Exhibition poster © Monthly Art

“The whirlpool exists in itself but does not possess even a drop of its own liquid. The whirlpool is absolutely immaterial.”

— Giorgio Agamben


Yunchul Kim, Impulse, 2018 © Yunchul Kim

The spiral does not enclose the inside and outside but rather entangles them as a single event. Even extremes of opposition and consciousness are dispersed or intertwined within the vortex, orchestrating a chaotic event that rises from the flat plane of a stable and homogeneous circle. The center of the whirlpool is a black sun that exerts only an infinite force of suction.

The title of the Korean Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, 《GYRE》, originates from William Butler Yeats’s poem The Second Coming, which prophesies the collapse of Christian civilization and the ominous arrival of a new era.

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer”—Yeats captures the violent motion where past and new civilizations intersect, expressed through the image of two conical spirals. In a world where the central control has disappeared, an even greater vortex forms, generating multiple suns and awakening new senses and modes of existence at their boundaries.

Yunchul Kim, Chroma V, 2022 © Yunchul Kim

Kim Yunchul’s unique kinetic objects interlace three themes—“The Inflated Sun,” “The Nervous System,” and “The Great Outdoors”—into a complex knot. The questions posed by Ian Bogost in Alien Phenomenology provide an insightful framework for understanding his machines: “To what flows are these machines structurally open? How do they organize these flows? What operations do they perform upon the currents that traverse them? And how does the world relate to these machines?”

Inside the Korean Pavilion, one senses both our planet Earth and, beyond it, the cosmos. Amid surging waves, dispersing dust, the convection of the Earth’s surface, countless fragments of light passing through trees, and the slow eddies along the shore, we encounter spirals and vortices of varying scales. The visitors—inhabitants of the Earth—become the protagonists of this vast space and embark on a journey into the boundless world.
 

The Inflated Sun

The Sun, the only star in our solar system, gradually expands as it enters its later stage, and when it eventually reaches its end, the dispersed dust of the Sun coalesces to form new planets. What would the world look like if we were to perceive it through the lens of this expansion and dispersion of the Sun?


The Nervous System

If one imagines the Korean Pavilion as a single entangled body, the works flow like veins and intertwine like nerves. Within this grand respiration, the viewer may dream of a world in which all things are fused—beyond metaphor and symbol.


The Great Outdoors

Life and death circulate along the boundaries between one vortex and another. The artist attempts to discern traces and signs of the unperceivable outside through the agency of tangible materials.

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