Democratic Display: Sla Cha
Text by Hyun Siwon

1. Democratic Display

When a leopard catches an antelope, it places it up in a tree to prevent hyenas from stealing it. Squirrels store numerous caches of seeds underground, yet sometimes cannot even remember where they hid them. Field mice have special chambers in their burrows for storing food, and when hungry, they enter and retrieve seeds. Wolves bury leftover prey in the ground and return the next day to dig it up and eat it. A mole’s food storage is filled with its favorite earthworms, which it bites firmly before storing to immobilize them.

All of these technical behaviors concern the practices of storage. They structure temporality—where the body cannot remember where food was placed—and spatiality—either concealing it from sight (in burrows) or making it visible to all (in trees). The simplest solution to storage and consumption is perhaps the hamster’s cheek pouches. When transporting seeds and fruits, it hides them in both cheeks, temporarily storing objects inside its body before permanently digesting them. Once it returns home, the hamster opens its mouth wide and removes the seeds with its front paws. People often find its puffed cheeks adorable, but this is merely a consequence of using its body as a storage system.

2. Being in Front of the Eyes

Sla Cha’s work ultimately displays “things that are in front of the eyes.” At the same time, she treats display itself as something that is also “in front of the eyes.” She constructs display cabinets with compartments tailored to the size of her works and arranges the sculptures in alignment based on a frontal viewing position. As Ahn In-yong described in the text “An Integrated System for Temporary/Permanent Display,” her work does not end with the creation of individual pieces but extends to what he calls a “virtual storage for integrated sculptures.” Controlling the conditions for installation and the mechanisms of viewing and experiencing space constitutes Sla Cha’s primary medium.

The impulse and friction of placing one’s work outside the studio is not new. However, in an era where objects think more than humans, travel farther, and move with greater force, Sla Cha incorporates her exhibition system into handcrafted sculptural objects. With considerable experience and technical skill in model replication and material research, she creates playful works that respond closely to the properties of materials. Yet she also draws a boundary to this play. What does it mean to engage in repetitive making with an endpoint? By repeatedly controlling and restraining techniques of making, she resolves the scale of her work economically.

Is the term “object sculptures” appropriate? In Sla Cha’s own terminology, they are “items.” In games, items elevate the subject and function as concrete elements within a system that sustains and revives narrative. In everyday life as well, they are tools designed to serve specific purposes. The objects Sla Cha creates and places in display cabinets do not require shifts in visual resolution—whether squinting or widening the eyes. What matters is that resolution is controlled within the hand. They resemble virtual pets that must be watered and touched, rather than decorative plants. Sla Cha’s items integrate both vision and touch.

Whether in a game or in a mineral shop the artist has visited, the sense of totality toward items collapses once the sensation of “landing” disappears. An item is an incomplete object, like a piece of flesh that has been cut away. What remains in the severed section—like freshly removed flesh—is the potential to be reused in another narrative. As inanimate objects, they serve as evidence linking human subjects to events and stories in reality. Works such as Meat Gem, Bone, and Cheese do not function within solemn or omniscient storytelling perspectives. Detached from overarching narratives, Sla Cha’s items remain independent sculptures.

 In the exhibition space, Sla Cha’s works are positioned at a proximity that feels as though they have always been there. This impression arises, first, from the alignment between the compartments and the size of each sculpture, creating a sense of unity between position and scale. In this state, the sculptures are easily translated from visual presence into tactile images within reach. They appear light and mobile. Second, Sla Cha arranges not a single sculpture but multiple lists of objects before the viewer.

These lists function as substitutes or candidates that form a harmonious system, making each position appear inevitable and stable. They resemble tools for comparing price or composition. It is as if the artist has prepared a dwelling place for these item sculptures by constructing display cabinets. Alternatively, it can be seen as a process of eliminating the indeterminacy of objects wandering in search of judgment—whether valuable or not—waiting for a tribunal of value to appear.

3. A Piece of Flesh

In 1967, Thomas Hoving, then director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, announced his intention to create a democratic exhibition. To achieve both democratic and popular displays, he began opening storage spaces—collection repositories rather than exhibition galleries. He declared a more flexible and expansive approach to making stored collections accessible to the public. Among the objects displayed was a house for Marie Antoinette’s pet dog. Created between 1775 and 1880 by furniture maker Jean Baptiste Claude Sene, the small doghouse—measuring 54.6 cm square and 78 cm high—was made of blue velvet and beechwood.

Its lavish gilded decorations, resistant to corrosion even after centuries, presented both a jewel-like object and the delicate craftsmanship of its time. How did audiences respond? Did anyone attempt to recreate similar doghouses? According to one critic, rather than being democratic, the exhibition was regressive. The dignity of such a singular luxurious object should not have been displayed. Far from achieving democratic or horizontal display, it merely provoked reflection on the fortune and fate of the one dog adored by Marie Antoinette—echoing the infamous sentiment, “If there is no bread, let them eat cake.”

4. Selection (Decision Making)

What occurs in the process of making and arranging sculptures? Let us call the time Sla Cha spends coordinating wooden shelves, wall racks, partitions, and altar-like pedestals in 《Ancient Soul++》(Taste House, 2018) a process of “selection and ordering.” Above all, “selection” reflects her position as a craft-based and practical artist who works directly with materials and processes through physical engagement.

In her 2016 thesis, she writes: “The current attitude intervenes by editing fragments of the vast world of work into something I can directly handle, something that can be translated into my own choices and scope.” She adds, “Recognizing the act of translating into something manageable often clarifies many things. The work transforms according to the range within which my arms can extend.”

In her thesis, “selection” is translated as “decision making.” Through this process, she builds a hierarchy of work by expanding from the smallest units of detail. Entering the exhibition, one encounters works such as Mixed Stone (2 Types), Mixed Stone (4 Types), Leather Pink, Leather Sky, Leather Brown, Egg Gem Water, Egg Gem Fire, Egg Gem Grass, and Egg Gems. These can be categorized into minerals, weapons, food, and objects imbued with protective energy. Even within minerals, there are poetic mutations such as Dust Stone, born from linguistic play.

This small sculpture—formed by clumped gray dust—resembles a moment of “discovery play” that intervenes within the process of selection and ordering. The vertically and horizontally arranged inventory evokes the equivalence of positions within large-scale information systems. One perceives similarity—of form, material, and naming—before distinctions.

Is this choice not perplexing? When a single object exists as sculpture, it undergoes transformation, but when many sculptures exist together, they become “equivalent.” Like identical names multiplying online into thousands or millions without distinction, or like an online watermelon whose taste cannot be known unless physically broken open, individuality dissolves within multiplicity. Patterns repeat, making it impossible to identify a singular style, like ancient comb-pattern pottery.

Thus, it becomes meaningless to infer human behavior from individual objects, and it becomes evident that one is exposed to object-images as mass information. As Sla Cha’s sculptures increase, the individual value of each item decreases. Works such as Rough Cut Ruby, Rough Cut Aquamarine, White Pillar, and White Staff generate variations that function as replicable entities rather than singular exhibition pieces. Instead, they reappear as entities that can be used and replicated.

Yet more important than the sensation of purchasing or using them is Sla Cha’s light mathematical thinking. There exists a minimal diagram of extreme simplicity. The artist even created an Excel list categorizing works as Small (S), Medium (M), and Large (L). Does this not demonstrate how basic mathematical thinking can leap into unexpected territories?

5. Collection

In contemporary art, museum and institutional collections are often metaphorically described as “weapons” for interpreting reality. The choice of what to collect and how to display it reflects a society’s perception of time and historical consciousness. It is noteworthy that Sla Cha uses the words “trend and nuance” as a conceptual goal of her abstract thinking.

In her thesis, she states that her aim is “to create trend and nuance.” When individual sculptures move beyond the visible frame or disappear from sight, she becomes both the commissioner and the sole operator of her own production system. With the tools and materials in her hands, she can recreate these item sculptures at any time. Issuing orders to herself, she expands her inventory like filling cells in an Excel spreadsheet, securing the capacity of objects one by one.

6. Inventory Window

Architectural drawings and exhibition floor plans are clearly different. Exhibition plans are temporary in that the arrangement of works changes with each exhibition. The “exhibition floor plans” produced for distribution to viewers, as well as the “space (building) plans” held by institutions or uploaded online as JPG files, are in fact provisional. This is because the construction of temporary walls—an essential process in exhibition spaces surrounding contemporary art—occurs very frequently. In general, temporary walls are built and dismantled according to the artist’s intention or the curator’s method of spatial organization.

Functionalist diagrams in architecture began to emerge systematically in the 1930s. For example, Applied Motions in Kitchen Planning presents the process of making coffee cake as a procedural chart. Meanwhile, Study of Typical Kitchen Layout (American Architect, July 1933) by Charles Ramsey and Harold Sleeper shows a diagram focused on minimizing unnecessary movement in kitchen design. What, then, is being upgraded in the exhibition floor plan of 《Ancient Soul++》(Taste House, 2018)? What is the subject that believes it is capturing a particular trend and pervasive nuance actually being captured by, and what is it struggling against?

Sla Cha transforms 《Ancient Soul++》(Taste House, 2018) into a place of visitation. The floor plan of the exhibition she created is realized in three-dimensional physical space, yet it is thoroughly influenced by the structure of a game inventory window. The inventory window, whose ceiling height cannot be determined, throws the subject into a vast sea of time. Within the constraints of a rectangular frame, time is gathered as if digging tunnels underground. In a place where national territories and climate changes are always fluid, and mutation occurs at every second and every moment, Sla Cha produces items that emerge instantaneously.

7. Transparent Sculpture

The criterion for determining these items is transparency. In works that depict minerals, materials used in physical and chemical industrial processes reveal their interiors and crystalline structures. The effect must be immediately visible, and visual clues that can convey even the origin story of material existence are embedded within them. Lava Stone and German Stone are transparent.

However, there is an even more transparent sculpture. It is Original Egg, made of styrofoam and resin, measuring 24 × 20 × 28 cm. It appears as a three-dimensional object protruding from a window, something that Sla Cha desired to possess. Let us not attempt to seek an answer from others as to what this “thing” is.

References

• 취미가 (Taste House)