2016 Gyeonggi Creation Center Resident Artists

In the form of canvas or sculpture, artist Na Gu records the memories which are being forgotten, fragments in the storage and useless sundries in daily life. In this record intervened by subjective interpretation, it is hard to read the complete substance. The figures in the canvas lack eyes, noses, and mouths, and their bodies are flowing down, but each one firmly reveals his or her existence in a dim space. Moreover, the useless sundries around our settings (an error image on a computer, withered leaves, and leftovers of milk, etc.) are connected to other traces. This can also mean that the incomplete inner deficiency plays a role as a feasibile condition of life. 

Artist Dong-chan Kim talks about his past experiences and behaviors which do not seem very unusual. He represents the past appearances through performances and films the scene. In this process, some drawings or sculptures can be created as a result. The filmed parts during this process are edited and installed along with drawings and sculptures to form the space. This shows the artist’s past time aspects as well as the present ones. The recent work “Laundry”is his first greeting as an artist who first experiences Residency life in Korea aftercoming back from his studies in Germany. On the back side of clean laundry hung in line, there is a drawing in charcoal. This work wants to transmit the artist’s heart flutter mixed between the wish of saying hello with a bright aspect without staining anything, and the wish of drawing something. In the coming work, he is planning to seek his true self through the process of reflecting on his surroundings. 

Artist Dong-hyun Kim shows the interconnectivity of humans-environment-society-universe through the movement of a physical chain reactor device. Each component composing the work symbolizes a part of the system which contributes to the totality based on each peculiarity, and autonomy. The fact that each component is ultimately interconnected can be realized by the chain reactor of the sensor. According to artist Kim, when one part of the system changes, it can give influences on the overall system and this is the core attraction of kinetic works. By inducing the participation of the audience in his work, the audience serves as a driving force to actually move the work, this way, the artist intends to give a message that the small communication and changes between oneself and others ultimately contribute to their involvement with society. 

Artist So-hyun Moon realizes image works based on stop motion animation techniques using puppets. The society is represented by the reinterpretation of puppets and some cynical and terrible imagination is added to this. The puppet’s attitude and daring determination confronting somewhat cruel situations sometimes seems foolish and ridiculous. This way, artist Moon’s puppets are considered our own portraits living in the contemporary society and show them to us in the third-person perspective inviting us to clearly see the situation in which we are in. Artist Moon is seeking a method to create unique rhythms of images by way of juxtaposing non-manipulated real successive movements with manipulated false segmental movement. 

Artist Yun-taekSa captures “movement/instant/motion” we can easily experience in our daily lives and expresses the visual embrace of the aspect in a pictorial way and he has been inquiring into the aesthetic possibilities related to this. This method proposes an attitude of new interpretation of paintings to see what kind of aspect can be presented by the result of collision and cross. It will be evidently possible to capture more sophisticated phenomena if digital technology effects are used, but this can be the problem problem posing of potentiality and puissance of paintings regarding the tangled matrix of such anevent. Focused on the axis of time, artist Sa embraces distinct material motions along with emotional lyricism from the unconscious dimension and intends to express such hue on the canvas. 

Yoon-a Suh remembers a variety of moods surrounding her as air. The air is obviously invisible and intangible but the space-filling air perceives even the subtle emotions of objects from A to Z. Through numerous inquiries into materials, artist Suh records the memories of space by taking the techniques of piling up the charcoals on the thick papers. This space talks about humble, secret, obscure, and hazy feelings and people who encounter this familiar but unfamiliar space at the same time start to assimilate these feelings. Artist Suh carries out charcoal works in conjunction with drawings. She is also interested in publishing her drawing works in the form of books. 

Min-gyu Song spares some regular span of time every day to dedicate himself to drawings. His drawings are based on his experiences from daily life and the captured images are reinterpreted as signs and not as representations. These signs are also based on his personal interests (He is a lover of SF movies). His works thoroughly reflect individual experience and taste. Artist Song shows a moderate level of emotion. The texture of the paint brush carefully accumulates the touch one by one and the measured arrangement of neutral colors seems fairly objective. It is because the joy of interpreting signs gives an opportunity for using the full imagination. Artist Song inquires into the signs based on his own experiences and establishes a new visual language system in the contemporary society to invite us to experience the delight of an unusual visual language.

Gyung-su An is interested in unstable psychological attitudes and phenomena occurring in the boundary of landscape. He constantly goes around the vicinity of his house, looks for a vacant lot and he repeatedly visits the place and creates a relationship with the place. The environs of the vacant lot are under highly delicate and strict control. The vacant lot is left unattended but not isolated. Artist An expresses, on canvas, an unclear identity as the landscape and unstable places neglected by a certain order, this way, he goes to the original place and photographs insecure fixations and carries out works of returning the object of his drawing to the original place. This is a part of his intention of creating a relationship with the surrounding landscape, and the fragment of the artist’s research processes on the possibility of seizing a “symptom” beyond the narrative structure or the pictorial expression of his works. 

Lo-kyung Yi is making film as a temporary community in conjunction with creators from diverse genres such as dancers, stage actors and musicians. He is highly interested in political issues such as how a collaboration can be approached.  in the film site for film-making and how the process of filming to screening can be connected. This shares the same context with his work theme, and he reports the situation from different perspectives in the contradictory settings of consent and betrayal composed by individuals and society. Recently, in his work “The clever man in between two dogs”, artist Yi deconstructs the Chinese character獄 referring to confinement or imprisonment and reconstructs the meaning by mixing with the legend of “clever dogs” based on aseparate interpretation of significance of letter combination method. His interests in letters even expand to the dimension of individual recording and articulation device beyond the role or function of the letters themselves. This will be connected with the research on the relationship and contradictions regarding letters (scenario), humankind (actors), and memories.

Today, the experience of arts and the places to enjoy arts are in drastic change. In the real field of arts, Saeng-gang Lee, sometimes as an organizer, sometimes as an audience and evaluator, he always confirms that the spaces of experiencing arts are constantly changing. Moreover, Artist Lee pays attention to the possibility of the interface of arts which can exist in our real life and not necessarily within the boundary of a “place” or “space”. He is equally concerned about how to share his discoveries with the audience, therefore, he started to look for some places to meet the audience man-to-man, to avoid the limited “exhibition halls”. For this reason, he has been searching for the rooftops, squares and some adequate places to meet people face-to-face and he carried out “CROSS Project”. 

This year, Wan Lee completed “Made in” projects he has been carrying out for the last few years and currently, he proceeds with “Treasure” project. “Made in” Series started aiming at making a breakfast himself in person and he visited 12 Asian countries and cultivated the product from the local places in person. This way, artist Lee discovered that even one portion of breakfast contained the global capitalist system and past history in it. He proceeded with his works from the perspective of expansion from Asia inside toward the external side and not based on a dichotomy of East and West dealing with the contents of which Asian history, since post-colonial times, is transforming into neoliberalism in terms of tradition, religion, race, labor, politics and history.  In the successive “Treasure” project, the artist makes 3D scanning of the ruins of Asian Museums inside European countries and reproduces the 3D scanned works by 3D printing task. This way, he invites us to see how the Asian cultural heritage had been moved to Europe and he creates a reproduced Asian Museum by regaining and recovering the ruins based on new technology.

One day, Chae-young Lee experienced the familiar places she used to frequent looked like a piece of a scene, for instance, street lamps shining in the calm of night, signboards of the street and surrounding elements of old buildings of the city… These scenes are recorded in India ink on paper as if they are black-and-white pictures. Like this, through India ink, artist Lee expresses unique emotions coming from the places which are common but easy to be disregarded. She shows the intrinsic aspect of an object, by standing back from the object and keeping a certain distance and taking an objective attitude. Artist Lee plans to keep showing her interpretations of new places and time in black-and-white images she has discovered along with steady studies of methodological use of India ink, writing brush, and traditional Korean papers. 

“Are you happy” is composed of speech video of a happiness expert and the script video based on the lecture. For the configuration of lecture script, I consulted some happiness quotations from “happiness preacher”. Yoon-hee Choi and some statements from the hand-written poster “Are you really doing fine?” which was spread all over the country, and started from student movement in the winter of 2013. As for the script video, two words of “happiness” and “well-being” are presented by being hidden in scarlet and yellow space, while the happiness preacher gives a lecture by filing this space the first time with “happiness” and the second time with “well-being”. Artist Ah-ram Jeong paid attention to the fact that two social phenomena repetitively use the similar words of “happiness” and “well-being” of individuals, and through the articulation that overlaps the two phenomena by linguistic mediation, she asks questions about the correlation between the standardized collective ration that are connoted by the search of “happiness” and “well-being” and real individuals.

Su-yeon Choe pays attention to the phenomenon of which the past that exists only in an indirect way is repeatedly represented in a particular way, finally becomes permanent as an image of “tradition”. For representation, imagination is required along with historical research and individual aesthetic sense is applied. In this process, the discrepancy between substance and representation creates cracks such as awkwardness and foreignness. Artist Choe admits this difference and expresses the images of so-called tradition highlighting the artificial state by intensely revealing the superficial texture. She sometimes enlarges small and trivial things as a sort of solemn monument, treating shoddy materials like plastics as if she draws a marble sculpture, and sometimes the aesthetic sense of image itself is not compatible with the pictorial expression and it creates a sort of majestic feeling which was inexistent in the original material. 

Jin-yo Choi takes interest in the process of which an individual is socialized and he talks about “frames” such as the social system, institutions, and the structure in which an individual is internalized in the process of establishing relations. In the beginning, artist Choi set up a virtual system and described every step of the process in detail and showed the aspect of an individual as part of the process. However, he soon started to proceed with works by projecting the indistinct individual onto the artist himself. For the last 3 years, artist Choi has been conducting an experiment of directly delivering his serial works in the form of a publication to the audience. In this process, it was necessary to form standardized “frames” so as to effectively deliver it to as many people as possible. In a sense, such “frames” can be considered an indispensable choice for carrying on with his works. Recently, apart from the publication form, he also proceeds with a variety of events and performances to establish relations with the audience. 

Ran Hong pays special attention to the reality of which external beauty has turned into the ideal tangled with desire as well as the phenomena in which people lose something important by being blind by superficial and illusionary values. People overwhelmed by materialism dream of an ideal space that transcends this reality. However, on the other side, there is an existence cruelly trampled by the desire for utopia. Artist Hong presents crocodiles as a sacrificed existence and a fragile being in carrying on with works. By confronting crocodiles and landscape painting, which is a universal subject for Oriental paintings, in the top-bottom structure, artist Hong shows the aspects of reality in which utopia and dystopia are chaotically blended in diverse ways of painting, installation, and collage.  

Many people filling a huge space… They encounter by accident and just pass by one another but the sense of existence vanishes away into the air. Since 2013, artist Gyung-hyun Hwang has been constantly drawing the aspects of the crowd who is incessantly rambling around subway stations, terminals, tourist sites, and train stations. He intends to observe the crowd from an omniscient viewpoint standing back from them and rediscover the inherent aspects of modern-day people. By fixing the black particles on the paper, through this intense black-white contrast, artist Hwang represents the landscape and talks about inner instability of humans with remote settlement possibility as well as the ideal which subtly coexists within, from the perspective of painting. In the painting works, artist Hwang plans to keep researching on “screen” such as material property and structure of matters as well as the interpretative process of the objects and he intends to expand the work activities in a wide range of ways including utilization of middle media.