Acrobatic Cosmos : b - o - o - k: Son Hyun Seon, Yoon Ji Young, Chang Seo Young
Chapter II is pleased to announce an exhibition, ‘b – o – o – k’, by ‘Acrobatic Cosmos’, a project group of Son Hyun Seon , Yoon Ji Young and Chang Seo Young, from 21st December 2018 to 2nd February 2019 in Yeonnam-dong, Seoul.
‘Acrobatic Cosmos’ established by three artists who deal with different media such as painting, sculpture and video, had the first exhibition at One And J. Gallery in March, 2018. This exhibition at Chapter II shows a tendency of a prequel to the last exhibition which adopted the project’s name for its title.
‘Persistent and broad deliberation on invisible presence’ was a main subject of the group’s initial investigation. The first exhibition attempted to manifest the theme, whereas, as the word mentioned in the above paragraph, ‘prequel’, suggests, this new exhibition presents the group’s fundamental artistic aim and a journey of achieving it.
The three artists have explored unspecific yet existent shapes by applying their own distinct experiences, imagination and visual approaches. Even though naming these figures does not enable them to gain a semiotic and aesthetic connection with actual objects due to their invisibility, the act of defining ‘unseen objects’ is an intuitive and also considerably receptive attempt as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913, Switzerland) assisted that “the relationship between the signifier and signified is arbitrary”.
Borrowing a structure of archiving, the artists’ works are neatly juxtaposed with each other on a large-scale table which occupies the exhibition space. It is intriguing that some completed works and secondary fragments variously used in a course of production coexist.
Hyunseon Son’s new work, ‘Mirror’ (2018), conveys the artist’s interest in illustrating colorless fluid matter including water and wind. In terms of visualizing water and wind, her previous practice captured conditions of certain objects—their physical movements, in other words—to convert the intangible targets into a two-dimensional representation, while the mirror signifies an artistic record of not only its function of reflecting other objects, but its physical existence as one body. Water, wind and a mirror possess their physicality and directly accompanied effects, however, contrary to water and wind—the natural phenomena, the artifact, a mirror without reflections, demonstrates ‘a state that a function does not perform’. In this context, we can expect that the notion of ‘function’ would progress into one of Son’s artistic mechanisms providing a variety of narratives to her practice.
Jiyoung Yoon has examined a fundamental question, “What is an object?” through diverse experiments. In this exhibition, she mainly displays several silicon planes, sketches and copies of 3D drawings of a human body which offer a clue to speculate Yoon’s working process. When Hyunseon Son employs a cup to represent water, the presence of a cup is not necessarily a prerequisite for water. On the other hand, ‘the propositional relation’ is a key leitmotif of Yoon’s practice, as Yoon reflects upon the other side of universal comprehension of the human cognitive system in which an epidermal response to visual stimuli defines and represents objects. Thus, in order to overcome such standpoints that a cup restricts and distorts an existence of water, Yoon logically makes a disclosure of a dominant-subordinate relationship between perceptions and materials which are permanently intertwined in natural states.
In Chang Seo Young’s video, ‘Hat, Candle, Cake’ (2017), three different objects appear to suggest each separate way of measuring time. Time is sometimes explained as a specific condition where a sense of self-identity continuously collapses in natural circumstances. This understanding corresponds with principles of international atomic time defining one second depending on oscillation frequency of a Cesium atom. Circular grid scale paper on a plinth is a device indicating the lapse of time; disappearing by 30 degrees, it consequently turns into a circular cone shape whose angle becomes acute. Completely exposing grids of the surface, the circular cone plays a clear role of a dummy which manifests time. In this regard, it has a similarity to Son Hyun Seon’s cup and a conceptual definition of a surface in Jiyoung Yoon’s practice. Chang’s approach to ‘time’ which stands for a practical standardized definition of obscure notions steadily develops into a connection between ordinary objects and causal processes, and moreover it leads time to adapt itself to human sensory receptors in its own mode.
