In contemporary architecture and urban environments, one increasingly encounters a proliferation of additive and provisional elements that contrast with the totality once grounded in planning. Signboards placed in front of shops, lottery-style stores that guarantee a sense of public legitimacy through amusement, and imported snack shops offering a cheap experience of the world all serve to fill the empty spaces of the city, while public sculptures and various structures enter urban space in an effort to assert sophistication.

These elements reconfigure the city not as a patchwork of repairs but as a “patchwork” of assemblage. Whereas mending restores a damaged whole, patchwork consists of the combination of fragments. Urban space, no longer organized through an overarching coherence, becomes a complex arrangement of disparate elements.

Thus, not only the aforementioned decorative objects but the very structure of space itself appears as an accumulated totality—something added, layered, and aggregated. Unlike a relationship between part and whole, this urban totality is capable of endless proliferation and amplification, a defining characteristic of the contemporary city.
 
To present “a somewhat different space,” space must literally be produced through the addition of “more.” Such a space, to borrow the term of architect Rem Koolhaas, is “Junkspace.” In his view, Junkspace reconstitutes the entirety of the city and architecture through processes of accumulation.

It does not simply denote “trash” or “waste”; rather, it emphasizes ornamentation produced through investment—of both power and capital—and through the pursuit of convenience and aesthetic function. Junkspace is not the loss or rejection of utility but the production of utility, through which urban space is designed as “another space.” Yet, as Koolhaas notes, “Junkspace thrives on design, but design dies in Junkspace.”

Here, “design” does not merely refer to visual decoration, but to a broader crisis encompassing fields such as urban environmental design. This crisis can be summarized in the erosion of authorship: the shift from identifiable creators to anonymity. In the ubiquitous presence of Junkspace, the question of who made it becomes irrelevant, as functionality is foregrounded—even when such objects are not truly tools, but instead serve as objects of display.
 
If one is able to sense a certain humanity within Junkspace, it may emerge precisely at the moment when functionality drops out from this anonymous production. Unlike the melancholic emptiness of an uninhabited city, Junkspace already contains within it the absence of a creative subject.

Jihyun Jung’s exhibition 《Multipurpose Henry》 at Atelier Hermès can be understood as an attempt to glimpse traces of authorship within this “death of design,” through a meta-perspective on Junkspace. This approach is grounded in the autonomy of “form-making.” In the exhibition space, viewers encounter objects commonly found in the city—fluorescent lights, plaster objects derived from public sculptures, and signboards resembling those of well-known franchise brands.

At first glance, Jung’s work might be misread as an aestheticization of “waste,” or as a means of prompting reflection on the (urban) environment. However, such interpretations are reductive. What is crucial in his work lies in the act of working through the formal logic of Junkspace itself.

The works in the exhibition evoke the urban landscape in a fragmentary manner. Materials such as statues and their partial forms, signboards, and egg stacks, as well as titles like Double Decker (2018), A Statue (2016), and Display Cabinet (2019), all recall elements of the city. While these works visualize the city both directly and indirectly, what is particularly notable in this exhibition is the emergence of “bundling,” or patchwork.

As multiple functions and decorative elements are imposed upon a single form, the urban condition appears as an assemblage produced through addition. Jung’s approach to transforming existing objects appears less as an act of creation and more as a mechanical pattern of recombination.

For instance, Egg stack, Terrazzo, Heavy Stone (2019) consists of three sculptural elements, each with distinct referents, bound together not only through technique but also through their juxtaposition. While Jung operates as a creator, the traces of authorship emerge precisely through the de-functionalized nature of the objects.
 
The video documenting the casting process of Filing Public Hands and the work Scanner (2019), in which a scanner is rendered in concrete, point not merely to replication, but to the characteristic of Junkspace wherein replicated objects encounter different contexts and assume new functions. Just as a conventional scanner reproduces images into various formats, the scanned scanner is stored as a concrete form. Similarly, the motif of the hand—derived from public sculpture—is reproduced and redistributed, diverging into multiple functions as it returns to the public.
 
In this exhibition, the removal of function further emphasizes form-making. Acts of replication, casting, and bundling correspond to Koolhaas’s processes of restore, rearrange, reassemble, revamp, renovate, revise, recover, redesign, and return—not only as methods of production but as principles in themselves.

Objects within the exhibition alternately function as pedestals or as combined structures, blurring the distinction between object and ground (support). In Egg Stack, Terrazzo, Heavy Stone, the work itself operates as a patchwork, enacting processes of integration, separation, and the differentiation of function.

Extending beyond the widespread replication of works such as Rodin’s The Thinker, this exhibition captures an urban condition in which functionality and utility are produced through replication and separation—through the separation of function, and the separation of object from ground.

In this sense, the “multipurpose” implied in the title 《Multipurpose Henry》 does not simply refer to the presence of multiple functions. Rather, it emphasizes that objects and supports are treated functionally “for any purpose.” As the statement goes, “What we value and believe in is not creation but manipulation,” the status of objects is redistributed through replication and reproduction into various functions—whether as pedestals or as objects for contemplation.
 
Furthermore, through Koolhaas’s framework, the exhibition can be extended into a reflection on authorship. Through its title and works, it reveals—on a meta-level—the urban condition as one of anonymous proliferation and the absence of creation. Thus, the title “Multipurpose Henry” can be interpreted as follows: rather than referring to Henry Moore himself, it points to “Henry Moore–like” sculptures that appear ubiquitously, produced without attribution or through imitation.

What is at stake is not merely the presence of such anonymous sculptures, but the way in which Moore’s work is continuously remixed and varied, reducing the author himself into anonymity. Like statues, signboards, or display methods that feel vaguely familiar, the sense of “having seen this somewhere before” reflects not only a shared formal language but also the anonymity of authorship within contemporary urban space.
 
By capturing anonymity within the additive and proliferative production of urban landscapes, and by removing functionality, Jung reveals traces of authorship within technique. The melancholic quality of his work does not stem from the depiction of uninhabited urban space, but rather from the fact that the objects themselves already contain an absence of humanity—namely, the anonymity of the creator.

The method of accumulation—of addition upon addition—is transformed into an autonomous form through the subtraction of function. If, as Koolhaas suggests, in Junkspace “form does not follow function but searches for it,” Jung removes the functions assigned within urban space and instead emphasizes form-making. Through processes of addition, replication, and reproduction—of adding, adding, and subtracting—he reinterprets urban space within the exhibition, transforming the method itself into the work.

References

• [비평] 《다목적 헨리》 / 더하기 더하기 빼기
  [Critique] 《Multipurpose Henry》 / Plus Plus Minus