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16/11/2011

Innerspacing the City

Chelsea Art Museum, New York

curated by Denise Carvalho

Featured artists: Jungju An Charlie Hahn JaeWook Lee Na-Hyun, HeeJin Park Kwan Taeck Park Gyung Jin Shin

Chelsea Art Museum is pleased to present Innerspacing the City, curated by Denise Carvalho, Ph.D. Innerspacing the City explores the ambivalence of experiencing urban life in the performative body, within human relations, and through language. This theme is examined through the work of seven young Korean artists and their perception of utopian society as an abstract, distant, inaccessible entity that is beyond their control. In their hands, however, the city is personalized, and limited to their individual emotional and critical responses. In this way, the city becomes a vehicle for dialogue between reality and the ideal.

However, all of the underlying concepts represented in their works share a duality: between Seoul and New York City, South and North, local and global, space and time, real and ideal – and between the past and the future. The philosophical perception of what we refer to as “real” has shifted throughout history, from the Cartesian split between mind and body, to the Kantian approach through reason, to the moving body in relation to its surroundings. Ultimately, the exhibition as a whole focuses on a collective consciousness, rather than the subjective. However, the question remains: is what we call “real,” or its lack thereof, merely symbolic and ideological? Or is the “real” the fragmentary and the personal actions that allow us to dream about something beyond itself?

JaeWook Lee’s All men are created equal Bullshit (2011) consists of two slide projections of the artist transporting water through his mouth, from shore to river to ground, as he writes Thomas Jefferson’s immortal phrase, “All men are created equal” - to which he adds: bullshit. The artist’s laborious action appears absurd in light of New York City’s shoreline of majestic skyscrapers, emblematic of the overdeveloped city in contrast to the potent struggle of the masses against neo-liberal capitalism. The action blurs distinctions between the experience of art, the art object and the space of art, challenging the city’s control of art in the public space. The fact that the work was written with water also leads to the ephemeral nature of the work, just as contemporary art becomes obsolescent in its organic integration with media culture. Moreover, Lee’s work repeats processes of generating and destroying symbols that are removed from art, reminding us of our aesthetic nature that creates and transforms through beauty and crisis.

Na-Hyun's Painting on Water (2009) is the result of two experiments: to represent through painting on a paper, and to experiment with the same process on the surface of water, which it is, accordingly to the artist, an unpredictable substance to control. Na-Hyun’s use of water as calligraphic medium references an early Korean artist, Han Seok-bong, who, due to poverty, practiced calligraphy on a rock using a brush drenched in water. The whole process of painting in water entails the struggle between human will and the will-less state of the artist according to nature’s response.

This struggle or interaction between human and nature parallels an evolving and objective historical construct. Thus, the artist approaches history through the position of the margins, as he destabilizes history through his own subordination to water or nature. His attempt at objectively representing an image on water fails. The same attempt to control the substance of water can be paralleled to the building and control of cities. Seoul’s recreational space, Cheonggyecheon, for example, was once a stream covered with concrete to be used as a road. Since ancient times humans have attempted to control water through heightening riverbanks; building bridges, dams, and channels; cutting water with tunnels; and polluting water with oil, chemicals and, most recently, through gas fracking or fracturing.

These latest technological advances utilized in order to control our natural resources have resulted in them becoming scarce, polluted and unavailable for future generations. The artificial landscapes we build transform our own subjectivity. But nature continues to drive human necessity, whether through the building and functioning of our topographies, which become historicized, or through our own dehumanization or the disappearance of numerous life forms and natural habitats. Thus our natural inheritance enables us to find new ways of redefining ourselves.

HeeJin Park’s Take Out Art (2011) explores the boundaries between reductive information and economic value often associated with the labeling of art. The artist mixes the reductive function of practical information seen in museum labels with the contingent, personal, and social language of graffiti, reinserting its tagging and texting into the stoic and depersonalized format of the label. HeeJin Park’s intention is to ironically assign institutional authority to the anonymous language of graffiti, giving it an encoded visibility and authenticity through the format of the label. In New York City or in Seoul, graffiti has become a highly stylized art language, no longer perceived as marginal art, with works that are commissioned by advertising companies or as public projects mixed together with graffiti created as vandalism or as defacement of public property. HeeJin Park’s installation addresses the duality of our interpretations and perceptions, blurring distinctions, as well as transforming the unpleasant to the pleasurable and making what is fake real.

The altering of signifiers in the transmutation of things highlights the differences that transform objectively classified practices. Kwan Taeck Park’s installation, The Future of the Present (2011), is a collection of photographs and transparencies of the artist’s family album. The use of personal memories in his work counteracts a depersonalized mass produced culture that does not differentiate people, cities, or art, making also invisible and reductive the personal specificities that lead to social change. Layers of photographs hang like windows within windows, but instead of abstracting the information, each photo’s personal story enables the viewer’s sense of recognition.

The installation begins with the wedding of the artist’s grandparents in Seoul in 1948, and ends with their sixtieth wedding anniversary in 2008, covering the lives of Park’s grandparents and their descendants over a period of sixty years. Simultaneously, the work shows the flow of Korean modern history through the lens of the artist’s private life, rejecting the use of photography as a tool to sustain an image of stillness or self-preservation, which is used by the media to perpetuate, perfect, or stigmatize the human image. The experience of moving through the installation is also a strategic part of perceiving change. As black-and- white photos are replaced by digital color, showing the passage of time through technology, there is no ideological or moral construct in the way the images are placed together, no clear message of whether the lives of the people portrayed have become better or happier.

Jungju An’s Breaking to Bits (2007) is a video installation which depicts the demolition of a school building at the Songwon Foundation in Gwangju, in Korea. In the video, sounds and images of laborers tearing down window frames, ripping down floors, and excavating outer walls, all play variations of the same tune, with its own phonetic value. As a Dionysian orchestra, brutal and mechanized sounds of destruction are apprehended as spectacular or sublime. From the perspective of the anonymous onlooker, the modern notion of the city is perpetuated across time and space in its invasive and destructive qualities, like a factory that continues to churn out consumerist products without rest. Despite this impending awareness in the artist’s work, Breaking to Bits sustains a rather relaxed tone and tempo, emphasizing An’s interest in capturing the tumultuous clamor of everyday life as a sonorous continuum, as an overall contemplative hum.

Gyung Jin Shin’s Mimicking Venus (2011) is a video installation of the artist’s performance exploring the body’s dual characteristics: the basis and outcome of the Platonic ideal that links nature and reason. In the video, the artist’s body is inserted into a modified replica of a ‘pointing machine’ (La Machinetta di punta), a measuring tool invented in the 18th Century to replicate sculptural models from wood, wax, and plaster into marble and stone. In Shin’s piece, the Platonic ideal of form is replaced by a mechanical apparatus as the artist’s body is measured by metal needles that protrude into the body’s space, restraining its organic form and freedom of motion. The irony of the organic/prosthetic relation is that the mechanical ideal, or the fake representation of the ideal, lacks the organic potential for synchronicity, which is indispensable for any functional relation. This is shown here as the artist keeps organically “recalculating” her posture over and over again. The material replication of aesthetic form can be reversed from its ideal trap when we think of imitation in the Aristotelian tradition, as a form of recognition and understanding. In this way, reenacting can become a powerful tool for the very process of subject formation outside of the regime of power.

Charlie Hahn’s Stand (3-D) (2010) is an installation that utilizes basic perspective drawing as an ultimate virtuality. Lines and forms are juxtaposed on the surface of real, physical objects in larger-than-life scale, visually interacting with the space and conveying distortions as a result of socio-virtual perspectival standpoints toward pre-virtualized elements. Informed by the ‘80s French group, Supports/Surfaces, which was aimed at disrupting and redeploying the canvas and the stretcher through folding, crumpling and tying methods, Hahn expands on these strategies by destabilizing the surface and the frame all together through geometrical traces or fragments, showing a gathering of arbitrary and unrelated indexes. Instead of a projected ideal world that evolves continuously and linearly, what we end up with is a fragmentary model of a world of chaos. In any case, chaos here does not mean destruction, but its opposite: the infinite possibilities of the collective imaginary in the actual experiences of time and space.

Image: JaeWook Lee. All men are created equal Bullshit (2011). Two slide projectors. Courtesy of the artist.

For more information please contact:
Chris Longfellow Press Officer The Chelsea Art Museum 212-255-0719 x 108 press@chelseaartmuseum.org

Press Preview With the Artists: Thursday, November 17, 5pm – 6pm
Opening Reception: Thursday, November 17, 6pm – 8pm

Chelsea Art Museum
556 West 22nd Street 212 New York
Hours: tuesday – saturday: 11am – 6pm. Thursday: 11am – 8pm. Sunday – Monday: Closed
Ticket: adults: $8, students: $4, seniors: $4, members: free, 16 and under: free

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