ART-PRESENTATION: Gimhongsok vs. SEO Hyun-Suk
The exhibition “2019 Title Match: Gimhongsok vs. SEO Hyun-Suk—Incomplete Ruins” presents newly commissioned works by Gimhongsok and SEO Hyun-Suk. Gimhongsok has been reinterpreting concepts and ideas that are embedded in different phenomena that occur in and around art, disrupting the conventional perception of art. In the meantime, SEO Hyun-Suk has been examining the meaning of theatricality and architecture by connecting different places and locations under the context of modernity.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art Archive
For the exhibition the two artists created new works that investigate the conditions of validity for today’s art that exist in a world where absolute values are vanished and our senses are captivated by the capital and its spectacles. Born in 1964, Gimhongsok lives and works in Seoul. He studied sculpture at Seoul National University and graduated in 1987, and then conducted postgraduate studies at Kunst Academy Düsseldorf. His conceptual art practice resists stylization, with works taking wildly varying forms and spanning many mediums, including video, performance, installation, painting and sculpture. The artist is a member of the three-piece art collective “Xijing Men”. He often imbues abstract meaning in everyday forms to interrogate the relationships between art and society, and to examine how art is able to exist in shifting economic and cultural systems. Gimhongsok presents works that reveal discomfort incurred by incompleteness and imperfection. The works deal with the suspicion towards completeness, perfection, and order under the title “Human Order”. The project reconsiders the order and structure created through social consensus, such as the conventional concepts of beauty and artwork. The artist also puts himself under self-censorship through which he discloses his own suspicion and caution towards what he has been accepting as activities that fall under different categories of art activities. In “Theatre of Dusts”, SEO Hyun-Suk invites viewers to look at the alternative reality in which Buk-Seoul Museum of Art turned into “ruins”. Created in the form of virtual reality, the work overviews a situation where the ideal of the avant-garde, which dreamed of utopia and believed that art could change the world, has been collapsed. In addition, the viewers are asked to become performers of the artist’s site-specific performance and roam through the museum’s gallery and different spaces inside and outside the museum building, sensing emotional stir through a variety of artistic devices staged by the artist. In 2019 Title Match, Gimhongsok’s “incompleteness” and SEO Hyun-Suk’s “ruins” are working as concepts that are employed by the artists to make candid confessions about the confusing state of being artists in the era of no absolute values and reveal a process of thought towards art activities. The ways through which the two artists create their works seem to point to disparate directions that cannot be matched under the frame of “title match”. However, the different elements employed by the two artists generate meanings in a certain structure.
Info: SeMA, Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, 1238 Dongil-ro, Nowon-gu, Seoul, Duration: 28/6-15/9/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Fri 10:00-20:00, Sat-sun 10:00-19:00, http://sema.seoul.go.kr
