Oh You Kyeong: Chaotic but Poetic
Chapter II is delighted to announce Oh You Kyeong’s solo exhibition, ‘Chaotic but Poetic’ from 6th September to 14th October in Yeonnam-dong, Seoul.
The central subject of Oh You Kyeong’s practice is circularity. This scientific and conceptual phenomenon, ‘Circulation’, is underpinned by existence of independent and interconnected realms and human recognition of them. Gaia, Hyper-Connected and Chaos theories explain that circulation is not only united and ubiquitous among organisms and members of society, but also unspecified and unpredictable. As its lexical definition indicates, circulation includes interaction and interference regularly occurred between materials and non-materials. Furthermore, these activities define each system’s characteristic, provide constancy to it, and develop a boundary to the other system.
Oh You Kyeong aims at creating ‘Open Space’ and adopts a notion of circulation as a crucial element for her work of art. This space is under several laws of physics which dominate the special environment of the earth where air, water, fire and ground broadly called as four elements since ancient times continue interacting. She borrows certain effects and phenomena triggered by immaterial factors such as the current of air, gravity and light in order to effectively convey her intention. Oh has constantly employed them as essential artistic features: for example, the convection currents generated by spectators’ movements (Spectrums of Earth : Inverse Mobile, 2016), the ebb and flow of the tide caused by the gravitational pull of the moon (Entanglement_Mirror 2, 2015) and the reflection and diffusion of light (Moon’s Pagoda, 2013). In this context, Oh sometimes addresses her identity as a mediator or an ascetic.
In this exhibition, she unveils new piece entitled ‘Salt City (2017)’— a performance art showing a process in which hundreds of salt blocks on the foreshore of the west coast are steadily reduced, modified and ultimately disappeared due to the tide; she documented the course for 18 hours which stand for one cycle of the tide, and a 12 minutes single channel video of its edited version will be presented in the show. The work proves that the artist’s approach takes a step forward since she actively participates in the cycle by employing salt which is a water soluble material gained from the ocean, instead of simply applying the concept of natural circularity frequently embodied in her past works. Salt City follows the formal structure of Land Art on account of the fact that it is a onetime happening and it transforms the non-artistic medium, a white block figure of salt lumps, into a minimal shape of a pagoda. Especially, the combination of the foreshore and salinity reminds of Robert Stevenson (1938 - 1973)’s monumental Land Art, Spiral Jetty (1970, Utah, USA).
Influenced by the gravitation of the moon which locates dozens of kilometres away, the salt pagoda gradually vanishes when the encroaching tide submerges its lower parts. It is a visual stigma revealing the providence of natural cycles and invisible forces existing in an ordinary surrounding along with the artist’s own recollection of altitude sickness she experienced during the trip to the Himalaya. Traces and thin faulted salt blocks discovered after the ebb tide enable viewers to realisethat the circulating act of the earth rotation alters shapes of artificial constructions and brings about an irreversible outcome—a reversion of salt in this case. Consequently, the work evokes a sense of awe at the lapse of time and natural phenomena appeared in the work, and arouses a bizarre poetic inspiration. Also, through her documentary video in a fixed frame, Oh You Kyeong demonstrates that the prolonged economic status of salt slowly melts away in an attempt to criticise the development of capitalism which has disclosed its extreme drawbacks and to share her philosophical contemplation on ‘Finite and Infinite’.
This solo exhibition will be an opportunity to review one year’s achievement of the artist selected as one of the first residents in Chapter II Residency. It is supported by the Art Practice Supporting Project 2017 of Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture. Oh You Kyeong graduated from the University of Seoul and The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSBA), Paris. She is currently broadening her artistic scope by attending multiple exhibitions at major museums and foundations such as Palais de Tokyo (Nouvelle vaguel, Paris, 2013), Okayama Art Summit (Distance, Okayama, 2012), Hermès (Condensation, Tokyo, Seoul, 2014), Buk Seoul Museum of Art (Accidental Encounter, Seoul, 2015), OCI Museum (Six Sense, Seoul, 2015) and Clayarch Gimhae Museum (Earth, Gimhae, 2016).
