibition of painting, installation, video and performance by four contemporary Asian artists: Soun Hong (Korean), Chakraphan Rangaratna (Thai), Ding Ren (Chinese American), and Eric De Leon Zamuco (Filipino). This exhibition is a collaborative project between two Asian curators and a DC based art institution, IA&A. Thus it is anticipated to bring dynamic cultural perspectives to the District arts community and increase the cultural exchange between Asia and the U.S. During the two months exhibition period, numerous public programs and series of music and literature events are scheduled. More information on monthly music and literature events can be found at www.artsandartists.org

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Sponsor
Arts Council Korea

Collaborators
Children’s Art Studio
OpenArt Studio

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By Kang, Su-Mi (Aesthetics and Art ctritic)

Artist: Yeondoo Jung

Location #7 | 2006 | 41cm x 60cm | C-print

1. Simulacrum Obscura and Simulacrum Lucida
A Chinese emperor could not sleep annoyed by the sound from the waterfall painting in his bedroom. The Greek painter Parrhasios tricked Zeuxis by drawing a curtain on his painting. The history of image is full of such anecdotes that tell us how visual images can often delude or mislead people: that mere imitation, illusion and fakeness can actually deceive and disturb actual human beings who breathe through flesh and blood, and are supposed to make rational judgment. We could name it ‘Simulacrum Obscura,’ in the sense that it hides its own imitative or imaginative nature to cloud rationality and reality. Although strictly speaking art cannot be equaled to image (coming from the Latin word ‘imago’ or ’simulacrum’), it is true that the imitative and illusionary nature of image has been appreciated as an important characteristic of art which mainly derives its source from images. In this context, we might say that art before modernism had always been an ‘imitation,’ ‘illusion,’ or ‘representation’ of the already existing reality. It was with the invention of photography that art could overcome its ‘Simulacrum Obscura’ characteristic, changing its focus from representation to abstraction. Banishing everything except the materiality of the medium, Modernism art has strongly negated the ‘Simulacrum Obscura’ nature of image and strived to become reality in itself.

However, here we encounter a form of art that can neither be categorized as ‘Simulacrum Obscura’, nor modernism art. Instead of hiding its fake or imitative factors, this form of art interweaves them with fragments of reality to reveal the hidden side; the clich?s and vulgarities of our real world. This form of art could be named ‘Simulacrum Lucida,’ meaning a bright, positive illusion that enlightens and illuminates the real world.

Location #1 | 2005 | 122cm x 154cm | C-print

2. An (anti-) guide to simulate Yeondoo Jung’s Real Pictures
A little boy is standing on a snowy path that reminds us of a scene in a fairy-tale-like soap opera. Wearing a blue cap and muffler and wrapped in a cozy looking overcoat, the boy is turning his back on us gazing towards the forest in front. This picturesque scene is a photographic image and the sight is so charming that at first glance, it is hard to tell if it carries any particular content or meaning.

As we pay more attention, however, the photographic scene seems somewhat too picturesque and awkwardly unnatural that we find ourselves curiously scrutinizing the details looking for some clue. Here it is! The falling snowdrops are indeed styrofoam balls hanging in midair and a leg of a tall ladder can be seen in the right corner of the picture. In addition, while the atmosphere in the photograph suggests that it is nighttime, we can see that a mysteriously long shadow is falling at the little boy’s feet. The fact is that the picture was actually taken during daytime, but someone, probably hiding somewhere in the forest, is shining a strong light towards the boy and therefore plunging everything else into darkness. The moment we realize this, the photograph no longer looks like a mere snapshot of our everyday life or a record of a single memory or landscape. It rather seems like a picture taken with a particular intention, or perhaps staged in a setting. Still, the exact perspective of the dense forest and the thick blanket of snow on the ground and trees are strongly suggesting that the picture can still be linked to something real, something that actually happened. After all, we are unable to decide if this is a real or a simulated picture. Our ability to tell true from false is endangered before a single photographic image.

Location #16 | 2006 | 122cm x 156cm | C-print

Hence the time to clarify the real (or simulated) facts about the picture and the moment the picture was actually taken. The producer/creator of this picture is Yeondoo Jung, and the unsettling picture in question is one of his new work series named Locations. If you are familiar with Yeondoo Jung’s previous oeuvre, you might presume that these new works are simulated photographs as well. One of his previous projects called Bewitched, for instance, is based on interviews with ordinary people, realizing their unfulfilled or most desired dreams in the form of photography. Another project titled Wonderland is similar in concept but the dream holders here are much younger, mainly little children from kindergarten. It is about capturing their ‘wonderful dreams’ through their own drawings and realizing these dreams by transferring it into photographic images. The main concept that these two works have in common is ‘dream (hope/fantasy)’. And this is why some might assume that the new Location works are also a ’simulation’ of dreams. It is actually true that elements of fantasy can be found in the Location works too. The landscape that is featured in the pictures looks a lot more dramatic and dreamy than what we encounter in real life. Nevertheless, the artistic intention is not as plainly apparent as in the older works. The Location pictures look more like clich?d dream images that we may have seen in an advertisement or a movie, rather than a photographic realization of someone’s unique dream. Neither do they look like the visual reproduction of children’s wild imagination. The fact is that they rather look like an imitation of the material desire of our pop culture. And that is why at first sight it is hard to tell if there is any special intention.

Location #11 | 2006 | 122cm x 155cm | C-print

And here comes the big question. What’s the artistic intention of the Location series? (This question is inevitable when we consider that the artist’s intention or idea has always played a key role in his works.) The Location series does not seem to carry a simple and clear message like its precedents. However it is this ‘unclearness’ that does the trick here. Ironically enough, the ‘unclearness’ is actually indicating that everything is ‘clearly shown’ on the surface of the image. On this account, Jung’s Location project could be seen as a ‘Simulacrum Lucida’. Living in a world where any images can be altered or synthesized, it is almost impossible for us to have an absolute certainty about any kind of photographic images we encounter. Jung’s “Locations” however, shows us the ‘real’ situation and successfully tricks us into misconceiving the ‘real’ landscape’ as ‘fake’ landscape, searching in vain for the boundary between hidden meaning (that doesn’t exist) and concealed reality/simulation (which in fact is not concealed). In short, Jung’s work is real photography, but it deludes the spectator to see it as a simulation. The work with the little boy that I mentioned in the beginning is less so, but the other works of the series more strongly incite this kind of confusion. For example, in a picture where the winding outline of a far mountain is seen in the background, an old woman is sitting on a rectangular shaped stage set that looks like a frame of an artwork. A fake cherry blossom tree is standing nearby in the front. Is it the stage set or the mountain that is real? Try another work. At first glance, the picture looks like an ordinary scene of children playing in an ordinary small country town. A closer look, however, reveals that the foreground where the children are playing and the village that shows in the background is crossed by a white borderline which looks like the hem of a projection screen. Is it the foreground with the children playing that is the fake stage or is it the village in the background that is actually a screen projection of a landscape image? How about the picture with the mountain climber? Who is the actor here? Is it the dark silhouette climbing on the steep mountain wall in the background or the woman hanging on the fake wall that is apparently made of balk?

The truth is that everything here is real. In all these pictures, the real and the fake are seamlessly combined in actual space. The rectangular stage set and the fake cherry blossom tree in the first picture were installed on a real mountain and the foreground where the children are playing in the second picture is in fact a fake ground that was set in a country that exists in reality. The fake mountain wall in the foreground of the last picture was temporarily constructed on a real mountain corner. All these facts are not what I inferred but they are more or less obviously shown in the pictures themselves. Again, Yeondoo Jung’s pictures are real pictures that were actually taken in one camera shot. So how should we spectators look at these real pictures, the “Simulacrum Lucida”?

Bewitched #2 | 2001 | Seoul

Here is the (anti-) manual that I prepared for the spectators:
Ⅰ. Do not try to distinguish between the real and fake landscape in these pictures.
Ⅱ. If you must, do it just for fun as if you are breaking a puzzle. The cost of this will be the fun of appreciating the real thing.
Ⅲ. See the details and appreciate the fact that the space we live in is an assemblage full of clich?s and many different objects.
Ⅳ. Reflect on how much ‘awkwardness’ can be found in the things that we took for granted; the movie scenes are that once we dreamed about, the landscape of far places that made our heart flutter, the romantic lyrics of the pop songs that we used to sing along.
Ⅴ. Amuse yourself with all the fakes, imitations, performances that are audaciously set before the real landscape. The real reality is here for you.
Ⅵ. Pay a tribute to the artist who created, assembled and directed all these fakes, imitations and performances. Thanks to him we were able to take a glimpse on the fragments of the shell that holds our slightly upside down world.
Ⅶ. Be aware. Think how confident the artist must be to hide the real as fakes and visualize fakeness so audaciously.
To quote a line from a trendy soap opera, “Let’s say that the real is disguising the fake as the real. In a situation where the real is acting as the fake as a substitute of the fake, how threatening the fake real must be! It must be indeed a matter of truth and genuineness.”

Wonderland: Afternoon Nap | 2004 | C-print

3. Bright Simulacrum vs dark reality
“The visibilities cannot be defined by the vision; they are complexes of actions and passions, of actions and reactions, multi-sensory complexes that come to light.”
(Deleuze, Foucault)

After the delightful exploration of Yeondoo Jung’s ‘real pictures’, some questions could be raised. With the invention of digital photography and Photoshop, the genuineness of photography as the documentation of reality (subsistence) is often not reliable any more. Jung’s “Location” is based on the present and past stratum of photography. It is about taking even real pictures under the suspicion of ‘fakeness’, a twist on the situation where simulated images are threatening reality. The twist is made like a frontal attack. Real reality and fake reality coexist in real time and space, taken in a single picture. No alteration or retouch is made afterwards. However, the questions start from here. Why all the efforts to make real landscape look like fake, and why compelling the puzzle game to the spectator by inserting the fake in the foreground? Why all the laborious work of installing a fake mountain wall on a steep mountain pass, and adding a crude fake tree or Styrofoam snowdrops to the real landscape that is beautiful in it’s own? Of course we discussed the reasons in the previous chapters. But that was thinking from the artist’s standpoint of view. To repeat it once more, it was to show that the boundary between the ‘real’ and ‘simulated’ is blurry, and that we desire to live in a world where even real reality looks like fabricated fake. About all this, the artist made his statement through photographic images where the tricks are brightly visible. However, isn’t our real world already full of movie like events, soap opera like situation without the artist taking the trouble to use fake stage sets or simulated objects? Considering this, if the artist wanted to show in his work the situation where the real is confused with the fake, or reflect on the fake nature of reality, shouldn’t he have considered digging into the details of the real world without any additional devices? In this previous works Bewitched, the realization of the figures’ dreams is made just temporary and imperfect, only though the photographic image. The dreams come true, but just ‘almost.’ (The catalogue of these works is titled ). Therefore, we can think that the dreams/hopes of these figures are still just ‘daydreams,’ and that it is just the artwork that made these dreams come true. In this context, we can think that in Locations, only the conceptual idea that “our real life is full of truth and lies and it’s hard to tell one from the other” is shining brightly, without touching base with the genuineness and fakeness of our real life. While the simulacrum named “Location” is shining brightly, our reality still remains dark. Therefore, it could be said that the genuine ‘Simulacrum Lucida’ as a real illumination and enlightenment is not fulfilled yet in even in this new works.

* Translated by Sabine Lee (Kukje Gallery Assistant Director)

By Jung Do-Ryun (Art Critic)

Artist: Jo Seub

“Photography is the product of complete alienation.” – Marcel Proust [as quoted by Siegfried Kracauer]

Here is the artist: as one of North Korean armed guerrillas massacred by vigilant South Korean soldiers, then instantly resurrected to take a commemorative group photograph; as “General MacArthur,” wearing a ludicrous wig and shades and charging on a shallow-watered shore (the same, or at least similarly unbecoming wig reappears on the artist as Marilyn Monroe, carousing with an American soldier); as one of shamelessly naked revelers in a party that spirals out of control and ends with an assassination; as a gangly track runner, barely propping herself up on painfully spindly legs; as a demonstrating student, assaulted by a policeman and bludgeoned by troops. Punctuating this stream of events are additional scenes of violence-a murder (a scowling man attacking a young woman with a pickaxe), a mayhem (a boxer with his face pummeled beyond recognition), and a torture (two men dunking another’s head into a bath tub of water, while a couple of naked backs nonchalantly washing their bodies in the background). The artist adds, for good measure, a few panels of texts-narrations that describe the atrocities depicted, and a chronology of events, circa 1945-1980, that cryptically explains the history of a country written in blood.

Marilyn Monroe | 2005 | Digital Light-Jet Print

Again and again, Jo (and what seems like a few good friends) materializes in the various scenes. The photographs, most of which are of a same size, are arranged in one long strip of a random sequence. In fact, what unifies these representational images seems to be the artist’s transvestitism, far from meticulous but rather tacky and sloppy. A photographer as a performer: we have a good number of precedents in the history of photography in fine art, that is, the medium’s gradual evolution from a tool of record to one of trickery. In this particular trajectory, which occurred with especial urgency sometime after the 1960s, the inherently duplicitous nature of the camera’s eye collapsed with the artist’s body and its performance. The name of Gilbert and George comes to mind, and, of course, Cindy Sherman may very well be Jo’s patron saint. In its willingness to change identities as often as possible but its apparent lack of ability to do so well, Jo’s performance in his constructed photography would lie somewhere between the methodologies of those two western forebears. I say “apparent lack of ability,” but, to be more precise, the artist does not seem all that interested in disguising himself with any believable degree of accomplishment.

Water Torture | 2005 | Digital Light-Jet Print

The English verb “to disguise” is said to originate from the old French word disguiser, which consists of guise, meaning “manner,” “custom,” or “fashion,” plus the negating prefix des. Extending this etymological chase a bit further, we find travestire, the Italian word for “to disguise,” which arose from the Latin, trans (“over”) + vestire (“to clothe”) and is the source for the English word “travesty.” As a theatrical term, “travesty” refers to “an alteration of dress or appearance; specifically dressing in the attire of the opposite sex” and is, in that light, closely related to “transvestite” and “transvestitism,” or in a more colloquial parlance, “drag.” In a more general sense, it means “an exaggerated or grotesque imitation, such as a parody of a literary work.” Here, then, is a word and its derivations that seem to encapsulate the modus operandi of the work of Jo Seub. He “dresses up” to alter his appearance, sometimes into the opposite gender, to go against the “custom” or “fashion.” The result of this alteration is exaggerations, or “grotesque imitations.”

5.16 | 2005 | Digital Light-Jet Print

What is the artist’s subject then?: the history of a nation, or a history of violence. Jo’s long, cinematically sutured picture sequence does not just tell a history; rather, it proffers a parody of that history. That much is easy to claim. In his work, the history is presented as a contingent narrative and, perhaps even, suggested as a literary invention. But, of course, those who have lived and know the turbulent recent past of South Korea-that is, most viewers of Jo’s work so far-would likely argue that the history of that particular nation is anything but invented. For them, it is as real as it is painful and traumatic, with some choice moments of shared exhilaration. Punctuating what seemed like an endless repetition of political instabilities and regime changes were extreme hypes that bring the nation’s subjects together to make them feel that they are part of a cultural and spiritual unity. Then to what purpose and gains does the artist parody such a troubled but noble history?

It has been previously suggested that Jo’s work and its relationship to history parallels Marx’s conception of history as repetition, first as tragedy then as parody, the famous quote taken from Marx’s 1852 text, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon.” As often is the case with overused quotes, Marx’s original thesis suggests far more subtlety and detail than the simple formula of historical repetition. Consider this paragraph that immediately follows it:

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”

Exhibition View

What the passage implies is the melancholic impossibility of any effort to make the present as extraordinary, since the past and tradition already predetermined that the present would be a travesty-disguised in appropriated “names, battle slogans, and costumes.”

It’s hard to argue convincingly that a “revolutionary crisis” is in order here, however. What really is at stake rather appears to be the supposedly shared sense of history and national consciousness and its ideological rhetoric of unity, which began to crack at some not so distant point in the past. Not all subjects of the sovereign nation share a same story. The history has lost its confidence. The sacred narrative is now up for grabs, and mockery is as fair a game as sanctification. This is the aftermath of a revolutionary era that ended, a period of stability and complacency that renders its subjects paradoxically disoriented and undirected.

Exhibition View

One of the things Marx reminds us in the abovementioned passage is the contingent nature of history: it can be shaped by who writes it and how he writes it, but it is always fatefully bound to what preceded it. Writing history is simultaneously passive and active, and, according to Siegfried Kracauer, the historian’s craft parallels that of the photographer, as both “record as well as create.” What occurs in Jo’s travesty of history in his performative, constructed photography is an inverse of this situation. He enacts various scenes of violence and elation that constructed the narrative line of a collective consciousness, through outrageous travesty, with intentional lack of precision and completion, and with a body that consistently fails the power of enhancement and concealment of the camera’s eye. And this may just be a way to make himself and his viewers into witnesses-not participants-and into strangers-not lovers-of the history they have always taught to assume they are part of.

At the dawn of photography, Proust praised photography for its ability to emotionally detach itself from its subject. In that way, the author imagined his objects of love, all of which eventually aged and died, could be alienated, preserved for his remembrance. History could thus be saved in frozen images and lived in the mind. For us living in the brave new world of digitization, media saturation, and pervasive absence of faith in media of representation, the only way to remember and to have a history may very be by repeatedly enacting what we already know. It’s a tragic injunction, but that’s what we might need in a world that is already a parody. Jo’s work is one such attempt.

(This article was written for the artist’s solo exhibition “Do not Question” in 2005.)

Hosted by KORUS House, Embassy of Republic of Korea (www.dynamic-korea.com)

Organized by Project Andini (www.projectandini.org)

For Immediate Release

February 19, 2010

MEDIA CONTACT:

Jeong-ok Jeon 703-507-0864 jeongok.jeon@projectandini.org

Jammie Chang 301-755-4428 jammiechang@gmail.com

On View: March 10 (Wednesday) – March 25 (Thursday), 2010

Gallery Hours at KORUS House: Mon-Fri (9 am -12 pm & 2 pm-5 pm)

Opening Events: Wednesday, March 10, 6 pm-8 pm

- Reception and Gallery Tour with Artists

- Opening Performance: “Shreddy Bear” & “T42″ by banished? productions

- Outdoor Video Projection: “Lash” by Hye Rim Lee

- Book Exhibit: “Shamanism + Cyberspace” (Atropos Press, 2009) by Mina Cheon

DOWNLOAD: PDF Format Press Release

DOWNLOAD: High Resolution Images (click thumbnail, scroll down for caption and download link)

DOWNLOAD: Curatorial Essay

KORUS House Map: www.dynamic-korea.com/korus_house/kh_location.php

Washington, DC (Jan. 18, 2010) – KORUS House of the Embassy of Republic of Korea and Project Andini are pleased to announce Desirable Fairy Tales: Between Fantasy and Reality, a group exhibition featuring four artists with different cultural and aesthetic backgrounds, Mina Cheon, Hye Rim Lee, Gilbert Trent and Satomi Shirai. In celebrating the first art exhibition program organized by Project Andini, an art collective founded in March 2009, this exhibition includes various eye-catching opening events: a gallery tour held by the curator and the artists, an experiential performance installation by banished? productions, an outdoor video projection “Lash” by Hye Rim Lee and a book exhibit of “Shamanism + Cyberspace” by Mina Cheon.

Desirable Fairy Tales: Between Fantasy and Reality attempts to disclose the absurdity of socially-accepted behaviors and the fabricated universality in our lives, which are profoundly rooted in the children play as ‘ideal’. Based on their personal experience and memory of childhood play, the exhibiting artists Mina Cheon, Hye Rim Lee, Gilbert Trent and Satomi Shirai, create works which are collectively themed around girly toys such as paper dolls, doll houses and the ageless Barbie doll, and yet each deals with different issues within geopolitical, virtual, autobiographical and cross-cultural circumstances. While some of them attempt to refute postulations of societal norms that are taken for granted, the other artists encourage audiences to question these stereotypical formulas, ideals and concepts and see them from a different perspective. The use of various contemporary art mediums such as painting, installation, digital print, photograph and 3D animation adds to an exciting dynamic to the exhibition.

Korean American artist Mina Cheon explores how South Korean paper dolls of the 1970s reveal the way in which her country was Westernized, especially in the way little Korean girls came to idealize the American life style. Cheon’s large scale digital prints of original paper doll dresses depict various Caucasian and Victorian styles of women’s attires for different functions which has produced a Western fantasy as the standard beauty. Part of the series of “Dresses for Different Events” and “Party Dresses & Home Dresses” are presented in the exhibition along with three installations from “99 Miss Kim(s).”

Hye Rim Lee, a Korean multi-media artist based in New York and Auckland of New Zealand, is focusing on the aspects of popular culture, in particular cyber culture and video game in relation to notions of femininity. Lee’s work visually and critically evolves from TOKI, a female cyborg which is the main character of her 3D animation. Apparently appealing a universal sexual desire and fantasy of men: girlish face with womanish body, TOKI, in a deeper sense, raises a question of ‘subject-object framework’ in which a woman figure in art has long been an object, which was created and consumed by men. Presented in the exhibition are her two 3D animations: “Lash” and “Crystal City Spun.”

Deeply inspired by Buddhist philosophy of human existences, Gilbert Trent, an African American, gay artist, explores issues of race, sex and gender through representational images of paper dolls. Trent often revisits his memories and captures the unsettling feelings he had as a child because of his attraction and desire to play with “girly” things. His paintings “White Girl Black Paper Dolls”, depict a white girl dissatisfaction of having to play with paper dolls alongside, “Ken?” a transgendered Ken from the Barbie collection, are representative of his ethnic background and sexual identity. He will also introduce his experimentation of an installation as an extended media, which reflects the perplexity between a boy’s girly desire and the reality.

Japanese-American artist Satomi Shirai is primarily interested in the “assimilation and transformation of culture in migration and passage of time” and her photographs cull from her own experience of relocation and separation between two distinctive cultures: Tokyo and New York. Capturing the interiors of domiciles that are staged with miniature plastic toys from a doll house kit, her photographs represent Western architectural structure and Japanese domestic life style. The enlarged images of the originally small doll house kit blur the concept between reality and fantasy, yet manifest the delusion of “ideal life style.”

What would the world be like if there was a single standard in beauty and a homogeneous manner of life? What if all girls chase for pink and boys for blue? What if every girl holds a velvet fantasy, but then the fantasy approaches to the reality as she becomes a woman? This exhibition certainly encourages audiences to pay attention to the tension between fantasy and reality in the childhood world, to challenge the socially-invented ‘formula’ or ‘concept’, and to seek balance between fantasy and reality through different perspectives.

About Curator

Jeong-ok Jeon is a founder and director of Project Andini, an art collective based in Washington, DC since early 2009. Jeon has been curating, organizing and consulting various art exhibitions and cultural related events. Her past positions include the guest curator of the US ASEAN Film & Photography Festival held in the National Geographic Society in Washington, DC (2006), the second curator at SSamzie Space in Seoul, Korea (2002-04), and the curatorial assistant for the Korean Pavilion Exhibition at the 50th Venice Biennale in Italy (2003). This year, Jeon begins her MA in Philosophy at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. She also holds MFA in Fibers from Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, GA (2001) and BFA in Fiber Arts from Ewha Womans University in Seoul, Korea (1997).

About Artists

Mina Cheon (Korean-American), PhD, MFA, is a new media artist, writer, and educator who divides her time between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul. She is currently a full-time professor at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) in Baltimore, teaching studio and liberal arts. As an artist, she has shown internationally, with solo exhibitions at spaces including the Lance Fung Gallery in New York (2002); Insa Art Space, Arts Council, Seoul (2005); and C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore (2008). From installation and performance to video and interactive media, her artwork deals with issues of media, space, borders, and conflicts between nations, especially the triangular relationship between South Korea, North Korea, and the United States. www.minacheon.com

Based in Seoul, New York, and Auckland of New Zealand, Hye Rim Lee (Korean-American) has extensively shown her digital animation and performance works in solo and group exhibitions, art fairs and film screenings. Most recent exhibitions include “Dress You Up in My Love,” a crossover fashion show in New York (2010) and “Glasstress” of the 53rd Venice Biennale (2009). In 2008, “Crystal City” a solo show was viewed in three locations: Gacma in Malaga, Spain, Diehl Projects in Berlin, and Max Lang Gallery in New York. Lee also participated in several artist-in-residency programs such as ISCP in New York (2007), SSamzie Space, Seoul (2006). She holds BFA in Intermedia from The University of Auckland, New Zealand and BM in Voice from Ewha Womans University, Seoul, Korea. www.hyerimlee.com

Gilbert Trent (American) received his BS in Fine Arts Education at Virginia State University, Petersburg, VA (1979) and MA in Studio Art at New York University’s Venice Program that was held in both Venice and New York (2003). His various exhibitions include “Six in the Mix” at the Hillyer Art Space, curated by Renee Stout, Washington, DC (2009), “Art, Actually” at Leslie-Lohmann Gallery in New York (2008), “East of the River Group Show” at Honfluer Gallery in Washington, DC (2007) and “Self-Portraits: Clara and the Americans” in Brescia, Italy (2003). Trent is currently teaching studio and digital art in the private sector and participating in a studio program at Arlington Art Center in Arlington, VA. www.gilberttrent.com

Satomi Shirai (Japanese-American) has exhibited her photographs in numerous shows including “Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2009 Exhibition” at Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery in DC (2009), “Public/Private” at Arlington Art Center in Arlington, VA (2009), “Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2008” at National Portrait Gallery in London (2008), “Spectral Analysis” at Motus Fort in Japan (2008), etc. She has participated in Akiyoshidai International Art Village in Yamaguchi (1998) and one of her work is collected by Kiyosato Museum of Photography Art in Yamanashi. She is currently a MFA candidate at City University of New York Hunter College. www.satomishirai.com

About banished? productions

banished? productions is an avant-pop performance company that generates immersive interdisciplinary art experiences for all, to re-create wonder and re-awaken the senses. It is committed to producing quality work that cull from multiple artistic expressions, particularly in performative experiments that play with text and form. banished? strives to inspire and collaborate with other artists in order to fuel its own artistic process: re-discovering and re-inventing the art of narration. http://www.banishedproductions.org

KORUS House

Location: KORUS House (2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20008). The Korean Embassy consists of three (3) buildings; The KORUS House is located between the main office building and the consulate on Sheridan Circle. For a map, click here. The KORUS House is at location B.

Metro: The KORUS House is about a 15 minute walk from the Dupont Circle metro station, heading northwest on Massachusetts Ave. Metrobus lines N2, N3, N4, and N6 stop nearby at Embassy Row.

Parking: Guests are welcome to park in the small lot adjacent to our building during the event, but space is very limited and first-come-first-serve. There is also some limited street parking in the local area.

KORUS House, Embassy of the Republic of Korea
2370 Massachusetts Ave. NW Washington, DC 20008
Tel: 202-939-5688

By Jonathan Goodman

Artist: SoYoun Jeong

Uncanny Garden | 2004.2007 | 3 channel video installation with a real flower garden, a bench, stands and rock

SoYoun Jeong is a contemporary artist educated both in Korea and New York. She is currently a doctoral candidate in image engineering at Chungang University in Seoul; her art often concerns images realized with a digital video camera and edited on the computer. Yet, at the same time, she incorporates nature into her intricate projects: in one work, live flowers exist in conjunction with video projections, while in another, a one-channel video installation with four flat LCD monitors, an image of the moon is shown to move in geometrical arcs and lines. The speed of the moon as it travels results in interesting, seemingly mathematical patterns in the piece. Yet its distinctly limited trajectories concern a natural imagery that exists in dialogue with the programs defining its movement. The incorporation of technologies-mostly low tech in nature–remains useful to the artist; but Jeong’s aims lie more in the direction of a merger between the imagined and the analytic. The tension between the two categories of thought do not clash so much as build upon each other, enabling Jeong to present her audience with works of startling vision.

Jeong has titled her show “Art Almighty,” imbuing her exhibition with a cosmic, if not necessarily pious, outlook. The proposals made by her work bring up interesting ideas, in which her predilection for an interface between nature and culture establishes mergers that feel highly contemporary. As the title of her show implies, her creativity’s insight takes part in a language that is larger than life. Art alone cannot establish the kind of reach Jeong’s work possesses; there must be as well a consciousness of nature’s position as an example independent of and corrective to an overly estheticized point of view. This outlook extends to the artist’s methods: Jeong looks to computer programs to help her edit images that belong to natural cosmology. But what seems first like a contrast between technology and the world turns out to be a unity in which differing points of view are subsumed within the province of art. Jeong’s grand claim addresses her audience through the power of the imagination, which may be invoked by an outlook that is technical as well as cultured. As the programming for images has become more and more subtle, and more easily available, its use results in work that not only reflects the growing sophistication of technology, but also the inspired impulses of the imagination. Additionally, making videos or film has been democratized-the technology is available to everyone. Jeong’s art, then, is achieved by skills common to anyone who makes a movie with a video camera and edits the film with a computer.

Crazy Moon | 1 channel video installation with 4 LCD monitors

The question whether art can be strengthened by technology seems a bit beside the point, for we already have artists such as Bill Viola and Gary Hill, who create stunning video works that connect nature and culture in brilliant fashion. Jeong works in a similar way: nature is imaged by low-tech procedures that emphasize an intuitive esthetic intelligence. In fact, it is interesting to see that two of three recent pieces by Jeong incorporate nature into a realm outlined by technology. It would seem, then, that the artist herself has deliberately mixed categories of expressiveness, so that her work is at once old and new. It appears to me that Jeong’s resourcefulness as an artist stems impressively from her willingness to work with several kinds of media at once; in the installation entitled Uncanny Garden, she incorporates flowers-bits of genuine nature?into schemes that at first seem dominated by video images-pictures mediated by technological processes. At first glance, it seems as though Jeong is contrasting different kinds of communication.

But in Jeong’s art, nature acts as a bridge to a spiritual unity that tends to exist primarily as experience or in the imagination. It is a primal origin of metaphor, so that we cannot conceive of a lived coherence without it. Jeong presents a visual imagery meant to transcend the means responsible for making it. Nature is referred to in no uncertain terms. In Uncanny Garden, her projection of video images onto two connected walls collapses the length of an entire day into an experience lasting only three and a half minutes. The real flowers inject reality into a fleeting demonstration of extended time; Jeong will make no attempt to care for the flowers for the duration of the exhibition, saving the remaining, surviving blooms for transplanting into the backyard of a friend from Brooklyn. As she comments, “I was wondering how plants would survive a change between artificial circumstances and the internally set clock of nature.” But while Jeong is interested in seeing whether the plants would live in an artificially lit environment, she also gives us the experience of an entire day compressed into a duration of less than four minutes, in which the light of the sun plays a major role. The conflict between artifice and reality is expressed as a screen projecting the sun’s illumination and an actual garden; however, the final experience is that of survival and transformation: those flowers that continue to exist are planted again in an outdoor field. The experiment is successful in that the process of life continues, even if damage has been done.

Vice Versa | 2007 | Acrylic on print works and photo prints | 17″ x 11″, multi pieces

Crazy Moon, Jeong’s experimental single-channel video installation with four monitors, shows a moon dancing in a line or arc that defines itself in relation to the center created by the monitors’ display. For this work, Jeong shot a full moon at night and then edited the image with the software program Final Cut Pro. To create the dancing image, Jeong herself danced with the camera while shooting the moon. It is easy to think of the moon as an overwhelmingly romantic image, in Asian painting as well as Western art; the experience of Jeong’s moon links it to these traditions of painting, despite the fact it is a video work. The moon on its travels creates many kinds of shapes, the result of its flight across the screen. The monitors approximate the sky, although in a thoroughly non-natural manner. Again we find the ideas of being and seeming beautifully implied in Jeong’s imagination; she attempts on a regular basis to join the poetic to the electronic. Both conditions delineate a shared reality, in which technology exists to transform the artwork whose image is based upon nature. Jeong speaks to our increasing dependence on digital electronics, which artificially influence?even to an extent control–our environment.

In a third piece, Vice Versa, Jeong dizzyingly shifts from digital print to painting and back again. In two small double images, she begins by taking a photo that she then digitizes by scanning into the computer. Then she paints by hand over the print taken from the photo, at which point she scans the painting, printing the newly scanned image. The results are nearly indistinguishable from each other, although Jeong frames the images so that they are not oriented in the same direction. The pictures themselves, striking abstractions composed of massed colors, are beautiful in their own right, but the complexity of their origins lends them a conceptual acuity that is very much of our time. Compared with Western painters, Asian artists are sometimes freer in the custom of making copies; the notion of individual creativity is subsumed within a general, less rigid ideal of originality. Jeong creates images that critique the notion that a work of art is exceptional, irreproducible. As an idea, this postmodern concept sees the copy as equal to the content of the original, a position illustrated by Jeong’s art. In her final pictures we see a digital image of an analogue image painted on a photo that has been scanned-an image of an image of an image that is so subtle that any version of it can hardly be told apart from its progenitor. The work more than suggests-indeed, it embodies?the concept that all art takes part in mimicry; and that it does not matter whether the source of mimicry is artificial or genuine: everything is spurious in terms of its beginnings.

Vice Versa – Detail | 2007 | Acrylic on print works and photo prints | 17″ x 11″, multi pieces

For some of us, Jeong’s literal and metaphysical machinations may appear a bit biased toward a reality based upon technical novelty. But it is more correct to say that Jeong uses the computer as an earlier artist might use a palette-it is a tool for expression, not an end in itself. It is to Jeong’s credit that we do not experience her work as a technical triumph, but rather as a representation in which what is shown and the way it is shown are one and the same. Jeong articulates a language which is not reductive but which, instead, synthesizes a union between that which is artificial and that which is genuine. We expect to be alienated from the artificial, yet that does not happen in Jeong’s art; rather, she finds a point in common in seemingly opposed categories of knowledge. (This is usually the aim of any good artist, but in Jeong’s case the methodologies have been divorced from their visual consequences.) Jeong thus brings us closer to the contemporary world, in which the line between our technology and ourselves seems fainter by the day. She looks to the future, combining means of expression that are not dialectically opposed but instead mutually supportive. Thus, she seeks to ally our search for knowledge with our passion for experience, helping us in our endeavor to make sense of the world. Her videos comprise a vision enhanced by nature rather than a view enhanced by technical processes. She is truer to tradition, to the older method of painting, than we might think.

Jonathan Goodman is an art writer who specializes in contemporary Asian art. He has written reviews and articles for Art in America, Sculpture, and Yishu. He is currently teaching at Pratt Institute and the Parsons School of Design in New York City.

By Youngjun Lee

Artist: Jeong Mee Yoon

The Pink Project – Jiwoo and Her Pink Things | 2007 | Light Jet Print

It was after democratization took place in the late 1980s, after doubt began to overshadow the realms of sense and meaning, that the authority held by the meanings of all things began to shake in Korean society. Following disputes over things that used to be only natural, a controversy over “color” broke out. Of course even in the 80s, before the democratization, there were controversies of color concerning political ideologies, but it was not until the 90s that such controversy reached as far as to implicate presidential candidates. Ever since, as liquid seeps through the fabric of hygienic bands, the color controversy penetrated into the finest pores of society, causing people to question the colors of others’ clothes or what colors were used to paint buses. It was 1985 when popular singer Cho Young-Nam complained at a discussion at the Seoul Museum of Art that all the cars in Korea were either black or white. Perhaps it could be called a feeble beginning of the color controversy, outside the boundary of politics. Shortly after this event, the city buses of Seoul were painted in purple. The color, which was said to have been designed by a Hong-ik University Professor, was changed after receiving tremendous reproach from annoyed citizens. Even the mighty university professor was helpless before the color controversy raised by the people. What was the reason for this? It is because color itself is political. As it is quite bothersome to explain why it is political, I hope all sensible readers will understand it on their own.

Now, photographer Jeong Mee Yoon engages in a color controversy through her photography. In our society, the controversy of color has expanded to the most microscopic dimensions. It is somewhat frightening to think that someone’s ideology or personality could be judged by the color of his/her fingernails or pulmonary valves. Moreover, Jeong Mee Yoon uses a dichotomy that could either save or kill a man. Perhaps the reason that we are keen about seeing the outcome of the perilous situation, in which a sharp and heavy nippondo (Japanese sword) is placed on a person’s head as if one was about to slice a cherry tomato, is because we are not so interested in the life or death of the person. In any event, Yoon’s color controversy is quite simple in structure, but intricate in connotation, leaving a long lingering aftertaste.

The Blue Project – Ethan and His Blue Things | 2006 | Light Jet Print

This is how she does it. She divides children’s rooms into two. Blue or bluish items are placed in the boys’ rooms, while pink items are placed in the girls’ rooms. The children are photographed sitting in the middle of the rooms. They are positioned in the center of the room, as if they were responsible for the color of the objects surrounding them – the color of the superego which decides their gender. It is rather excessive for the photographer to place such weight on the innocent children. It is like telling a person driving a Jaguar, “Since your car is a Jaguar, you are also a Jaguar, and therefore you must catch a deer and eat it raw.” It is a tyranny of signs. After all, the car is only a metonymy of the actual jaguar.

What happens if there is a tyranny of signs? Ironically, the true nature of the signs are revealed. Similar to the way a particle accelerator is used to charge corpuscles with tremendous energy, enabling scientists to find the origin of matter through the traces of fragments from the ultra-high-speed crash of the particles, Jeong Mee Yoon confirms the heavy and sticky order of colors and senses with the children through a tyranny of signs that forces the kids into being the main characters of their given surrounding colors. Frankly, the children do not want to know about such facts, but the order has been prepared long before they were born, and even if some enlightened parents buy tanks and swords for their daughters and flowers and hair pins for their sons in an attempt not to raise their children as stereotypes, the children will demonstrate remarkable wisdom of selecting the stereotypical colors predefined by the superego of society on their own as if they were being led by some sort of centripetal force.

The Pink Project – Lauren & Carolyn and Their Pink Things | 2006 | Light Jet Print

However, the photographs of Yoon, which look quite organized and scientific, are in fact very fictional. The classification of Girl-Pink and Boy-Blue was a result of a certain organizing. The reason they are fiction is because the order of senses in the world is not so clearly cut. Even if things used by children can be categorized according to the colors preferred by the genders, there is always a gray zone. There is even a buffer zone between the Northern Limit Line and the Southern Limit Line of the DMZ that splits Korea in two. Thus, I would like to call what Yoon created, a “virtual stereotype.” Actually, what we need to observe in her photographs is the intersecting point between the conceptual setup that clearly divides the objects, and the photographic execution of taking the pictures with the children in the middle of the rooms filled with the objects. At that intersection, the visual order of the colors and the photographic order cross paths. Could Jeong Mee Yoon’s message be that there is such a solid order in the world? If so, she is a silly photographer who goes through the effort of taking all that photographic equipment all the way to America to photograph a kid’s room scattered with all his/her belongings just to tell us again something everyone already knows. If not, what else could there be?

But if one sees only the tight order of objects and dichotomy in Yoon’s photographs, they are missing the whole picture. The intersection is not an area dominated by a single order. All the pink items are not the same pink, and the blue items are not the same blue. All the children’s belongings are slightly different pink. They only look the same because they are placed in the singular and abstract category of “pink.” As we have a habit of always thinking in categories, we tend to classify things simply, such as “pigs are all fat,” “the South Pole is always cold,” etc. Jeong Mee Yoon’s photographs use such habits to acknowledge our worldviews and make us feel comfortable. Yes, children are only children, so where could they possibly go? They can only play in the garden of stereotypes made by adults. But such sense of relief shows small but terrifying differences between its pixels, because nothing in the world is identical. The only things that are the same are abstract categories. No objects or senses filling up those categories are identical. This world is full of differences resisting against order to the extent of horror. Even the pink plastic spoons owned by Emily are not the same pink, though they are all industrial products. They all look different according to where they are placed and from what angle the light hits them. Like an ancient Greek philosopher once said, “you cannot put your hands in the same stream twice,” the same object cannot appear in two different locations at the same time.

The Blue Project – Sunjae & Seungjae and Their Blue Things | 2008 | Light Jet Print

In the matrix that is formed between objects, there are holes made by the large and small differences, and though Yerim’s shoes are pink, they are in fact all different colors. Even the left shoe and the right shoe are not the same color. The irony of the pink and blue are deeper than one may think. So saying that boys only like blue and girls only like pink is as dangerous as saying Koreans all look alike from a distance. Nevertheless, we are actually accustomed to such conventionalism. We make gross generalizations such as the Germans are diligent, the English are gentlemen, the French love culture and art, and Arabs all look alike-the kind of generalizations that could get our heads chopped off with a Saif.

Hence, if the artist’s intention is to reconfirm a very simple stereotype, she does not need to undertake such complicated work. She can just ask people what colors they like and announce the resulting statistics according to the categories of gender, occupation, education, dwelling areas, etc. Perhaps the work of Jeong Mee Yoon indicates that color has no meaning? Let us extend the color controversy to food. The significance of color in this case is extremely arbitrary, for instance, just because a food is a certain color does not mean it tastes a certain way or is given a fixed significance. Are red peppers hot, or green peppers hot? According to our stereotypes, the red ones should be hotter. But in reality, from Mexican jalapenos to Indian chilli and Korean Cheongyang peppers, the really hot peppers are light green. Let us look at Coca Cola and jajangmyeon (Chinese noodles). The color of Coke is dark brown, which is not so refreshing. Furthermore, the logo of Coke is red, which is also unrelated to coolness. But that does not mean that the hot and heavy colors of the drink make people sweat in the summer days just at the thought of it. In fact, it is the opposite. How about jajangmyeon? This is also dark brown. It is a dark, sticky and oily food. But no one despises these noodles because of such aspects. On the contrary, jajangmyeon has received everlasting affection from the majority of Korean people. This means that color is not an absolute signifier. Color is an innocent signifier that has entrusted its body to the diverse functions of signification. It is the humans who take those poor colors and frame them with all sorts of nasty connotations. Color itself has no meaning. This is the simple truth that I insist.

Jeong Mee Yoon’s color controversy catches on cold fire. Who gave blue to the boys and pink to the girls? Was it their parents? Was it society? Was it the school? Was it a neighbor? Was it a friend? Or was it the obscure but powerful custom and superego known as the distinction of gender? Will the same colors be given to the children to be born in these children’s rooms in the far future? Will the children in the center of their rooms filled with pink or blue objects act as superegos of the next generation’s children, or deny themselves and mix up the objects, placing themselves in a gray zone of colors? A more fundamental question is must there be a distinction between colors? So what if it is blue and so what if it is pink? After a long struggle that lasted for over 50 years, our society has been barely able to escape from the red complex, except for a small part. Now shouldn’t it overcome the more elaborate and sneaky complex of tying pink and blue to certain genders? Jeong Mee Yoons controversy of color seems to exert that the realms of pink and blue are clearly divided, but for some reason I feel that it is directed towards the more radical question of “what use is it to make divisions between colors?”

Supplement——————————————————————————————————-

< Pink Floyd and Blue Note >

When I was little and first heard of the Pink Floyd, I thought it was a group that did soft and mushy music because of the feeling the world “pink” gave me. After knowing that their lyrics contained wretched expressions about all the wounds and pains in the world, the color pink began to look completely different to me. Actually, pink is a contagious sign, which could give a twang to any word it accompanies. But the Pink Floyd had nothing to do with the color pink. The word “pink” was just a tribute to blues musician Pink Anderson, who was worshiped by Roger Waters and Syd Barrett-early members of the Pink Floyd. Some get confused between the Pink Floyd and the Pink Lady. Fortunately, the two “Pink”s are both musical groups but have nothing else in common, and therefore leave no room for further confusion. It is a good thing that the connotation of the color pink did not penetrate into the music of the Pink Floyd, who made sad and beautiful songs about the contradictions and wounds of the world. That is why we do not easily get tired of their music.

The most famous jazz club in New York City is the Blue Note. The club is very popular with Japanese tourists, to the extent that they call it the mecca of Japanese tourists. The Blue Note is so famous that while there is only one in New York , there are three in Japan-one in Tokyo , one in Osaka and one in Nagoya . When I went to the club, a funky atmosphere of the Japanese tourists had been dominating the place, rather than a pure and cool feeling of blue. I never went back to the Blue Note again. It would perhaps be more honest for the club, which is attracting tourists with the force of blue, to change its name to “Pink Club.” The Blue Note: how irritating!

< Pink Lady Falls into the Blue Ocean >

Japanese girl’s duo Pink Lady, which created a sensation in the early 1980s with its sexy concept in Sexy Music and Kiss in the Dark, could perhaps be seen as a predecessor of Korean singers Lee Hyo-ri and Seo In-young. Now the name only remains as a flower shopping mall, a drama title, the name of a cocktail, and a device for masturbation. The group which has been long forgotten and is hard to find even on the internet, however, has managed to clearly engrave the connotation of “gaudy and vulgar” on the word “pink” through its songs. I recall that the Hee Sisters, Suk Sisters and the Gukbo Sisters, who were active during the same period, could not match the Pink Lady in its “pinkiness.” As I listened to a pirated edition of their music that someone had bought for me for 350 won, I was surprised that music could be so shallow and vulgar. Then I was surprised once more at the fact that more than 20 years later such shallowness and vulgarity could reappear in Korean singers. History repeats itself, and so does pink-once as the color of a Korean traditional shirt, once as a song with a sexy concept, and once as the color of lipstick.

Now pink is no longer the blue ocean. Except for a very limited area of taste, pink does not sell. In the 80s the Pink Lady may have swum in the blue ocean, but in the 21st century they have fallen into the blue ocean and have drifted away to an unknown place.

< The Pink Panther and the Blue Impulse >

I have never seen the Pink Panther. I just thought the title was sort of peculiar. The Pink Panther was a popular series of detective movies which was produced from the 1960s to the 1980s. There were eight series in total. The production gave birth to the famous actor Peter Sellers. In the first movie made in 1963, “Pink Panther” was the nickname for a giant diamond. The story is about a thief known as the Phantom trying to steal this gem. The Pink Panther acts as a mascot, who appears in the beginning and the end of the film, serving as a symbol of the funny happenings in the film. The Pink Panther was later made into a separate TV animation series. It is said that while taking a bubble bath scene, the staff used strong chemicals to make more bubbles, resulting in injuries on the actors’ and actresses’ skin. Robert Wagner, who had to dive into the pool of bubbles, suffered from temporary blindness that lasted for four weeks. However, it is only the title that is imprinted in my head.

Watching the Blue Impulse-flight demonstration squadron of the Japanese Self-Defence Force-flying smoothly with their Japanese-made T4 trainer jets, I feel envy as I wonder when Korea will be able to form a flight demonstration squad with jet fighters made in Korea . The Blue Impulse was first founded on March 4, 1960 at the Hamahatsu Air Force Base with 5 F-86Fs. It made demonstrations at the opening for the Tokyo Olympic games in 1964 and for the Osaka Expo in 1970. Following the introduction of Japan-made T-2 jets, the squad now operates eight T-4s. The name of the squad most likely takes after the US Navy flight demonstration squadron, Blue Angels. To a flight demonstration squadron that engages in beautiful but dangerous acrobatics, blue is an appropriate color to express the perilous fate of the pilots who must perform on the fine line between life and death. Pink just doesn’t seem to go well with death. As I am writing this paper, I suddenly hear on the news that a Blue Angels’ plane crashed, killing its pilot. Blue is the color of bruises.

< The Pink Panther and the Blue Impulse >

In English, the word blue seems to have more negative meanings than positive ones. In Korea , blue is a refreshing and clean image, but in English, blue basically means depression. It also could mean desolation. “Out of the blue” means “all of a sudden without warning,” or perhaps, as a Korean saying goes, “like catching and eating a rice cake in one’s sleep.” The phrase probably came to be because of the absurdity involved in a case where something suddenly falls out of the blue sky. I suppose the custom of boys preferring blue and girls preferring pink came from the phrase, “out of the blue.”

(Youngjun Lee, Ph.D. is a professor in Photograpic Art at Kaywon School of Art & Design in Korea.)

By Jun’ichiro ISHII

Artist: Jun’ichiro ISHII

Rue de L’infinite
2008 | “HISTOIRES D’EAUX – HISTOIRES D’ART” Gréoux les Bains, Provence, France
2007 | “Horizons: Rencontres Arts Nature” Chastreix-Sancy, Auvergne, France
Wooden sidewalk which has a form of infinity | (L) 11m X (W) 5m X (H) 1m
Video archive “PROMENADE”: http://www.reart.net/library/en05.html

Introduction: ART as a Communication Tool

For me, ‘ART’ signifies an individual attitude in society. When people gather together, the idea of ‘another’ appears. The notion of a relationship between others will encourage the concept of ’social’. My art activities are between you and me, and function as a communication tool.

Chai on the Balance
2007 | “ART-IST: The 18th Istanbul Art Fair” Istanbul, Turkey
2008 | “The 44th Troy International Art Festival: BORDERLINE” Canakkale, Turkey
Hanged up Chai (traditional Turkish tea) in an abandoned space
Video archive “Compound Eyes”: http://www.reart.net/library/en06.html

Background: The Epoch of the Globalization

Today, our bare social reality has caught up with the epoch of the empirical, transformative condition called globalization. Currently in modern society, all our social fate; the customs, experiences, politics, economics and environment have engaged in this reciprocal relationship ‘complex connectivity’. From a cultural point of view, I am interested in the social phenomenon which this complex connectivity brings about.

Ondulation | 2009 | “Utopia – Interpretation of New Era” OX warehouse, Macao, SAR China | Temporary pound and dropping water | (W) 3diameter X (D) 0.5m X (H) 4m

Activity: Cultural Sketch

My creation begins from the observation of usual culture. I trust that the most banal, routine and seemingly meaningless practices of everyday life contain the most integral essence of culture. And the process of finding the integral cultural essence or the local cultural peculiarity is my artistic motif. My creation begins from seeking of this cultural peculiarity in the site.

I adopt mainly installation, but not just installing the works which has already completed in a studio. Rather, adding minimum transformation to the peculiarity of the site, I am representing it as site-specific work. To precisely grasp pure impression of the site, I do not have formal methods. Most of my works do not seem connected, both in terms of materials and the completed form. However, by adding a symbolic form to the peculiarity, I am trying to shift unconscious image into a concrete vision. It is like an unusual interpretation of the usual practice or more like a cultural sketch.

To cover the temporariness of this site-specific works, I employ the video art. It is not only for archive, but independently works as an art piece which gives another perspective from different angles.

DO NOT ART | Photo montage project since 2006

Artist Statement:

Observations of local cultural activities can be seen as observations of a globalizing society. Since I intend to see art as a representation of individual attitudes in society, I believe that I should develop my cultural awareness via practical trans-cultural experiences. Our institutional social environments are developing, more attune to the various individual needs and demands to which have independent autonomies. In this individualizing environment of today, we cannot deny a possibility that our personal casual actions may cause unexpected reactions in the physical across long distances. Rushed cultural installing might be an unaware violence of the modernity sometimes. Not only exhibiting art works unilaterally, I am trying to focus on more usual, and more unusual local cultural peculiarities. Also, I am wishing to broaden my perceptions of culture and cultivate the degree of cultural awareness via this intercultural creative process. This individual self-cultural practice is the core of my artistic motivation. And this is my personal attitude in the globalizing society.

Jun’ichiro ISHII

www.reart.net

By Jin-Sang Yoo
Professor at Kaywon College of Art and Design/Director of Kukje Gallery

Artist: Jinkee Choi

Powerful Family | 2007 | Pencil drawing on power outlet and wall | 6×3″

We call the space where the objects and events ‘exist’ in the unconsciousness. The negative implication of the term, unconsciousness is originated from our conscious-oriented or the speech-oriented perspective. In fact if we allow ourselves a little distance from the consciousness, rather the self-centered system, we can find the subjectivity in the semantic system that has been blanketed most of the elements in the world. Unconsciousness forces you to consider relationship between the objects and events that happen through such relationships to be accidental, improbable, or even insane. Above all, the unconsciousness, which is residing outside awareness, is declared as the category encompassing ‘non-existential things’ that language cannot define. Nevertheless, what only exists in reversed sense is ‘unconscious’ matters because consciousness, or the objectives understood by semantics are the very ones interpreted through consciousness. They are with filtered or distorted by cognitive system, and most of all, they are perceived within the subjectively signified implication structure. Hence, the objects and events are what consciousness and language pursue, and they are also the objects always hiding aspects out of reach at the other end of consciousness, or the objects surrounded by abyss that our thought never be able to cross. Each object is isolated by the abysmal chasm all around or it can only be connected each other through the certain capability that bridges between the objects. When they are left undiscovered, they ‘exist’. Things of being are either unknown or unrevealed. Things of being, if I quote Heidegger, ‘is the object of being called when we ‘call’ it and it, can only disclose itself through ‘the act of calling (Der Ruf).’ In this sense, the object or an incident that came up into our consciousness is like things we are actually ‘calling’.

‘The gaze’ is one of the key forms of calling. It is one of the most direct forms of response to the calling for an object. Concentration of gaze means all the eyes turning upon a single viewpoint; it also implies the object that gathers all the eyes are due to the certain calling of an object. Just as Lacan said, we are not looking at an object, in fact that object is looking at us. The objects are the objective of gazing, and at the same time it is the source of gaze. Two points, two turning points of viewpoint and the objective are two cones existing between gaze and the object of the gaze. And their vertex is the tip pf needle that signifies pinning point that infinitely narrowed down, abstract point, and the location of being. According to Freud, eyes are basically something very sharp like an awl or a pick. Also it is an eye that is constantly poked by tip of a pick. An eye as a pointy penis, penetration of an eye with it, and Oedipus’s self-castration by poking his own eyes portray the epitome.

Styrofoam Polar Bear | 2008 | Styrofoam | 15×13x4″

The works of Jinkee Choi consists of gazing an object rather than transforming it. Gazing something that comes up in his mind instead while he is staring at wallpaper, tiles or even stains, connected with the facts that the objects he gazed was meaningless and the gaze itself is a collection of the concentrating moments. Gazing as an answer to a calling is only relating to that moment, and it does not really mean awakening the structure of the consciousness. Maybe, it is to separate the objects and incidents from the perspective of outside the implication structure or from the ‘mouth’ so that they can be entirely perceived through the eyes. In using ‘eyes’, most common mistake is to constantly compare your findings with the implication structure. This stops and subordinates things as the signifiers: things that are yet categorized, located, signified, or determined within the relational system that refers to each other. Nevertheless, we can forecast that stoppage will take place unavoidably at one point from the question how we visualize the objects on unconscious level. Visualizing the object of the unconscious or the objects of a gaze should not be surrendered to the current implication structure. Then the art is can be defined as the methods to represent ‘outside’ in a way in which avoiding such subservient.

The way Choi draws the objects into the inside the cognition from its negative status form his singularity as an artist. From a few works of his, he overlaps the objects of the gaze with the memory of the site where first apostasy-as in original sin- was committed. For instance, the process in which an egg container is transformed to a nest, Dunkin’ donuts wrapper to donuts and ice cream package to a milking cow is about the visual representation of things that are trapped by the implication structure, rather than verbal representation. Autistic is how he describes the process because temporary lockout against the circular process of reference. Furthermore, autism implies the fact that connecting points of the objects are not circulating within implication structure and stays on the boundary of non-implicational structure. It seems that Choi imagines that objects sharing their meanings, or objects temporarily seize the implication system, furthermore, object’s way of looking at objects. However, is it really possible? Or has he named the series, ‘Optimism’ in the sense that it is only feasible within the closed circuit?

Toothpaste Buddha | 2006 | Toothpaste | 2×2x7”

From his early works with plastics to his recent ‘Spotlight series’ and ‘Autistic Optimism’ his demonstration of lightness and instantaneousness implies the gravity or the speed that your gaze must carry when you see his works. They are even non materialistic enough to understand it is rather a clue to the resemblance between the gaze and the implication than art works. They are minimum materials for the basis that bring up substantial, specification, representation and even signification between the calling and the gazing. In extreme case, the mere spotlight that separates trivial objects from the surroundings can draw them into the relationship with gazing.

Daily lives, everyday objects, and their classes, uses and shapes found therein become of materials that compose of the artist’s autobiographical documentation. So how he lives with what surroundings happens to be the main contents of his work. His works might be understood as his way of dealing with unchangeable condition in his life through the representational process. However, it does not seem to be enough to categorize his works even with his work-reconstructed ironic attitude towards the materialistic lives. His viewpoint as a weak or as a minority does not seem adequate to elaborate the conditions of the vividness in his works. Granting him a singularity is the way of understanding his gaze as analogy between objects. He certainly does show one stage of it, and his way is very witty.

Pinning Glasses | 2007 | Glasses/owl tips | 7×6x2”

Analogous relation is a contradictory concept to the implication structure. It is opposed to our obsession, which insists to place objects within the order of logic through logistic quality of language. Analogous relation may be irrational, but it intermediates the direct association with other objects through erudition on the objects, intimacy, sympathy, devotion and so on. Fundamentally, it is the groundless system and internally equipped with the most flexible system of perspectives. However, analogous relation found in Choi’s works are reflexive unlike those of surrealism. The objects do not intentionally encounter with other objects that are seemingly unrelated. The objects rather engage in an autogamous relationship with things that are within themselves. Lunatic or humorous elements, which gaze extracts from the objects, connect inside and outside of the object. From those can be named as reflexive-resemblance, the framework of ‘monad’ as in Gil Deleuze’s Le Pil may also be found. It includes the technique called voisinage of the lightings by inner demarcations that may remind of spotlights.

Jinkee Choi’s works are currently developed with two main layers defined as daily experiences and their another dimension as its center. What we can anticipate is the situations through which revealed are several layers of reality. I would not know for sure if this corresponds with what the artist pursues, but I would not certainly imagine that to happen. Perhaps the outlook of his works must start from here.

(This essay was originally written for Door to Door 3, Korea Nonprofit Art Space Network Conference 2005.)