Installation view of 《When The Chips Are Down》 © Space Pado

When The Chips Are Down

Text by An Yuseon

The exhibition title 《When The Chips Are Down》 derives from a situation in a casino where all the chips used for betting have run out and one can no longer continue betting, referring to a moment when a decisive choice is required.

Religious studies scholar Jonathan Smith cites this expression in his critique of existing religious studies, which has positioned religion as a unique phenomenon that cannot be explained through other cultural phenomena.

For him, religion is a tenacious and compulsive human activity and labor that seeks to interpret the entire world through limited materials such as scripture, ritual, and doctrine, and it is a phenomenon that requires self-conscious reconstruction.

This mode of thought is what Smith presented to us when the chips were down—that is, when religious studies had reached a situation in which it could no longer grasp the multifaceted nature and complexity of the world while repeating an Eliadean approach.

In 《When The Chips Are Down》, Yeonjin Kim, Dew Kim, and Serin Oh transform the exhibition space into a ritual space by arranging altars where offerings are made to a god and rituals are performed. Their works placed throughout the altars and ritual space, along with collaborative works born from the entanglement of elements derived from each artist’s practice, become a kind of sacred object (聖物).

Yet under the general distinction between the sacred (聖) and the profane (俗), their sacred objects are closer to the profane, regarded as a cause of illness or disaster, or to a rupture from wholeness. By visualizing and violating taboos, they generate the sacred as a state of sensation such as anxiety, fear, desire, and pleasure, as described by Georges Bataille.

Now, on a red altar that recalls a gaming table where chips were once placed with expectation, these sacred objects pose questions to the world considered normal and to the longing directed toward it. ─ From the exhibition preface

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