2019
How to Face “Today” — Korea Artist Prize 2019
Okkum Yang (Curator / National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea)
From 2012 until the present day, the Korea Artist Prize has presented a vision for contemporary Korean art by fostering discourses in the contemporary art scene. The artists have been chosen based on the recommendations of the committee comprised of art professionals such as curators, critics, and scholars and the first-round evaluation process done by a panel of Korean and international judges: Ayoung Kim, Hyesoo Park, Jewyo Rhii, and Young In Hong. For this exhibition the artists have presented their new works that are directly correlated with, expanded from or mutated from their previous works.
For the Korea Artist Prize 2019, Kim has showcased Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot which takes a form of speculative fiction and pertains to migration of different levels on a global scale, referencing geological data and overlapping movement of the data with the migration stories of Yemeni refugees in Jeju. Park looks into the common values and constructs embedded in Korean society from a variety of perspectives. Especially through her new work, Park explored individual’s conception of us, namely, their understanding of collectivity. Rhii installed Love Your Depot — warehouse system that operates as both storage for works of art and a workspace for art-making. This system is an alternative proposal, designed to delay the potential extinction of visual art and at the same time search for ways to share art and art-making. Driven by the worldwide prevalence of nationalism and social inequality, Hong has had an interest in animals who communicate in ways different from humans’. The artist’s specific inquiry into the bird is reflected in her new work, Sadang B.
Young In Hong: Another Way of Communication B
Young In Hong (1972– ), using various media and forms including drawings, installations, public art, embroidery painting, and performance, has sought ways of putting into question the concept of equality and continued to incorporate this into an artistic practice.
Having witnessed how the current pervasiveness of nationalism and social inequality throughout the world has dramatically intensified, Hong has been led to think that an entirely different way of communication is urgently needed. Her attention was directed at animals who communicate in completely different ways, and particularly her inquiry into communication of the birds has fed into her new work. Sadang B consists of three new pieces: To Paint the Portrait of a Bird is a large-scale installation; The White Mask is a video documentation of sound experiment and the sound work itself; Un-Splitting is a group performance. To Paint the Portrait of a Bird, which is installed at the entrance of the exhibition space, is an installation of large-size bird cage consisting of video, sound, embroidery and three-dimensional work. As the audience walks into the exhibition space, one is lead into a bird cage and faces paradoxical situation where positions of human beings and birds reverse which invites the audience to question the hierarchy between animals and human beings. This space is fraught with opposites and dichotomies such as: inside/outside of a cage, human beings/animals, nature/civilization and reason/instinct. In this circumstance, only the sound of birds can pass through these boundaries. The artist focuses on the system of communication and existence in such an environment of division in all levels. In the interior of the bird cage, one can spot the embroidery piece of gammoyeojaedo1, which symbolizes ritual ceremony space that excluded women as full participants. As well as the embroidery, the lighting on both sides of it represents the space for confucianist — and patriarchal — ancestral rites. The platform in the center of the cage contains architectural images with crest motifs representing Western powers in the colonial era. On with these images, the artist mixes in poetic prose that feature metaphor for and criticism of human society from a bird’s perspective. The White Mask, a video documentation of a series of profound sound experiments, has been done in collaboration with Club Inégales, a London-based music ensemble. The musicians experimented with becoming animals through improvisation and composed seven songs in search of being in a state between human and animals by actually thinking that one is becoming an animal. Un-Splitting, a group performance in collaboration with choreographer Stephanie Scheubeck, took place in common areas of the museum for the period of the exhibition, four times in total. The performance recruited participants on online platforms through web tutorials, and acquired motifs from archival images of female low-wage labor and underappreciated household labor reflecting the social perception that disregards young female workers as political subjects. This abstract performance, with its choreography created from selecting images from archives as motifs and blending it with movement of animals, is made deliberately long and repetitive in order to illustrate the tedious nature of labor. Each works comprising Sadang B represents a dialectical space where conflict and paradox is overcome and the artist hopes that different ritual takes place for the audience. This, as well as being the artists’ exploration into alternative ways of communication, is in line with the artist’s artistic practice of equality and her long investigation into the history of the non-mainstream.
Hyesoo Park: Who is Your We, Who is Our You
Hyesoo Park (1974– ) has produced works that question the universal values and collective subconsciousness engraved into our society and further give form to the values of the individuals’ memories and lives. In order to visualize these abstract values and conceptions, Park has examined environments that surround us, collected materials meticulously, collaborated with experts in related fields and finally put those ingredients into a piece.
Park’s new works made for this exhibition starts from the question, “who is your we?” This question invites one to examine individuals’ definitions and categorizations of we, namely, their understanding of groups. Prior to the production of the work, the artist conducted a survey on one’s perception of we among a representative sample, and the output of the survey was analyzed by an expert and interpreted by the artist to be reflected in this work that visualizes collective subconsciousness in Korean society. Stemming from this one question, her works include: No Middle Ground, an installation embodying various social phenomena, Survey ‘The Level of Intimacy About Us,’ an installation and survey, To Future Generations, a documentary film and Perfect Family, an imaginary firm and potential future rental service of human roles. No Middle Ground, situated in the middle of the exhibition space, is an architectural embodiment of polarization in Korea. The L-shaped structure takes the motif from Geumsan Church in Gimje around the beginning of the 20th century, one of the earlier churches in Korea. This space symbolizes the social and cultural inequality where men and women could not sit around at the same space. The words on the wall: “THIS IS US, THIS IS NOT US,” with a large installation symbolizing dichotomy, suggests extreme conflict prevalent in polarizing societies. The rear side of No Middle Ground was reserved for Forum Theater: URI, an installation piece or also functioning as a discussion space or a stage with events coordinated by experts in different fields throughout the exhibition period. Being the most distinct part of Park’s work in many ways, Forum Theater: URI and related surveying activities extend and redefine the role of the audience as a participant and a performer assuming they are subjects capable of proactive reasoning, and attempts to involve the audience as a part of the artwork. To Future Generations is a video documentation of interviews of several people working for funeral service industry — four funeral coordinators and four handlers who manage the deceased’s belongings — and tracks spaces of people who died without any relations and in a distant manner, unfolds stories of individuals that lie outside the traditional family structure and makes us theorize about alienation and ostracization. In Perfect Family, an imaginary human rental service provider, Park looks into the dissolution of family and issues encompassing individual in a society, which is rapidly spreading in modern society. Through these works, Park compels the audience to face squarely various social phenomena and absurdities in Korean society.
Jewyo Rhii: Somewhere for Delay, Continuation, and Creation
Jewyo Rhii (1971– ) has combined variable, ephemeral and mundane materials to make a point about issues out of her own experience and about narratives that take place in a specific circumstance. The artist has attempted to find a meaning of things that exist in the center or the periphery of an institution or system. However, her work is not confined to speculative issues or personal dilemma or problems. With her own style, she portrays resistance against the familiar and intangible norm as well as conflict present in systems of society and the art. In order to achieve this, Rhii often proposes new ways of conceiving routined exhibition events, or resurfaces the struggles that were made from preexisting norms and reveal them in a new light.
In this exhibition, Rhii presents her new work, Love Your Depot, a proposal and a prototype for a new kind of storage system and creative studio that she plans to actualize in the near future. Her exhibition space is occupied largely by artist storage, a lab (consisting of broadcasting station, media lab and Five-Story Tower), and TeamDepot — a content development center and shared area for creative activity. In this space, the artist forged a storage space that mimics storage spaces in museums and several Korean contemporary artists’ works are stored including Rhii. As one mumbling line: ‘where do artworks go after exhibitions’ from her video work suggests, artworks innately possess the possibility of extinction if it is not chosen by the art market, collectors or institutions. Love Your Depot is a proposal aimed at suspending this extinction and making a space for shared creative activity. The works stored and displayed in this exhibition space are researched and archived in a variety of ways throughout the exhibition period and the contents created from here is video-streamed online as an attempt to expand the reach of communications beyond physical and spatial limits. Moreover, performance artworks such as Artwork Take-in Performance or Loading Parade invites the audience to re-imagine this storage as a flexible space of creative freedom. As the critic Charles Esche commented on Rhii’s work: “she builds conditions in which she can operate without total dependency on the art system,”2 this experimental system can only be conceived of thanks to the artist’s will and insight in finding alternative ways beyond conditions pre-determined and presented to her. This alternative and creative proposal is not constructed in confinement to her personal life and the systems within art. Rather, it is a unique voice of the artist questioning a lot of topics in the realm of sustainability of art in this era of overproduction and overconsumption, thus encompassing values of the zeitgeist.
Ayoung Kim: Migration Both Vertical and Horizontal, to be on the Boundary
Ayoung Kim (1979– ) has explored present-day issues concerning the modern and contemporary history of Korea, petroleum politics, territorial imperialism, and the migration of capital and data, taking both macroscopic and microscopic approaches and reconstructing it in multi-faceted ways. Kim, who has continually experimented with the media, has shown a distinct style of work where she researches and collects extensively on issues concerning history and reality and merges the acquired data with visual elements in complex narratives based on artistic reconstruction.
Since 2007, Kim continued her exploration of issues occurring all around the world such as migrations, transportation, voyage, trans-nationality and regionality. The main piece of her work for the exhibition is Porosity Valley 2: Tricksters’ Plot, a sequel to Porosity Valley, Portable Holes (2017). This piece shows the artist’s prolonged interests for migrations and travels and it is an extension of her earlier works. Petra Genetrix, a mythological organism that appears in Porosity Valley 2, is a mineral and data cluster, and the story begins where this creature is obliged to migrate into a new place. The migration tale overlaps with the itinerary and lifestyle of refugees — who must choose migration in order to escape political or religious persecution, and this is manifested more clearly by the artist juxtaposing the migration of Yemeni refugees in Jeju Island, Korea in 2018 with geological references. Also, there are tricksters, mythological characters in myths and tales who hoax conventions and order, named Stone, Stratum and Wave in Porosity Valley 2. In actuality, these tricksters were played by the Yemini refugees in Jeju Island, and thus the video overlaps with how they would be treated in Korean society where ethnic nationalism and identity as one-race nation is prevalent. Another feature of this piece is that the artist’s interest in folktales and animism merges into Mongolian myths of the origin and their animism for the earth and rocks. Mother Rock, the super intelligent being that embraces aliens in the video is depicted as the center of intellectual energy and historical archive as well as a database and pinnacle of scientific technology. This Mother Rock functions as a character that permits acceptance, expansion and mutation of migrations of Petra Genetrix — a symbol of data migration. Ayoung Kim deals with societal, political and historical issues with her particular touch of dissociation and by collaging and juxtaposing various and potentially clashing elements and reconstructs the present times. The subterranean tectonic plates moving interminably and how they contrast with the surface of the earth where it seems to be formed with acute boundaries; and agents — whether actual or virtual — who attempt to travel from the inner part of the earth to the outer part or vice versa, are at times stopped at those boundaries and sometimes let through. The artist demonstrates this coexistence of complex relationships and thus puts forward new questions that dissect the past and present.
The artists who participated in Korea Artist Prize 2019, through their individual works, have shown their varying motifs and perspectives regarding contemporary societal and aesthetical issues. Also, in terms of media, this year’s exhibition is noted for experimental methodology involving installations, videos, performances and sound experiments. Moreover, this exhibition is distinct with others in that it incorporates various related programs such as discussions, experiments, performance, survey and atypical construction of archives and online content creation as a part of the work or direct affiliation to the work.
The artworks and discourse that these artists — who play integral roles in Korean art world — create enables us to peek into the future of the ever-changing contemporary art world and also to face the present day that visual language portrays.
