Installation view of 《We cannot be one, but we are beautiful》 © Space So

“Sometimes I, too, try to record a certain moment. I collect photographs, and sometimes I write as well. Yet I know that this is insufficient and incomplete, and I feel fortunate that I know it. Because if I were to record a moment and come to think that it was very accurate, I would know that this was the moment my love had departed.”[1]

In one corner, the phrase “We can never be one” is inscribed. Far away from it, the phrase “We are beautiful” is also inscribed. The distance between them is considerable enough that they are not easily connected to each other, yet the two ends of the words do not entirely leave the field of vision.

And we imagine that someone who happens to witness this scene may come to think of “us” as a “beautiful” form that will become “one forever.” We imagine the moment when words, which had simply been placed at a quiet distance from one another, without feet or hands, and which would never have met, suddenly cling together inside someone’s mind.

A single clear present that existed outside us enters each person’s independent memory and branches into tens of thousands of paths. When we bring our memories together, the nets that have already loosened somewhere and been tied somewhere else cannot be aligned at all. When reality is reorganized within us in such different forms, an individual world is born.

In other words, the world may not be so much a vast and worn-out civilization that has existed since the distant past, but rather something closer to the momentary flashes that keep bursting forth from within my own mind. Each eruption and explosion of the moment retreats into the past as soon as it is generated, while acting as a driving force that pushes us forward without ever allowing us to stop.

And here are beings moving toward worlds that have not yet arrived, together with works that are almost like their alter egos. Their movement, quickly receding while leaving behind engines and fairings that have become debris with a roar, resembles that of a space launch vehicle. Where have they come from, and where are they going?

Through the exhibition 《We Cannot Be One, But We Are Beautiful》, we try quietly to sense the vibrations inscribed in the tails and fragments lined up along six different artistic journeys.


1

Those captivated by the gentle beauty of the orchid, which blooms small and sends its fragrance far away, repeatedly painted graceful lines of ink orchids with the tips of wet brushes in an effort to reach their ideals. Jangyeun Jun grasps the fading afterimage of this literati painting and draws it into today’s world of gravity.

Black plates, heated by intense fire and bent into shape through merciless hammering, cut through the space and complete Yesterday and Today(2024). To endure the weight of the countless names given to one human life, the artist paints a heavy orchid, placing several small fruits held in her hand upon it in an attempt to calm its precarious trembling.

Ha Sunwoo’s still-life landscapes resemble an extremely microscopic world. The artist places still lifes on a stage. By presenting them with somewhat difficult situations and observing their responses, Ha persistently delves into the physical properties of time-space and the world. In Unfolding Conversation(2024), objects—a glass of water, or a match flame placed behind a half-drawn curtain—move away from their original frames, making new paths according to their own convictions as they move, narrate, and communicate.

The scene, filled with unfamiliar actions, may at first seem to ask about an understanding of the world itself, but it is closer to encouraging us to reconsider the system of perception through which we view the world. By dynamically unraveling the physical world that has been organized in “static language,” the work allows us to experience ourselves as we respond to it.

Installation view of 《We cannot be one, but we are beautiful》 © Space So

2

Jang Doeun carves and shapes with her own hands the body of a being that has endured firmly for hundreds or thousands of years and now seems to have transcended being human. Standing Figure(2024), which resembles a bodhisattva, has a head made of marble and a body made of wood. The right hand, which bestows compassion, and the left hand, which points toward the earth, are attached to the body by magnetic force.

The artist also repeatedly reproduces the anvil, a foundation of sculpture used in metal forging, using wood, earth, and stone. In this way, within the category of sculpture, she summons signs inherited across generations, removes their meanings, takes them as a base, and adds various materials and gestures upon them, unfolding a monologue about her own sculptural journey.

The forms that appear in Cho Wanjun’s paintings emerge vaguely like grains of sand held in the hand, only to scatter again. When one approaches to examine what is contained within the flowing particles, objects too light to carry meaning pass indifferently through the field of vision, leaving only green, which signifies “emptiness,” and elongated brushstrokes in their place.

In this way, the artist removes the weight of objects captured on the surface, allowing visual intuition to fill the space instead. Furthermore, he uses 3D printing technology in an attempt to dismantle the surface. Landscape 5(2025) is a painting made on a support composed of four painting modules; the artist completed the landscape by building up material from an absolute zero point.


3

Outdated decorations on old furniture, exterior walls with peeling paint, rusted iron gates, skin wounded by abrasions. Lee Yeonjung collects faint portraits of things that exist with their original forms half erased by age, yet have not disappeared. Rather than stopping at nostalgia, the artist places various materials on the surface, then scratches or grinds them down again, in order to revive tactile experiences inscribed as sparse records on the surfaces of objects.

In this way, she compressively retraces a long passage of time that is not her own. She takes away the past of something and, as if offering a tribute to that life, reincarnates the old life that had once been the owner of that past as a massive monument such as (2023).

The water that had filled Kim Areum’s mind for some time seems now to have disappeared. Yet as if looking back on her past self, who gazed endlessly at the river water of a foreign country flowing by, she inscribed and dyed water-like images on paper to create Droplets of Love(2023). For a long time, she has thought about love and eternity.

Water sometimes rises into view with great clarity, but when one reaches in to draw it out, it is immediately distorted. Meanwhile, in Becoming Water(2023), the artist shows people who follow the path of water until they themselves become transparent water.

Both water and the human heart may seem to keep moving away somewhere, but then as now, they may be flowing blue without ever leaving the place to which we return. Perhaps we see a deeper sense of eternity not in what remains fixed and unchanged, but in beings that do not subside because of their endless movement.


[1] Lee Heeju, Phantom Pain(Munhakdongne, 2016), p.26.

Choi Suji(Curator, Space So)

References