Art Sonje Screening & Artists Talk program accompanying HITE Collection’s When the Future Ended (2014. 2. 7 – 5. 10) is held at Arthall, Art Sonje Center. During the two days, ten participating artists will show their 14 major video works and engage in conversations with the audience. Jungah LeeYang is also scheduled to give a presentation on her 300/20 Project, the work that she has presented for this exhibition. This program serves as an opportunity to appreciate the works of the young eleven artists that six senior artists (Gimhongsok, Park Chan-kyong, Ahn Kyuchul, Inhwan Oh, Seoyoung Chung, Yeondoo Jung) had recommended, and further read each artist’s thought and perspective on the individual and society as the young generation living today, which is a timeframe that the older generation has constructed.

Works

RohwaJeong, Rotation

This work portrays communication between the artist, contemporary music composer and performer – RohwaJeong, Heera Kim, Trio Catch – exchanging the irregular messages without having met each other for 4 months. A receiver interprets the given message in one’s own way and passes the derived thought on to the next. This is an attempt to see to what extent misunderstanding comes into the particular act of communication.

RohwaJeong, Das Leben Der Anderen

Cutleries on the table are shared with other artists in residence. In the beginning they are arranged as if preparing for meal, but from a certain point they start to stack and overlap in disorder creating uncomfortably piercing sound. It represents an inevitable conflict and edged or forced manners in one’s relationship with others, whether or not it is arbitrary. The work shows a friction and happening of each individual within a relationship. At the same time, it talks about the gap between relationships that is formed by a different relationship derived from the established one.

RohwaJeong (Noh Yunhee & JeongHyunseok, 1981-) graduated from Kookmin University in 2007 with Bachelor’s degree in Sculpture, and started to work under the name of RohwaJeong. They were chosen as Emerging Artist for Art Space HUT, Jinheung Art Hall and Ssamzie Space, having their first solo shows entitled The Key in a Suitcase, Jinheung Art Hall and Complement, Art Space HUT in 2007 and the next, Single Room for 2 People (Emerging 8), Ssamzie Space in 2008. In between the major residency programs including Schloss Balmoral, Germany (2009) and Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris (2012) they participated in several group shows. They currently work in Geumchon, Geumchon 5th Residency Program in Seoul, Korea.

Seung-il Chung, Schaue und Höre

This work deals with seeing and hearing. As a match recorded close-up on video ignites, Robert Schumann’s Träumerei begins to play. Looking at the slowly burning match in this slow-motion picture and listening to the flowing background music at the same time make us think it resembles the lives of our own.

Seung-il Chung, Das Pflanzen

This is an attempt, of an Asian-born artist living in Europe, at cultural blend of Asia and Europe through his artwork. In Lake Fasanerie in the suburb of Munich, Chung does so-called rice planting originated in Asia, but this time with spaghetti, the integral part of European diet.

Seung-il Chung (1979-) studied Fine Art in Korea and moved to Germany in 2005. After his graduation from Academy of Fine Arts in Munich in 2011, Chung worked as a full-time artist and returned to Korea in 2013. He currently works in Korea and Germany. His major solo exhibitions include Kunstraum van Treeck, Munich (2014), Smudajeschek Gallery, Ulm (2013) and Galerie der Künstler, Munich (2012). In 2012 he won Debutants Award (Bavarian State) and published his first catalog. He emphasizes work’s imagery, blends cultural differences, modifies spatial experience using mirror, and works on drawings consisting of multiple parallel lines.

Jeong Sik Ham, The Prayer

Once a religious person, there’s a guy who lost his faith. One day he comes across an old lady trying to proselytize non-believers. After this encounter, his last prayer kicks off. Characters in this movie are metaphorical symbols of the director’s prayer. This is an episode of his stray thoughts about Christianity that seems to lose its authority, tracing the past memories. Through archaic metaphors and symbols, the work visualizes a religion that no longer belongs to the invisible world heading towards a complete separation from one’s past that once was faithful.

Jeong Sik Ham (1982-) graduated Korea National University of Arts with Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts and has been dealing with video. He participated in a group show asterion, Gong Art Space, Seoul (2013), and currently works with both video installation and film. Since his Hymn series in 2012, Ham works with particular interest in personal emotions and dilemma caused by religion.

Kang Jungsuck, March into the Night

Climbers often compare the common route of uphill-top-downhill of mountain climbing to the path of life. Kang produced March into the Night understanding uphill as living through a stage of one’s life, mountain top as balancing the equilibrium, and downhill as gaining dynamic energy from the descent. This video portrays Kang’s friends and himself climbing at night carrying the chronicles on their twenties.

The first half of the film summarizes 5 young men’s twenties along with mountain in winter, night scenes. The second half in which they descend from the mountaintop shows rhythms in between them.

Kang Jungsuck (1984-) graduated Korea National University of Arts with Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. His major group shows include Forces Behind, Doosan Gallery (2012), 99°C Artist Showcase, Seoul Art Space Seogyo (2012), and A House yet Un-known, Art Space Pool (2013). In 2013, he held his first solo exhibition entitled Ready-made Insaeng IV at Seoul Art Space Seogyo. Kang observes life’s defect that is whenever substitutable, and examines a moment of compromise set up by the surrounding individuals in a ritualistic form. His attempt is something to record bodily people living today facing their lives despite resignation and failure.

Dong Kyu Kim, A Nailhead for Escape

 “I’ve had a glimpse of an abstract painting on the market stall in Dongmyo, with other used items on display for sale. I asked the man several times, who seemed to be the owner trying to sell those items, and he repeatedly answered that he had bought this painting at an art auction. According to what he said, the painting could be sold at a proper price at an auction only if he had time to attend auction house. I was curious to know about “the proper price” that he was talking about, but couldn’t really ask in case he changes his mind. The painting was quite big to carry, that he made straps out of a plastic bag. Those straps started to penetrate into my palms.”

Kim started this project in 2011, not to blemish outdated style of abstract art or emphasize Korea’s cultural colonization but as a process of questioning what can be learned from the painting. Historical and economical issues aroused by the act of buying an old painting re-appear even though they seem to fade away through serial questions. The artist can neither structuralize the forcing emotions of this painting nor be perfectly free from those emotions. In this sense, it is a reaction rather than the result of one’s examination of the painting.

Dong Kyu Kim (1978-) studied Korean Language Education and Fine Arts. His major exhibitions include his first solo show at Art Space Pool, entitled Surfacing (2011), as well as the group show Our Resolution, Space99 (2012). He also participated in the performance project THE WHALES-Time Diver, National Theater Company of Korea (2011) and screening event entitled Docking, Gunsan Art Residency (2011). He interprets and intervenes the way of meaning and operating of artwork.

Yun Choi, Citizen’s Forest

Citizen’s Forest (2014) is a fake documentary showing the process of encountering the fairy in Citizen Park, Yangjae. The story develops by connecting the unintentional events happening during one day in the park. The story develops with unintentional events that happen during the day. At the entrance missionaries are always on standby to proselytize people, speakers in the park play Christmas carols although it is still April. In one corner of the park far from different kinds of amenities there stands many memorial monuments, and a photographic contest is on progress by some photography club. Fantasies and ideas meet as remembrance of photographic images and monuments. Here, citizens become fairies just like the park becomes a forest. Such belief is a must-do to survive this society. The aim of Citizen’s Forest is to chase the cause of this faith through fairies.

Yun Choi (1989-) was born in Seoul and studied Fine Arts at Korea National University of Arts. Choi’s works result from research on art, in a gap between the society and individual. Her first solo exhibition Transparent Face (2012) was held in Malmö, Sweden. She enjoys cooking burnt food with remaining ingredients.

Suh Bo Kyung, Summer Vacation

Summer Vacation asks about the border between the everyday occasions and art, by realizing the act of intervention in the external natural environment with the artist’s physical body. The woman in screen walks parallel to the horizon across the field, visualizes the air movement—wind, be doused with water, climbs an enormous rock in several directions, blows a conch, and runs back and forth, left to right within the rectangular video frame. These aimless-looking actions occur repeatedly along with the fundamental Natural Elements such as water, fire, earth and wind. They seem to have combined symbols that represent the nature and the female, as a female body actively intervenes in Natural Elements.

Suh Bo Kyung raises a question “How do we know what we know?” and deals with uncomfortable circumstances derived from juxtaposing the learned, imagined cultural experiences. Suh portrays through her works the tension between the concept of truth or liberty and its appearance through a particular social structure. Her major works include Intersection (2005), May God bless you (2006), How we know what we know (2007), Since 2009 (2009-), and Simple things (2009). She had her first solo exhibition in Seoul, 2007, and participated in a number of group shows including Retrieving Humanity, Santa Fe Complex (2010), Inchon International Digital Art Festival, Inchon (2009), and Exposed, LG-I Gallery and public spaces, London (2006).

Byung-su Lee, Three Tiger Experts

Each of the three tiger experts investigates tiger in his or her own way. In searching for Gwanaksan Tiger their opinions play the significant role, suggesting the right direction and clue. Sometimes, however, few minor problems occur due to their disagreement.

Byung-su Lee, Eyewitness Accounts

Can we discover Gwanaksan Tiger by collecting stories and memories about the tiger? Encountering the past makes us inevitably talk about our memories, and hence the story tends to materialize as an accumulation of complementary memories about its cognitive subject. If we could bring Gwanaksan Tiger from the past and see it through the contemporary “landscape”, we will be able to learn how to keep the other memories of our lost past not only as our own, but also as our landscape.

Byung-su Lee (1980-) was born in Seoul. After his B.A. and M.A. in Painting he lived and worked in Geumchon 2nd Residency Program in 2010. Lee is interested in reinterpreting the context and meaning of “now and here”, constructing projects within three compatible categories of place, subject and language.

Artist’s website: www.leebyungsu.com(http://www.leebyungsu.com)

Daum Kim, Mutually Mediated

Mutually Mediated reconstructs people’s exhibition experience into a video work. This work is initiated on the artist’s thought of an exhibition space having the same interface as social network services such as Facebook. Just as we experience indirectly through other’s photographs and notes posted on the Internet, Kim discovers traces of the interface of an exhibition and again restructure them into a “mutually mediated” traces.

Daum Kim (1983-) majored in Sculpture at Kookmin University and graduated in 2009. Kim participated in the group exhibitions XYGlocal, the 13th Seoul New Media Festival (2012), Total Theatre: Interspace Dialogue, Seoul Museum of Art (2013), Ongoing, Amado Art Space (2013) and Better than Universe, Daegu Art Factory (2013). Since 2014, he currently works in SeMA Nanji Residency, Seoul. He pays attention to different kinds of interface occurring between people of today, interested in traces derived from them.

Sylbee Kim, Aida

Aida reveals the contemporary issues of holiday, desires for a comfortable life and happiness. Its tours fulfill the basic needs of a holiday providing transport and accommodation, extended to catering, childcare, education, shopping, health and beauty service, entertainment, casino and even art auctions. MLP is a finance management agency, from whose Annual Report Kim quotes the chapter on the employee benefit as voiceover. The video showing the routines on board are in black and white, while the outside landscape and MLP portraits are shown in their original color tones. Touristic visits to each of the international port cities neither engages the passengers to a deeper understanding of the local life nor allows a crucially critical approach, corresponding to the known desire for holiday and the exotic.

Sylbee Kim, Friendly Fire

In Friendly Fire the fantasies of war, sexuality and the future form an example of science fiction. Fragmented images of exotic places are inserted in the video. The projective apparatus shown in the video represents the contemporary media to view ‘the other world’. A male voiceover-narrates and superimposes different layers of memories. The script is inspired by the relationship between South and North Korea, where the discourses on Korean War is often articulated through the rhetoric of a fratricidal tragedy, rendering it into a homosexual incest drama. The protagonist arrives to a remote planet in search of his twin brother and enters a mediating organization to infiltrate the terrorist group apparently joined by the missing twin. During a night march, he mistakes the twin brother as an enemy and shoots. His monologue at a military hearing afterwards is psychological abstraction than structured train of thoughts.

After graduating Korea National University of Arts, Sylbee Kim (1981-) studied Meisterschüler degree in Experimental Media at University of Arts, Berlin. Kim is currently based in Berlin and Seoul, mainly focusing on visual media, installation and performance. Her works are based on firm, conceptual thinking regardless of medium, going through fragmentation and construction into a nonlinear epic. Results are relatively immaterial image, temporary installation, and two-dimensional works that react site-specifically. She reinterprets the experience of cultural industry and mass media as a place that stores coincidentally and indiscriminately, and focuses on its basal identity and politics. She participated in several group shows in Berlin, Asian Art Achive Hong Kong, Kunsthalle Gwangju, and Goethe Institut in New York. Her recent solo shows were held at Space O’NewWall in 2013 and Project Space Sarubia in 2012.

Jungah LeeYang, 300/20 Project

300/20 Project consists of Cutting Out Seoul and Casting Seoul, the works visualizing the process and results of the artist’s research on real estate that demonstrates her economic situation. Meanwhile, the work House Purchase with 3 million won does not frustrate her but rather makes her focus on her economically restricted situation to show one’s own way of ownership.

Jungah LeeYang (1980-) studied Fine Arts at Korea National University of Arts, graduating in 2008. LeeYang linked her realistic situation with her project, 300/20 Project, and held her first solo exhibition at 175 Gallery in 2013. She is currently working on her next project called Mother’s Clothes and My Partner’s Object.