2018

《2018 Korea Artist Prize》

Soojung Yi (Curator / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)

Organized and presented since 2012 by National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea and SBS Foundation, Korea Artist Prize is a program whose objective is to support and promote representative artists of Korea. Each year, four nominated artists are given the financial backing for the production of new works to be shown at MMCA. How do the artists of 2018 represent this ‘year’? What attitudes do these ‘artists’ demonstrate and what visions do they present to us? What do we find in their works? In what respects are their arts ‘contemporary’? Korea Artist Prize 2018 is a platform in which these questions are asked and probed.

The question shared by this year’s three individual artists and one artists’ collective is “Are the conditions/thoughts that are surrounding us innately given or merely learned?” Here are showcased the recent works of these four participants who look into the social issues that they come across in their surroundings and share an inquisitive attitude of critical reflection. The exhibition is also accompanied by an archive for each participant created to help one understand the process of their art-making.

What becomes contemporary art and how?

siren eun young jung (1974- ) is known for her art projects that are based on her own studies, researches, and analyses of traditional Korean female theatre called “yeoseong gukgeuk,” which refers to a genre of performing art that was popular in the 1950s but has been forgotten without ever being established as either a traditional or modern form of Korean theatre. Yeoseong gukgeuk whose performers are exclusively female is a subject that serves as a greatly important ethnographic entity through which she attempts to how gender norms and cultural contemporaneity are understood and constituted. This form of female theatre can be observed in the histories of modern East Asian regions including Korea, and this subject allows one to face head-on what modernity’s desire invented and interpellated—the firm dichotomy in gender performance and the ideological ideas that govern the dynamics of the formation and exclusion of tradition. The artist deliberately puts on hold the existing history writing methodologies of yeoseong gukgeuk and stays herself in/side the discourses and memories of yeoseong gukgeuk. And she fills this inactivated time with the sense of mass of space, namely, the bodily movement of performance. Her emphasis is not given to the restoration of the intrinsic legitimacy of yeoseong gukgeuk. Rather, this sense modification of jung underlines the political power of more anomalous and queer artistic practices.

Can one live a day twice? What happens when civilization intervenes in nature?

Through her performances and video works, Minja Gu (1977- ) lets one rethink those experiences universal and fundamental to all human beings such as labor, time, and love and the notions related to them: as in Symposium by Plato, young people talk about love all night long; the artist lives the so-called ‘average life’ by simulating the ‘average time usage of the Koreans’; the artist succeeds in making a dish which is almost impossible to get the shown result with the ingredients in the food package. Her works defamiliarize our received ideas taken for granted as true. The artist’s experience of residency programs in various cities including the city where daylight saving time is practiced has led her to explore her interest in the artificiality, or unfamiliarity, of civilization that taints the natural element of time. The International Date Line (IDL) is set in the area of the 180-degree longitude whose western and eastern parts are respectively one day and the next as Greenwich becomes the zero reference line. In Taveuni in Fiji, the east side of the IDL is today and as you walk onto its west, it is yesterday. If one lives a day at the east of the IDL and in the following day he/she spends a day at its west, then he/she lives a day twice. If one spends a day in the west and next he/she live a day in the east, then he/she loses a day. Time is irreversible, yet this impossible is made possible in Taveuni. It is paradoxical. Island of the Day Before, Island of the Day After is a video/installation work based on the performance in which the artist and her acquaintance spend 24 hours in each side of the IDL and next day they switch and spend another 24 hours while asking the meaning of time, the meaning of life crossing between yesterday and today, between today and tomorrow. Here, the artist poses the question, “can one live one day twice?” and look into the irreversibility of time’s passage and the meaning of life. She constantly inquires into the possibility that much of what one believes as true might be man-made and that quite the opposite can be regarded as truth in another culture. Gu often get ideas for her works from the questions triggered by her being in different spaces and societies, and in this exhibition are also shown the objects that she collected and made in those time periods.

Okin Collective: Why do we create communities and how they are maintained?

Okin Collective(Hwayong Kim, Joungmin Yi, and Shiu Jin/formed in 2009) is an artists’ collective that was initiated to address the eviction of the residents of the Okin Apartment complex in Jongno District due to the tearing-down of the apartment complex. The Collective has been interacting with audiences inside and outside of the community through its videos, performances, and radio broadcastings while delving into the social issues arising in the cities under redevelopment with its focus on the relationship between communities and individuals. It has intervened in the social challenges through unconventional approaches: the Collective’s members and the residents had a party on the rooftop of the particular apartment building while organizing screening, exhibition, and concert; the artists performed Shakespeare’s Hamlet together with the workers were wrongfully laid off from Cort Guitars, a guitar manufacturer; the Collective also designed a stretching exercise to satire the risk society exposed to the disaster such as the Fukushima radiation leak. Its projects have laid bare the ambivalent and multilayered emotions, attitudes, and situations of people implicitly embedded in the simplified representations of relations and circumstances in the media so as to deal with the meanings and/or limits of the conflicts, reconciliations, and solidarities between community and individual, between communities, and between individuals in the modern urban environment. Okin Collective has been doing practices that traverse the boundaries between everyday life and art, and in this exhibition it presents: From the Outside which includes the record of its practices and process on the constitution of Okin Collective for the first time; their recent works for which it sought out communities in the three cities of Seoul, Jeju, and Incheon, one from each, and talked with people there about why we form a community in the city, how the community and its members interact, and how the community is maintained. In Search of How to Revolve, or its Contrary is about ‘Hoijeonart(Rotating Art)’, an art community in Incheon, and Casa d’Or (Golden House) those of the senior citizens who frequent a music café called ‘Casa d’Or’ in Jeju. Okin Collective pinpoints the complicatedness of what may be otherwise either black or white, like or dislike, and for or against and the subtle changes in the emotions of the people involved.

At the time, why did boys dream of a utopia to be delivered by the development of science and technology?

The artistic concern of Jae Ho Jung (1971- ) has been what lies beyond the cityscape, which is the symbol of modernization—the prosperity and development during the state-led rapid economic growth period. His continuous interest in modern cities and buildings can be detected in his works among whose subjects are the nighttime views of Seoul whose night skyline is ablaze with red neon crosses, the scenes of the Chinatown in Incheon after its fall, and the pilot apartment complexes built in the 1960s and 1970s, which were admired as they represented ‘Western lifestyle’ but in recent years are under threat of demolition. Jung has paid focused attention to the fact that we all were, as citizens of a developing country, ‘encouraged’ by the state to believe in the bright future to be brought on by technological developments and scientific advances.Jung’s work can be divided into three methodologically different categories: he records the surfaces of the buildings constructed in 1960~1970s in the central parts of Seoul such as Euljiro and Jongno; he creates new archives by translating into paintings selected images published in government publications, sci-fi comics, and news articles published in the same period; finally, he creates a rocket for the trip to the Moon that the protagonist’s attempt is not successful in the sci-fi comic book entitled “Yocheol Balmyeongwang (junk inventors)”. The artist’s archive painting series of the images from the government records and pop cultural entities such as films and comic books of the period reveals specific ways of thinking inflicted upon the minds of individuals who lived through nationalistic regimes that promoted the concept of a nation as a whole. He realizes during his talk with his teenage daughters that today’s girls or boys no longer dream of ‘space exploration’ or ‘becoming a genius scientist’. And this fact led him to the unnaturalness found in the “times when every boy or girl dreamed a trip to the Moon.” Consisting of paintings that seem like scenes from a sci-fi comic book, this series of Jung is also his hard-edged attempt to document the change of social values after the slowdown of economic growth, which was followed by economic crisis. To find images to be used for his paintings, Jung walks around the city and becomes a researcher seeking related materials. And in this exhibition an archive is created to showcase the photographs that the artist took as reference materials.

One can identify several common denominators among the artists mentioned above: First, they question the established norms and values of society. What is at stake is the reasonability of discriminations based on gender and gender-oriented norms or the justifiability of a Western country’s arbitrary selection of the zero time reference line according to which an imaginary line is created to separate two consecutive calendar days; second, they do not feel the need to be restricted by the medium-based genre division. siren eun young jung’s first medium was video and naturally she has moved to performance, the works of Minja Gu and Okin Collective take the form of the recordings of their performances. Jae Ho Jung sees himself as a neutral and faithful documentarian of his time using the medium of painting. They all define themselves just as artists of this present time; third, they believe the significance and role of contemporary art lies in enabling the audience to confront certain ‘discomfort’. To these artists, art is not about visual pleasure. Instead, it is about a shift in understanding through which viewers see the world from a different perspective. These are points common to them only at the present phases of their careers. No one knows what paths they will take. As they prepare for Korea Prize Artist 2018 after being selected through evaluations in their studios and at the museum, some of them see it as an opportunity to reflect on their previous works and others lose themselves in doing what they have wanted to do without worrying about the results. This exhibition is, therefore, intended not to examine how much we know about their works but to allow us to anticipate how much we are going to figure out about them. If we have thought that we know these artists to some extent, if not enough, the exhibition will tell us that we do not, we have just begun, and we should pay attention to their works more deeply and longer.