#10 If Art Is Our Language

# Yozoh meets contemporary art

We express our thoughts and feelings through “language.” Unlike ordinary people, artists possess another personal language: art. Their language is sometimes difficult and opaque, but it gives us the chance to think about things we never noticed before, and stories we took for granted.

Artist Yozoh communicates with the public in a variety of ways, in guises ranging from singer to artist, podcast presenter and bookshop owner. Always searching for new inspiration, she decides to experience contemporary art, a notoriously esoteric field that has always been unfamiliar to her. Through Korea Artist Prize, the country’s foremost contemporary art award, Yozoh experiences the language of art and finds out what stories contemporary art, seen until now as an exclusive, out-of-reach world, is trying to tell.

# Artist’s concerns – lonely death, displacement, gender discrimination, the right to live 

All four of the artists nominated for this year’s award have their roots in the same society as us. The stories they tell in the language of art are about things that also concern us.

To Hyesoo Park, who calls herself a single-household-to-be, talk of dying alone has personal significance. Her project, Who Is Your We?, is a survey that began with the question, “Can I make a family?” Park questions whether the family at the center of the concept of “we” really constitutes a safe enclosure. By contrast, Ayoung Kim considers those on boundaries rather than at the center of “we.” Kim, based primarily overseas, has been living as an outsider and a marginal figure, belonging on neither side of the fence. Having directly experienced worlds that exclude outsiders, she depicts the lives of migrants, focusing on Yemeni refugees in Jeju. A unique aspect of her work is the method she has chosen: portraying refugees, normally shown as vulnerable, as science fiction-style superheroes.

Young In Hong also uses diverse media and unique spatial arrangements to present a new artistic language. A huge birdcage fills her exhibition space, allowing human viewers to change places with birds. Shut into a cage and taking on this avian role, viewers get the chance to consider who it is that is really caged, and whether the discrimination and inequality they had taken for granted is really right. One of the most unusual spaces in the exhibition is Jewyo Rhii’s warehouse, filled with a collection of artworks that are unsold and have nowhere to go. Why has she created an artist’s warehouse in the middle of an art gallery?

# Yozoh, artists and our stories

Many people find contemporary art difficult. Yozoh is one of them. But here we discover how some experiences altered her view of the world simply by looking and feeling. And we encounter Korean contemporary art today through artists who express universal concerns in their own artistic languages, transforming everyday life into art.