Chronicles of Influence: Son Jong Jun, Oh You Kyeong, Yoon Suk One, Yi Sa Ra
Chapter II is pleased to present a group exhibition “Chronicles of Influence” by Oh You Kyeong, Son Jong Jun, Yoon Suk One and Yi Sara from 11th November 2016 to 6th January 2017 to commemorate the opening of Chapter II in Yoennam-dong, Mapo-gu, Seoul as a part of Utopia Inc. (Representative, Chun Seop Chio)’s corporation mecenat activities.
A manifestation of the present period’s tendency through artworks can be considered as a main task of artists; it sprouts on account of the artists’ intellectual activities led by an interaction with groups which they essentially belong to, such as their society and nation. As a member of them, an artist gains subjective experiences by consistently participating and mutually interfering in several issues from trivial incidents of his or her surroundings to meta-discourses of one community.
Modes of interpreting and expressing the stimulation from the exterior interruptions are visualized by an artist’s own determination for creation. They evolve into the artist’s original style and ultimately define the artist’s characteristics. Thus, the final outcome, artworks become a kind of a barometer estimating how those outer aspects influence a formation of one artist’s aesthetic conception.
Oh You Kyeong’s installation work, Created Mountains (2008, 2016) embodies features of mountains by employing a combination of several helium-filled balloons and black fabrics. Each balloon’s helium content maintains a floating state of the fabric and it decides not only height of contour lines but also the overall lay of the artificial mountains. Buoyancy and gravity, fundamental external forces applied to the balloons which possess a physical limit, exist out of the artist’s control. Eventually, the lapse of time recreates an erosion phenomenon, reminding of nature’s circularity.
By adopting imageries of stone statues as his subject matter, Yoon Suk One pays attention to long-standing traces of time contained in the statues’ surfaces damaged by unexpected external factors such as erosion and weathering or natural disasters and wars Meditation (2014). Yoon transforms existing scenes through diverse methods of highlighting or removing their original texture. Hence, his practice is a pictorial process restoring vanished vestiges of the scenes, carried out through entirely artist’s own imagination against an irreversible trait of time.
Yi Sara’s video piece, Double Reflection: Seoul (2013) shows her documentary approach to how a notion of “Otherizing” is remained and reconstructed in the current Seoul. To stereotype others and other groups has lasted as long as human history and it displays itself in a form of discrimination, fantasizing and violence; these modes of reactions to specific targets are decided by varied elements such as historical backgrounds, regions, a level of wealth, and civilization. Foreigners in the video selected by the artists represent a variety of perspectives that they received by the others in public places of Seoul. The viewpoints include contempt, criticism, suspicion and astonishment and they consequently reveal our typical unconscious responses to the outlander.
Son Jong Jun’s Defensive Measure (2012) portrays the contemporary society in which a self-defensive mechanism and aggressive attitudes towards other people are solidified as one of the social-pathological phenomena due to harmful effects of Capitalism and a collapse of traditional values, for example, intensified individualism, excessive competition and polarization. Especially, reinforced individualism generates a certain pattern of discrimination whose targets were restricted to the outside of a society, yet it now broadens its boundaries into the inside of homogenous groups. It ultimately encourages a trend of mutual distrust as a reaction of the situation, and furthermore it brings about a demand for psychological and physical defensive measures. Through multiple shapes of metal outer covers overlaid onto a human body, Son metaphorically describes that the self-defensive mentality is one of cases demonstrating loss of humanity stemmed from an age of materialism, typified by a machine civilization.
