Images today are produced and consumed in real time according to individual tastes. Immaterial images moving across smartphone displays and computer screens, as well as images physically reproduced in material form, exist everywhere—from private to public spaces, from streets to the interiors of buildings. It is already familiar to us that these images do not exist merely to be seen.

In art, the retinal orientation of art underwent a conceptual turn with Duchamp, yet contemporary modes of everyday image consumption often leave the depth of our perception at the level of retinal phenomena, confined to the surface of the object. Rather than deriving value from their origins, meanings, or contexts, images are treated as increasingly stimulating and intense visually oriented products. Many products casually described today as “sensory” or “sensuous” situate the contemporary image at the level of visual entertainment rather than as an object of thought.

Even photographic images encountered through contemporary social-media platforms render the recorded surface thinner and smoother, while tendencies toward a market-oriented superficial aesthetic narrow the horizon of meaning that such images can possess. Visuality, positioned at the core of modernity, has acquired greater credibility through its apparent clarity, while simultaneously erasing even the possibility of thought and sensation that might acknowledge opacity beyond vision.

The tendencies produced by technological development, the growing dominance of the platforms that contain it, and images emitted as forms of self-projection eventually trim even volume, depth, and narrative into polished forms and absorb them into superficial aesthetics—or taste. This image ecology shortens the distance between the observer and the image. Yet aesthetic judgment requires contemplative distance.

《Skin and Skeleton》 steps back from these characteristics of contemporary visual culture and examines the image as flesh, together with the networks of meaning—the skeleton—existing beneath its skin. It seeks to reconsider how contemporary images are consumed by focusing on their origins, medial conditions and methodologies, and further, their narrative possibilities.

To do so, it brings photography and sculpture, positioned along two distinct axes, together within a single exhibition. Yet although these two genres might initially appear as oppositional pairs—three-dimensional and planar, heavy and light, thick and thin, tactile and visual—they move toward one another from their formally differentiated starting points, leaving behind their physical distinctions to discuss the “image” at the intersection of sculpture and photography.

Crossing process and result, fragmentary images and forms of narrative, peripheral visual stimulation and affective sensation, the exhibition attempts to examine the “bones” and “flesh” of the phenomenon that today is so simply condensed into the word “image” through photography and sculpture.

Rather than concentrating on documented facts, Jeon Myungeun’s photographs allow viewers to access another person’s time through the photographed subject or imagine a particular moment when the movement or intrinsic vitality of a subject captured by the camera begins to emerge. Within the exhibition, her works are closely connected while varying the distance and depth of the gaze, as well as temperature and density.

Upon entering the exhibition, viewers immediately encounter a photograph of a girl titled Swimming. The girl has low vision. Seen from an oblique rather than frontal angle, her gaze, unable to direct both eyes fully outside the frame, seems to hover somewhere between contemplation and looking.

This gaze then appears to turn toward a distant landscape, as in The Landscape Is Too Far Away to Have Sound (Galnam Village) #1, or to linger on an image of the smallest material unit—a crystal—difficult to capture readily through vision, as in The Landscape Is Too Far Away to Have Sound (Winter) #2. Relying on the child’s gaze, what will we see? How might we sense or think about objects outside vision?

Beginning with the time and space in which the artist encountered the photographed subject and extending toward the memories and imagination that the subject evokes, a certain time and space repeatedly fades and blossoms beyond the images formed within our visual system, moving from personal memory and experience toward collective imagination.

The practice of another photographer, Oh Yeonjin, may be said to take photography itself as its subject. Her works generally consist of images obtained at the boundary between intention and contingency while varying the conditions tied to photographic mechanisms. They can therefore be understood as photographs about photography, retrieved through deep engagement with the internal mechanisms of the medium from a meta-photographic position.

The 'Self-Reflective Film (Melting)' series and the 'Object-Through' series likewise consist of traces recorded—or left behind—during processes in which the environmental and technical conditions involved in photographic production are adjusted. Unlike conventional photographs, they produce uneven surfaces or emphasize materiality.

They are also markedly abstract because they do not take external objects as their subjects. Rather than projecting the external world, these images that converge inward upon photography become spaces capable of containing both physical traces—facts—left by the process itself and narratives yet to arrive, or mental images, generated by the viewer’s gaze.

In addition to these two series, in which images are constructed by moving between liquid and solid states and invite gaseous forms of imagination within the mind, Tilted Lamella, printed on the window at the entrance to the exhibition space, evokes photography’s character as an optical apparatus by fully accepting the conditions of light as a semi-transparent membrane dividing inside from outside.

The succession of gradually tilting images draws “depth” out of the “surface” of the window while dimly reflecting objects located both inside and outside the space—from works by other artists to viewers walking through the gallery—thereby moving beyond visuality confined to the superficial layer and creating an illusory space-time endowed with movement.

From the perspective of sculpture, meanwhile, Byun Sanghwan’s works are narrative in character and contain temporality and movement. For the artist, forms such as inverted icicles created when water dripping from outdoor air-conditioning units in winter freezes upward from the ground become intriguing subjects and materials discovered in everyday life.

In Equivalent Exchange_Isolated and Helpless, he takes a mold of such an inverted icicle in order to cast a sculptural mass, then mixes plaster with the water produced when the ice melts and casts the form. During this process, impurities remaining within the icicle are fully incorporated into the sculpture, allowing the narrative of everyday life to settle deep within the surface of the form. At the same time, plaster appears both to preserve the narrative of daily life in sculptural form and, through its white surface, to allow for the possibility of projecting another narrative onto the everyday.

The artist then adds legs. Yet the legs embedded into the upper mass appear quite different from the symbolism of traditional sculpture. Thin and fragile in relation to the upper body, they depart from the monumental values traditionally achieved through ideal proportion and dynamic movement and instead evoke an organism with an unusual posture.

The precarious balance of a body that seems to struggle beneath disproportionate weight extends the gaze from line—the legs—to plane—one surface of the mass—and further toward a movement that attempts to advance into, or construct, a certain space-time.

Another work, Live Rust_Odyssey 23001 (α) (β), fully contains the sculptor’s body. In this work, Byun applies anti-rust paint to one surface of a structural steel beam and prints it onto a plane. Through this process, the material’s inherent properties are translated through the color of the paint, while its volume, mass, depth, and spatiality are converted into the artist’s gestures and the duration of repetitive labor, ultimately recorded as geometric abstract patterns.

By composing the work as a pair, α and β, separated from the same form, he physically prolongs and expands the temporality and spatiality of images generated within a single trajectory. A similar attitude can be observed in Sari of Sculpture, which seeks variations and chains of meaning through formal possibilities discovered in the process of controlling and adjusting matter.

Finally, the fundamental characteristic of Jeon Kukkwang’s sculpture lies in its “structurality” before its formal appearance. This structure becomes visible through the repeated application of variation and transformation to individual units as they are stacked and layered, causing the properties inherent in the materials to emerge formally.

Nature can be understood as a motif in his work, but he does not imitate its appearance. Instead, his practice constructs the structures that constitute nature in solid form. Beginning with the early central concept of “accumulation,” this approach converges into the sculptural form of mass possessing volume, movement, and texture.

Lump, from the earlier period of his practice, clearly demonstrates the artist’s particular methodology: “a process in which materials of identical dimensions are transformed under arbitrary conditions.” What should be emphasized here is that his attention falls less on the image produced by the form than on the process of material transformation grounded in the volume of the mass itself.

As his practice moved into the period of Interior of Mass, his attention shifted toward simultaneously revealing occupied and empty space and the inside—structure—and outside—form—of an object. In Continuous Reaction, for example, he stacks multiple rectangular slabs of clay and applies force in a single direction, transforming the rectangle into a non-rectangular form and exposing its interior through torn fissures in the exterior.

In doing so, he redirects attention from a form that simply offers aesthetic experience toward its internal structure—the “interior of mass.” Forms constructed from accumulations of long pipes, as well as performances involving tearing wood, stone, and corrugated cardboard, likewise raise questions about void and solid space under the theme of Interior of Mass by simultaneously revealing space and spatiality, weight and the sensation of weight, and seeing and being seen.

When examining the interpretations and origins through which the images constructed by these artists can be approached, it becomes clear that although the exhibition takes two ostensibly polar genres—three-dimensional sculpture and planar photography—as its central axes, the two are never truly opposed. Instead, artists belonging to the same genre actively intersect with the other genre on the basis of different attitudes, while at times repeatedly reconnecting within the categories of their own media and genres.

For example, Jeon Kukkwang’s sculptures, which reveal properties inherent in matter through processes of leaning and stacking, intersect with Oh Yeonjin’s photographs, which position photographic process itself at the center of meaning. Meanwhile, Jeon Myungeun’s photographs, which contain temporality while directing the viewer’s gaze beyond the frame, intersect with Byun Sanghwan’s Live Rust_Odyssey 23001 (α) (β), which fully bears the bodily presence of the sculptor while moving from sculpture to a plane and then generating another plane.

In addition, Byun’s use of the bleached white surface of plaster to create the possibility of adding further narratives establishes certain points of contact with the works of Jeon Myungeun and Oh Yeonjin. By contrast, Jeon Myungeun’s photography, grounded in recording externally existing subjects, may appear markedly different from Oh Yeonjin’s photographic methodology, which converges inward upon its own process.

Ultimately, the exhibition does not place medium at its center in order to divide the boundaries within which images are situated, nor does it reduce layers of meaning by summarizing them under a single keyword.

Instead, it begins with internal signs such as the motivations, autonomy, aura, and creative force through which images are constructed, imagining that they may generate meaning on their own through their agency and poetic autonomy. From this perspective, the image opens up not as an object of one-directional consumption but as a platform that actively stimulates thought.

An image is an interpretive sign containing multiple layers, from the origins and sources of its production to the social, political, cultural, economic, and historical implications surrounding it. It may even be an aesthetic image consumed under market logic while simultaneously becoming a language capable of boldly twisting the logic of capital itself.

At times, interpretation becomes richer as the private expands toward the universal and the macro intersects with the micro. Even disappearance and expansion within a succession of images may constitute one facet of the image. The image may thus appear visually as a concluded endpoint, yet from the moment we encounter it, paths toward multiple contexts begin to open.

References

• 《뼈와 살 (Skin and Skeleton)》