| |
Having drawn attention from Germany and other parts of the world for her inter-activity work involving image, installation, sound, and the active participation of the audience, this is the first time Kim Hee-seon participated in an exhibition in Daegu. Kim showcases temporal and special experience, relations and communications between people, and extends to reflect on the issues of life and death in a unique manner.
As an artist, she creates new stories by surfacing various memories from her childhood and makes them live through the experiences and memories of other people. She works by collecting other people¡¯s autobiographic stories and letters, emails and interviews from various media outlets, and then brings out universal feelings from them all. She then develops a bond of sympathy. At the same time, she brings up national, political and social issues, and how they relate to an individual. Her work, which is presented in moderation and refinement, retains a will to uplift the world in a creative way while being considerate of and flexible toward other people¡¯s feelings and thoughts.
For this special exhibition, Kim creates artworks, armed with her unique sense and imaginative power, to offer the audience an opportunity to better appreciate art as a form of communication, while amply considering the specificity of an Art Fair and a venue packed with people.
The art piece, Home, used an apartment at night, the most common residence in big Korean cities, and secretly peeps into peoples lives voyeuristically. The audience stands on a balcony at the entrance of the exhibition and is given a vantage point to observe the lives of ordinary people in the opposite side of the apartment. An individual space, divided into rooms, it shows scenes of a family having a meal together, people hanging clothes at night, or going in and out from the veranda. It opens up an extremely common daily activity of anonymous people.
The audience is allowed to freely search the daily life of each home using telescopes positioned diagonally on the balcony. When the audience focuses on one point, a secrete scene closes up. The audience experience becomes active, as though they are involved in the lives of the people they are observing. The audience is able to see a couple arguing, or in the privacy of their bed. While overlapping with other peoples daily lives through this experience, the audience is able to glimpse at the pleasure and sorrow, happiness and fear of people, all events related to our own lives, including bizarre events that happen when there is impersonal and discontinued communication. At the same time, the audience is made aware of the fact that we live in a society inundated with random bits of information, while facing disclosed individual details against our will.
This leads us to feel scared. Moreover, in such a common residence, the corpse of a solitary elderly person is often discovered, long after his or her death. Upon depicting the common life in a normal home situation, Home lets us reflect on the absence of sincere communication in today¡¡s society and the power of information that could violate the rights of an individual, a component of an indifferent society.
The ultimate objective of this exhibition is to emphasize communications as a field we are all involved in, and this is how it has to be. Artists will deal with issues of encountering people, exchanging ideas, and communicating with each other, through interactive multimedia artworks within a specific space, as an art fair where art galleries with different objectives and viewers interact. This exhibit forecasts the future direction of art that flows against the direction of commercial purposes in a specimen market that dominates today¡¯s art.
Curator Park Soyong
|
|
