Don Sunpil, Specimen of Affect Phenomenon (SAP): Error+Conservation, 2022, Resin, primer, poly putty, acrylic paint, varnish, 449x462x335(HxWxD)mm © Don Sunpil

On September 20, 2024, a day of steady rain, I visited Don Sunpil’s solo exhibition 《Electric Tomb Raider》. The exhibition took place in a shop inside the Kukje Electronics Center near Nambu Bus Terminal. Inside the tiny shop, measuring barely more than a few square meters, the otaku merchandise collected by the artist and the works he had made were tangled together and piled up.

Rather than being hung on walls or installed in spacious areas as in a conventional exhibition, the works were displayed on shelves or stacked like merchandise inventory. The space looked like an ordinary shop, no different from the stores next door or across the way, so visitors had to find the exhibition hidden among the real shops as though playing a game of hidden pictures.

Opened in 1997, the Kukje Electronics Center is known as one of Seoul’s three major electronics shopping centers, along with Yongsan Electronics Market and Yeongdeungpo Techno Mart, but today it is a quiet place amid the decline of offline electronics retail. Alongside this decline, the shopping center, which has not been remodeled, seemed frozen at some point in the 1990s, with its tacky signs, old advertising images, and outdated interiors.

The landscape created there by otaku culture, which had repurposed the space beyond its original function, was strange. After passing through the quiet shopping areas and reaching the section concentrated with subculture-related merchandise, the energy of young people’s desires began to sparkle. While time seemed to flow slowly in the stores that still sold electronic devices among the vacant units, the floors packed with shops selling subculture-derived merchandise were crowded with young people.

And in the midst of all this was the exhibition. In a city where rents are generally high, an exhibition had quietly slipped into a property whose rent, for whatever reason, was relatively low. This exhibition, therefore, necessarily had to be seen within that particular place. One had to pass the shops next door and across the way, the floors above and below, before encountering the exhibition anchored in the gap between them.

In doing so, although everything there belongs to the present, the exhibition creates a strange sensation of traveling through time to somewhere outside the ordinary time and space of Seoul, transforming the place itself into an object of art, a work to be contemplated. It invites viewers to regard as artworks the historical circumstances surrounding the decline of electronics shopping centers due to the rise of e-commerce, the subculture flourishing in the gaps left behind, and the strange urban phenomena and conditions themselves.

Yet although Don Sunpil makes the space itself an object of contemplation, he does not objectify the place by positioning either the audience or himself as mere spectators. Retaining the distinctive atmosphere of a shop selling otaku merchandise, the exhibition space sits among actual shops and performs the interface between the real and the fake.

Visually, there was little difference between a shop where subculture merchandise was densely stacked in a cramped space while the owner sat waiting for customers and Don Sunpil’s solo exhibition, making it feel almost as though the artist were performing the role of such a shop. The artist himself becomes part of the place, simply hiding plausibly among the real ones.

In this way, Don Sunpil brings art outside and allows it to become part of the world, while simultaneously turning the world itself into an object of art. A fake imitating the world reflects the world from within it like a quasi-mirror.

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