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7/5/2008

Dongducheon

New Museum, New York

Insa Art Space of the Arts Council Korea organizes “Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision,” a 2 year-long project for commissioning new art productions and cultural discourses on the local community of Dongducheon in S. Korea. This project is initiated from “Museum as HUB”, an inter-institutional network & partnership program by New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Composed of exhibition, workshop, symposium, lectures, talks & discussions, archive and film screening, “Dongducheon Project” presents 12 new artworks by 4 invited Korean artists, Koh Seung Wook, Sangdon Kim, Rho Jae Oon, and siren eun youg jung in exhibitions at New Museum and IAS.

Dongducheon is a small city with 88,000 population in the land of 96kmq. Located halfway between the capital city Seoul and the South Korean Front Line to North Korea, the city has been allotted by the central government for stationing foreign military bases over the half century since the Japanese Colonial era. Almost the half portion of its territory is occupied currently by the US Army bases, and most of the rest land is taken by mountains. Squeezed in-between, people of Dongducheon have had rare options for their survival besides succumbing to the top-down policies made by mega-structural powers. The city has served-and been structured and represented- only as a “military camp town.” The problem here is not just the fact that there have been a series of whatever interventions, regulations and controls inflicted to the region by external invisible hands behind the scene, but also that the levels and means of the interventions were so fundamental and continuous as to in terfere onto interpersonal and inter-communal recognition, communication and relationship. In these times of new world order, expansive global capitalism, corporate developmentalism and competitive privatization, the city stands bare in front of us as a site of collective negation, manipulation, elimination, exception, oblivion and non-visibility.

With the help of art and artist as creative public agents, this project suggests to be a medium of reinterpretation, articulation, communication, provocation and action on the region, all of which would eventually require us to critically reexamine the problems of our own minds and attitudes that have contributed to ongoing neglect and misunderstandings on the region. As the first attempt to locate Dongducheon in the structure of art production and cultural discourses, this project wishes to evoke diverse perspectives and discussions on other similar “neighborhood” regions, which is convinced to support autonomous local voices’ awareness and will to envision the future of Dongducheon.

Among numerous social apparatuses framing the contextual understanding of the region, this project claims to set the first priority on the subjects of local community. Artists, corresponding to each individual singularity, approach different communities of the region and develop different tools and ideas in dealing with their most urgent issues. Various forms of interface including casual dialogues over meals and walks, intimate/formal interviews, document/literary text research, field trips, and participatory educational workshop were contrived in this process and employed in final artworks.

In his single channel video “Dribbling Mouth” based on photo archives and literary text, Koh Seung Wook delves into the issue of “naming” the undocumented or misrepresented subjects of the past, and following difficulty in articulating the issues related to them in the present time. Strictly counting on talks and interviews, Sangdon Kim reveals the points of local subjects’ encountering with the external reality and their subsequent counteraction by inventing co-opted new languages and memory in his new pieces, “Little Chicago,” “Foreign Apartment” and “Hold your breath for four minutes.” In “The Narrow Sorrow,” siren eun youg jung, through a series of intimate dialogues with present club workers, illuminates unregistered invisible beings marginalized in contemporary Dongducheon by marking their places and relating their unheard narratives in present situation of the region. In his web publishing “Bite the Bullet!,” Rho Jae Oon addresses the issues of perception and recognition structuralized on a fundamental level by the media simulacra of past and future. He examines the key metaphoric images recurring in Hollywood movies on the war memory that have programmed even our future envisioning through fast image circulation and wide dissemination in common culture.

In conjunction to the exhibit, two artist books by Koh Seung Wook and Sangdon Kim are published. A Dongducheon project book compiling talks and lecture programs will be published by IAS, ARKO with more essays by international contributors.

Talk Programs
Artist Talk & Public Discussion, Thursday, May 8, 7:30 p.m ., New Museum Theater
Moderated by Heejin Kim (Curator, IAS) & Lee Daehoon(NGO Studies, Sungkonghoe Univ., Seoul)

Public Forum, Friday, May 9, 7:00-9:00pm, AiCenter, NY
Hosted by Nodutdol activists for Korean Community Development

Lecture #1 : Theodore Hughes, Saturday, May 10, 3 p.m., New Museum Theater (Korean Literature & East Asian Studies, Columbia University, NY)

Lecture #2 : Hyun Sook Kim, Saturday, June 7, 3 p.m., New Museum Theater (Sociology, Wheaton College, MA)

Dongducheon Project Symposium, July 16, 2008, IAS, Seoul
- “Museum as HUB”(New Museum, Vanabbe Museum, Museo Tamayo, Townhouse Gallery, IAS)
- Lecture 3 : Brian Holmes (Cultural Critic, Paris)
- Artist Talk & Public Discussion
Artists, Hwang Sejun (Art Critic), Kang Hong-gu (Co-Director, Dongducheon People’s Coalition)

Insa Art Space, ARKO (Arts Council Korea)
90 Wonseo-dong, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea, 110-280
tel. 82 2 760 4728, fax. 82 2 760 4725
http://www.insaartspace.or.kr - ias@arko.or.kr
http://www.arko.or.kr
Contact: Heejin Kim, hjk@arko.or.kr


New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery New York, NY 10002
Museum Hours:
Wednesday 12-6 PM
Thursday and Friday 12-10 PM
Saturday and Sunday 12-6 PM
Monday and Tuesday closed
General Admission: $12
Seniors: $8
Students: $6
18 and under: Free

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