Installation view of 《Spring has come》 (CR Collective, 2022) © Gosari

Artist Gosari explores the forgotten and unnoticed aspects of reality by paying attention to discarded and neglected objects and spaces and giving them new value. In this exhibition, the audience can reflect on ecological sensitivity and the value of the environment through visualizing the circulation of nature that the artist personally experienced as a farmer and think about the crisis caused by climate change.

We live in a repetitive rhythm. Humans have physical and mental rhythms, ranging from breathing, our heartbeat, and even emotions, while the Earth has natural cycles, namely the biorhythm of the Earth, which control the flow of days, nights, and seasons. For the 365 days that the Earth rotates around the sun at a tilt of 23.5 degrees and the 27.3 days that the moon revolves around the Earth, lights from the sun and moon touch the surface of the Earth.

The repetition of warm light and cold darkness corresponding to the revolution and rotation of the sun, Earth, and moon circulates in a cycle of climate change that goes up and down like biological rhythms of a body. In the 24 solar terms, which divide the change of land and air into 15 days according to climate, we feel the repetitive structure of nature in a cycle and find the relationship between time and space.

After the winter solstice, which has the longest night and the shortest day in a year, days gradually become longer. People think that they are passing through the middle of winter because of the chill around their bodies, but nature is already prepared to welcome spring.

Gosari brings out the warm spring that changes with the flow of seasons and climate when the great cold of winter recedes (Daehan Jan. 20) and the warm spring comes (Ipchoon Feb. 4).


Gosari, Compost hill, 2022, Compost fermented for 1 to 3 years, Dimensions Variable © Gosari

While a day, a month, and a year passes as two lights from the sun and the moon move regularly, a warm freeze begins to blow, and the frozen ground and water melt to encounter newborn life. Plants that sprouted and grew from the ground complete their life cycle and return to the soil again. They blend into the soil to create a foundation for the next life.

Some of them are collected and hung like stars in the night sky with a longer grace period before they disappeared. Gosari, through her interaction with soil, intuitively seizes the small moments that exist in nature, revealing the macroscopic structure and repetitive cycle of regular change in nature.

Through farming, namely the practice of caring for abandoned and marginalized lives, the artist leads us to explore the rhythm of the life cycle that returns from soil to mouth, and then to soil again. In this respect, we, as an observer,recognize the effect of the movement of a tenuous object in the phenomenon in which the operation of the microscopic existence forms a macroscopic structure.

The current situation, where people face global warming and the unpredictable problem of COVID-19 pandemic, may have started with a small rebellion that disrupted a natural moment. This is as if Gaia, the goddess of the Earth, could no longer tolerate human behavior that confronts the flow and circulation of nature and burst into anger.

The artist ultimately wishes that our harsh winter-like current situation where the freezing wind stays, will withdraw, as she describes, “Just as a small seed waits for the softened soil after repeated freezing and melting, I hope there will be a time for each of us to build the warmth and hope of spring after winter,” (from Author’s Notes).

Gosari features forgotten, disregarded objects and spaces that might be trivial or nothing to someonecould be meaningful to her. In her works such as Isa: Move into Somewhere (Seongbuk-dong, 2018), which wrapped the interior of an empty house with vinyl, presenting long-time traces of life after serving its purpose, or Woosil (Salt Museum, 2020), which piled up air-filled plastic bags in the shape of a fence around the village, Gosari evokes the meaning of objects and spaces that once lost their glitter.

This exhibition suggests that people speculate the time, space, and relationship between humans and nature, not only by paying attention to and caring the unrecognized aspects of life, but also by navigating the structure in which nature circulates based on the universal principle of creatures.

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