Installation view of 《The Other Self》 © Ilmin Museum of Art

The constraints of the system called the “contemporary,” which constantly demands renewal, are also applied to art, driving repeated transformations through frameworks such as expansion, deconstruction, recontextualization, and post-genre practices. Texts seemingly trapped within fixed “wordings” such as “new generation,” “post-sculpture/painting,” or “aspects of contemporary art” often resemble trend reports in fashion magazines or the entertainment industry’s incessant introductions of newly debuted idols.

Within this climate, where a generation has become accustomed to presenting itself as a kind of multi-player—either by choice or necessity—Kwon Osang and Haneyl Choi do not hesitate to introduce themselves as “sculptors,” and through their respective methodologies, they explore new trajectories for sculpture as a medium.

Since the moment when concerns about the expansion of sculpture and the meaning of “sculpture” itself began to grow somewhat ambiguous,¹ the fate of sculpture has been continuously swayed. Today, the term “installation” is used frequently—sometimes indiscriminately—provoking renewed debates about the norms of traditional sculpture.

Even artists who work through sculpture are divided between those who introduce themselves as sculptors and those who do not, making one’s attitude toward self-positioning increasingly significant. Moreover, perspectives on sculpture have migrated into flat screens, extending discussions to sculpture within virtual reality. At a time when sensitivity to the boundary between online and offline has dulled, experiences of sculpture encountered in immaterial worlds must also be reconsidered.

《The Other Self》 likewise examines the identity of sculpture within the foundation of contemporary art, where fundamental debates surrounding the medium have accumulated. While Kwon Osang rejects conventional sculptural methodologies and adopts everyday elements and materials as his own sculptural language, Haneyl Choi leads new currents in contemporary sculpture through the reference and reactivation of tradition. By sharing the exhibition space, the two artists present sculptures as outcomes (or processes) born of mutual exchange and reference between their long-developed methodologies, revealing a medium-specific reflection on the origins of sculpture.

In this exhibition, Kwon Osang adopts Haneyl Choi’s sculptures as supports, reapproaching traditionally defined sculptural concepts from a new angle. Haneyl Choi, in turn, places side by side 3D-printed works produced through reference to Kwon Osang’s practice, while also exploring the material properties of hollow, surface-only sculptures found in Kwon’s early ‘Deodorant Type’ works.

Additionally, by attaching QR codes—the language of machines—to sculptural surfaces perceived three-dimensionally by the human eye, and mediating the experience through a separate object (the smartphone), Choi invites viewers to encounter sculpture via mobile scanning, thereby probing sculpture’s material domain through immaterial forms.

In an era overflowing with new materials and technologies in response to shifting demands and currents, artists are constantly required to engage in different forms of assemblage. In this exhibition, Kwon Osang and Haneyl Choi deeply investigate and exchange each other’s artistic worlds, encountering a demand to assemble sculpture at the boundary between material and immaterial.

Their media-based reflections—assembled in the exhibition space—resemble movements of assemblage that resist being bound: they assemble at opportune moments, then disassemble and scatter. Although both “assemblage” (結合) and “binding” (結縛) refer to states in which separate entities, objects, or relationships are joined through certain factors, their underlying logics differ fundamentally. Assemblage implies a temporary union that presupposes the possibility of disassembly, whereas binding denotes a state of stasis in which subjectivity is lost and escape is impossible.

For heavy sculptural bodies, binding is often inevitable. In this sense, the shared remarks made by both artists in interviews² regarding the weight of sculpture and the harmful material properties that affect sculptors’ health—and their resulting search for lighter materials—are noteworthy. Through their pursuit of lightness, the artists’ works are no longer “fixed” within the exhibition space but instead appear as “placed.”

The use of lightweight materials that abandon heavy bodies, hollow sculptural forms derived from each artist’s stance toward art history, and the mobile scanning method that envelops the exhibition space within an immaterial environment to generate new sculptural experiences—these are the methodologies of Kwon Osang and Haneyl Choi. This essay examines their infinitely light sculptural “-ic”³ movements through three interrelated flows.

Even when sculpture possesses physically light properties, an assemblage devoid of any perceptible movement ultimately becomes bound. In this regard, Kwon Osang’s The Three Shades–Wrinkles(2022) and Haneyl Choi’s Old?(2022) evade binding by operating through their own sculptural “-ic” movements within the exhibition. In 〈The Three Shades〉, Kwon employs flat photographic images, yet the wrinkles of sphynx cat skin render the photographs as undulating images, producing an optical illusion of surface depth.

Haneyl Choi’s Old?, which bears a formal resemblance to The Three Shades, appears as a heavily weighted sculpture due to its corroded iron-like texture, but is in fact a lightweight work made from 3D printing or Styrofoam. While Kwon generates illusion through the volumetric effect of flat images rather than sculpture’s inherent three-dimensionality, Choi disrupts the viewer’s perceptual cognition through sculptural techniques that induce misrecognition of material properties.

The relationship between Kwon Osang’s Meaningless Emission (2022), leaning against Haneyl Choi’s Become a kenta(2022), also merits attention. Become a kent takes as its motif the centaur of Greco-Roman mythology, a creature with a human upper body and a horse’s lower body. Drawing from art history as reference, Choi reworks this long-standing cultural and art-historical figure—frequently addressed over centuries in cultural history, humanities, and popular culture—into a sculpture completed in just four hours.

Casually leaning against this work is Kwon Osang’s Meaningless Emission, a photo-sculpture shaped like a standardized trash bag, installed as if actually discarded, using Choi’s work as a makeshift pole. The installation of these two works resonates with the intersection of Kwon’s attempt to dismantle traditional sculptural norms and Choi’s sculptural “-ic” movement grounded in art-historical reinterpretation.

Haneyl Choi’s Always reboot: Ghost (2022; reprinted), suspended in the gallery and directing viewers toward Instagram filters through QR codes affixed to its uneven surface, along with the unfamiliar codes encountered when scanning QR codes stamped onto folding screen-like forms that resist easy categorization as either flat or volumetric, entice viewers to raise their smartphones and scan.

The presence of QR codes in the exhibition space can be interpreted not merely as a natural linkage between online and offline prompted by the pandemic, but rather as a manifestation of an intensified desire to bind online and offline realms more tightly than ever before.⁴ Before viewers can even reach a stage of contemplation or judgment, the exhibition space is incessantly converted into image data and rapidly consumed via social media.

Rather than resisting this trend, the artist actively incorporates it, unhesitatingly embracing the status of “instagrammable” objects and signs. In this process, Kwon Osang’s sculptures are also absorbed into the immaterial smartphone-user environment invited by Haneyl Choi, acquiring new bodies within virtual space.

While Haneyl Choi’s SNS-based sculptures allow his works to be summoned outside the exhibition space, paradoxically, the sculptural “-ic” movement of these works can only be fully experienced when the codes attempt an immaterial assemblage that envelops the physically present sculptures during the exhibition period.

Assemblage is completed when viewers physically sense that Kwon Osang’s and Haneyl Choi’s sculptures have shed their heavy bodies and become infinitely light, and when the experience of weight is transferred into the virtual realm. As echoed in Haneyl Choi’s question—“Will sculpture in the future gradually abandon its body and become lighter?”⁵—only by relinquishing heavy mass and becoming endlessly light can binding be blocked. Their sculptural “-ic” movements will continue to grow lighter, and they will not be bound.


 
1. Rosalind Krauss argued that from 1968 through the 1970s, many artists felt a simultaneous permission (or pressure) to conceive of an expanded field, at which point the meaning of “sculpture” began to grow ambiguous. Rosalind Krauss, “Sculpture in the Expanded Field,” in Issues in Postmodern Art, trans. Seungmin Yoo (Seoul: Noonbit, 2017), 158.
2. Ilmin Museum of Art, “Kwon Osang × Ilmin Museum of Art – What’s my collection?”, August 26, 2022, https://youtu.be/MSpI6jxewkM; Ilmin Museum of Art, “Haneyl Choi × Ilmin Museum of Art – What’s my IDOL?”, September 8, 2022, https://youtu.be/Wv9C4AjeZuI.
3. The dependent noun “-ic” is attached to “sculpture” to emphasize that their movements are ongoing. Accordingly, this essay refers to their attitudes toward the medium as sculptural “-ic.”
4. Cultural studies scholar Sangmin Kim has noted that the active intervention of QR codes in exhibition spaces prompts reflection (or compels reflection) on binary boundaries such as reality/virtuality and offline/online. He argues that offline exhibitions ultimately risk being perceived as limited experiences if they fail to expand into online connectivity (searching, sharing, saving, etc.). Sangmin Kim, “Art Experience in the Age of Non-Human Visuality,” in Curating the Pandemic: Art Experience in the Age of Non-Place and Immateriality (Movingbook, 2021), 89.
5. Haneyl Choi, interview with Moonjung Lee, “[The Gallery by Critic Moonjung Lee (90) ‘Sculptural Impulse’] Will Sculpture Remain Three-Dimensional in the Metaverse Era?”, Cultural Economy, June 29, 2022, https://m.weekly.cnbnews.com/m/m_article.html?no=143997.

References