Installation view of 《en route》 © Shinhan Gallery

From November 15 to December 24, Shinhan Gallery presents 《en route》, part of the 2022 Shinhan Young Artist Festa, featuring artists Youngchan Ko, Eunjung Kim, Soomin Shon, and Heesu Yoon, curated by Sooyoung Lim.

We are all on our way somewhere. Our destinations differ, as do our paces, yet each of us continues to move forward with a sense of direction. At this crossroads of various journeys, the four artists and the curator turn their attention not to beginnings or endings, nor to points of departure or arrival, but to the experiences and stories gathered along the way.

Taking “en route” (meaning “on the way”) as its theme, this exhibition introduces selected works by each artist that trace their individual trajectories of artistic practice. These traces—dense and delicate—are explored not only through completed artworks but also through the archives that sustain and shape them. Here, the term “archive” encompasses foundational records of the works, sketches, writings, books, and objects that have inspired the artists.

Through this exhibition, the audience encounters stories, sounds, phenomena, and questions that the four artists have collected across different places and times—from the mining regions of southern France to seaside ports, rooftop studios, and spaces within digital networks. The works, which temporarily inhabit the exhibition space, do not point toward clear conclusions or destinations. Instead, they suggest countless paths through which everyday moments, often passed over unconsciously, can be rediscovered and newly sensed.

Installation view of 《en route》 © Shinhan Gallery

Artist Youngchan Ko, who re-enchants specific places by employing the methodology of “history from below,” records and reimagines the southern French mining towns that have faced closure. Using lens-based media such as photography and video, Ko documents these sites while exploring their social memory. In this exhibition, he presents Without the Sun(2018), a video work produced through direct engagement with a now-inaccessible mine, alongside Dust Collecting(2022), a series of 30 photographs reinterpreted from the perspective of the present—distanced from the original time and place. Together, these works capture the fading narratives of local residents from multiple angles.

In contrast, Heesu Yoon, whose practice explores the traces of immaterial phenomena emerging where the artificial and the natural intersect, also investigates inaccessible realms—but through hearing rather than sight. Her new works presented here draw from minute observations and experiences within a port setting. In Drawing as Experimenting with Deep Sea Space Frequencies(2022), molten iron is used as a drawing medium, metaphorically expressing the temporal transformation of underwater elements into traces. Meanwhile, Barnacle Unit 1(2022) functions as a sound-gathering sculpture: a recording device embedded inside captures and transmits the vibrations and waves of underwater sounds.

Unlike the above two artists, Eunjung Kim maintains a measured distance from the large and small phenomena of everyday life that she continually encounters. Her works—from the artist’s book Refugee Pigeon(2021), inspired by the pigeons visiting her rooftop studio and the dove imagery seen during the Olympic opening ceremony, to Smoking Head(2020), which depicts a human figure running on a track with smoke rising from its head, and Pigeon Milk(2022), a totemic video piece projected like an advertisement that alludes to unchecked reproduction—reframe familiar social imagery through painterly imagination.

Meanwhile, Soomin Shon illuminates the invisible networks that underpin social structures through her video installation practice. Her performance-based work Playing Catch(2022) unfolds from autobiographical experiences of living as a long-term outsider. The piece metaphorically employs the act of playing catch—a reciprocal motion of throwing and receiving—to explore human dialogue. In the performance, two performers, each equipped with a microphone and headphones connected to an audio mixer, communicate as their amplified voices and breaths fill each other’s auditory space. At times, the soundscape collapses into a state where only one’s own voice seems to exist in the world.

Shon’s work expands the notion of relationality from human-to-human interaction to the connections between the animate and the inanimate. The writer and theorist Édouard Glissant once noted that “relation” secures multiplicity within pathways—a notion resonant with the exhibition’s ethos. In this sense, 《en route》 becomes both a site where each artist’s relationships with changing environments are made visible through direct and indirect acts of collection, and an opportunity for audiences to encounter these works, engage in new forms of relation, and trace their own trajectories in response.

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