MESH!!!
This year, Gallery Jung Mi So has chosen Kim Mikyung as an external invited curator to introduce three emerging artists. Kim Mikyung is currently a professor of Art History at Kangnam University and the head of KARI (Korean Modern & Contemporary Art Research Institute).
This exhibition reflects Gallery Jung Mi So’s desire to promote dialogue and debate as well as to facilitate how such debates can inform the contemporary art world.
What makes this exhibition especially significant is that it is not only the very first event sponsored by KARI, but it also reflects our enthusiasm towards this innovative organization.
What ‘MESH!!!’should accomplish, from our perspective, is to help metamorphosize our sardonic society and regressive negative attitudes which result from the break-down of communal life, spiritual isolation, and fragmentation. What is catalized is something analogous to what we define to be 'a novel communicative stance'. This is the starting point for the main theme of this exhibition. We at Gallery Jung Mi So aspire through this exhibition to bring about at least some mutual understanding, active identity and a reviving stimulant for the viewers.
This exhibition is a fine opportunity for the community and the artists to participate in self-examination, ponder the purpose of contemporary art, and develop a method of how to speak about issues through a contemporary lens that can be reflected our daily lives.
By Gallery Jung Mi So
The Potential of an Interlocking and Mutual Understanding MESH!!!
Knowing exactly how isolated your thoughts are and avoiding misunderstanding between others is extremely tough to get used to, especially amid this period of relentless division in society, and art in general.
There are some good moments where we think we have finally reached some kind of tangency over artistic opinions. However, after discovering undesirable incompatibilities, we face yet another set of intangibles that makes the picturesque world of mutual understanding ignis fatuus. An all too familiar situation occurs when one assumes they know what other people think. This is the point where the 'picturesque' turns into 'grotesque' - largely because what the second person knows is regarded as unfounded vis-a-vis the original intention of the first. So, after realizing the truth of illusional tangency, perhaps it is necessary to ask ourselves “Just what is really knowing my own art?”The apparent epiphenomenal mix-up of consciousness and the involuntary tendency of an unintended distortion often come from the pursuit of the 'pseudo-aesthetic grail'.
For about seven months, three emerging artists and an exhibition planner have gathered to make such an idealistic tangency actually happen. In other words, they have been trying to reassure each other about ideas regarding artistic thought; mutual understanding of the same intrinsic attributes being the sole constituent of their uni-vocalism. This required an interlocking of the independent ideas of the three artists - Ron Saunders, Jin Shiu and Yi Joungmin - and the chief exhibition planner Kim Mikyung. Hence, what makes this exhibition unique is that it not only relies upon on-site senses or an instant collection of expendables, but also draws a network between a critic’s outside academic perspective and the producers' incipient experience. In addition to this exhibition, this collaboration will undergo a final process during a roundtable discussion with an audience on the 3rd of March.
Endless Dividing of Our Web of Thoughts
What is so-called 'faction' represents the compounded concept of fact and fiction used in post-modernism and also explored by author Jorge Luis Borges. Even though our perception of something may seem to be obviously true, even to the point of actually seeing it, our interpretation of that event can easily be nothing more than a fabricated conception.
Whereas a masterpiece(the pseudo-aesthetic grail) is something that transcends all these conceptual restrictions by venerating an ever-lasting factualness, in reality, art work reveals the impossibility of perfect completeness. Collaboratively, the team of four began their conversation about a faction web and the notion of space-time fabric. The artists then talked about roaming over this interface, navigating between an obsession of a masterpiece and it’s legacy, a rhisomatic transiency, and the division/recomposition of reality and virtual-reality. What this conversation should help us attain is the ever-changing extension and transformation of the gallery that that is dependent on a temporal point caused by the movement of bodies and a glimpse into the thoughts of the four. Ultimately, this will wire up the whole of MESH!!!.
Ron Saunders, one of the three participants, demonstrates the proposition of producing a "perfect painting". Many artists for centuries have looked into the materialization of such a task, which in absolute terms, is unpractical. This particular implication is translated through the use of a pendulum in Saunders’work. More precisely, as the pendulum's non-artificial movement spontaneously creates whatever form of painting, the movement itself is realized by using a force and structure independent of the artist’s hand, which always entails some form of flaw. This work therefore requires an inquisition of the prematurely considered variables of what the pendulum is capable of painting. Furthermore, machines are thought to be able to create something from nothing, reflecting its own desire and wishes. In this exhibition, the artist uses layers, which include elements of photography and geometric formations harmonized with the environment, a brick wall, a steel plate blocking the windows and the thin ray of light from the gap between the window and steel plate in the gallery wall. On the floor, he visually connects a spatial dual-structure using the glass ceiling/floor which can be viewed from above and below.
Yi Joungmin's 'Freeze Frame' body of work focuses on the molecular moments existing between momentary elements. It draws our attention not to processing of acts or continuous narratives, but to sudden the advent of an 'awakening moment'. What this awakening moment suggests is evident in argument that the perpetuity of a masterpiece should be let go. In contrast to what M. Proust argues in “Search of Lost Time" where transcendence of a temporal state and the regressive unification of consciousness is important, Yi Joungmin’s work focuses on the molecular moment within the framework of an enormous Mesh.
Jin Shiu systematizes the cyclical phenomenon of words, texts, and images by continuously injecting his thinking process and emotions into images of stammering words, texts, and inexact moments. By this process he creates drawings, object installation, and single-channel video. So, in one work, Jin attempts to demonstrate the latent meaning of a stammer "aall hhuman iis kkkkindd" instead of the clear enunciation of "All human is kind". This process is also implemented in his single-channel video piece which relies on our expectation of a common phrase. Here, he takes the common sentence "Anyway, I'm so sorry" which has lost some of its power due to over-usage, and writes it in blood from his fingers.
The work of these three artists are intended to relate to an ever-changing reality which contains both a temporal extension and a perpetual space within the framework of a sophisticated mesh, all of which has derived from the discussions between the planner and the three artists.
Splitting and discontinuation of our society has, up to this point, been predominant, encouraging the rumination of bizarre soliloquy. But, despite such social circumstances, three artists have attempted to change a deeply ingrained predominant stance of negativity which could perhaps provide something hopeful for the pessimists who consider such attempts to be foolish.
By Kim Mikyung / A professor of Kangnam Univ., A head of KARI
