Fog Dossier is a collaborative research by artist Jeuno JE Kim and curator Kyongfa Che. The project thinks about our relation to history, whether it is to observe, escape or to be free from it, and different personal and public collections/archives that offer new points of departure. Tailored especially for Art Sonje Center, Fog Dossier Set 1: Seoul, the exhibition presents three new works from the project; The Collectors (2010), a video which the artist and curator co-directed; a drawing installation The Collectors’ Parade; and Fog Research Dossier, a blue print of the project composed of 2 books that contain images and texts produced by the artist and curator which are bound inside dossiers.

The project is an idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, events and history, engaging with found material in order to produce new historical information and perspective. As a process, the project collates four figures: Yanagi Soetsu (1889 -1961), William Morris (1834-1896), Isabella Lucy Bird (1831-1904) and Georg Everhard Rumphius (1627-1702) – four seemingly disparate figures in history whose common ground can be that each of them generated and left significant bodies of textual records and archival material from their lives and work. They had each negotiated with awkward realities within their specific historical contexts, and had produced works and left documents that reveal contradictions in their thinking; paradoxes that resist our desire for “making sense”, which stems from oversimplification of the past and our present lives.

Operating between the fictive and factual, the found and constructed, the project generates art works whose articulation rests on a matrix of citation and juxtaposition, suggesting unexpected crosscurrents in affective associations. Each work, via narrative, collage and montage, is an attempt to collect relations and material, inserting in the historical layers personal experiences, so that it may become a part of a collective articulation that resists a monolithic take on history. In doing so, the project produces its own archive – a Fog Dossier.