Installation view of 《Not Just Tiny But Abstract》 (OCI Museum of Art, 2019) © Shinae Kim

The term “information society” is familiar. Yet we have little real awareness of information itself. What is information? Can information clearly define an object? An exhibition opens that allows viewers to quietly perceive the properties of information through artistic practice. It is Shinae Kim’s solo exhibition 《Not Just Tiny But Abstract》, held at OCI Museum in Jongno-gu from May 16 to June 8.

As one of the six artists selected for OCI Museum’s emerging artist support program 2019 OCI YOUNG CREATIVES, Kim’s solo exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider the meaning of space and the nature of information by showing the process of condensing “space,” a fundamental subject of artistic inquiry, and the countless pieces of information related to it into extremely concise forms.

Shinae Kim transforms and materializes information such as numbers, coordinates, and angles into installations. This exhibition focuses on information from the first-floor space of OCI Museum. There may be many kinds of information that can be obtained from the first floor of OCI Museum, but what kind of information exactly does the artist address?

The area of the exhibition space, its height, the number of sides, the lengths of its edges, the number and positions of its vertices, the color of the walls, the finish of the floor, the material of the ceiling, the volume of the space… No matter how much information is handled, and no matter how precisely it is handled, it can never become “all of the information.”

Therefore, reaching “all information” is impossible. Here, one can already recognize that the selection of information inevitably takes place. Information is selective.

The artist separates the first-floor exhibition space into several layers. She understands the space as a combination of several elongated or rounded rectangles. The perimeters of these rectangles are straightened into steel rods, while the sides of the rectangles and their intersections with other rectangles are converted into joints on the surfaces of the rods.

The numerical values of the perimeter lengths are used as color values to paint the rods. By stacking and adding together the perimeters of the museum’s ceiling and walls, the many straight lines that form the space converge into a single numerical value: the “total length.” This is then materialized and given form as a small, intensely colored bundle of thread with the same length, placed gently in a corner groove where the exhibition wall meets the floor.

An artist’s book closer in size to a newspaper than to a book is filled with “events” that grope across the space in every direction. The lengths of the edges formed where walls, ceilings, beams, and beams intersect, as well as the positions and numbers of countless vertices, fill the pages with a profusion of indecipherable numbers and marks.

These are signs that indicate information, yet as the weight of their signified meanings is repeatedly blurred and erased, they eventually occupy the book like certain “forms” resembling numbers or letters. Viewers experience the materialization and embodiment of information through sight, touch, and sound as they flap and crease the pages of a book so large that it is difficult even to turn.

Shinae Kim, Scene 5, 2019, Thread, 824.69 m, the all added length of the edges in the museum © Shinae Kim

The width of the groove running along the corner where the wall meets the floor is 20 mm. This 20 mm is not information entirely monopolized by the groove. The desk placed in the middle of the exhibition hall has legs made of 20 mm black square pipes.

The word “Abstract” in the exhibition title suggests this public-good-like quality of information. Information is not absolute. It is variable. It is like an empty glass: if it holds water, it is a water glass; if it holds alcohol, it is a liquor glass.

People often mistake information for the object itself. The information Kim extracted while moving in and out of the exhibition space was all measured directly by the artist, but conversely, those numerical values cannot fully define the actual space of OCI Museum.

Rather than the inherent properties of the museum space, it would be more appropriate to see them as a “snapshot, shadow, trace, or rumor” of this moment. Information is not even a fragment of the object. At most, it is merely an arrow pointing toward it from a distance.

On a piece of paper folded askew, the red line segment that was originally its edge moves into the inside of the paper and gives rise to a new rectangle. The groove at the corner where the exhibition wall meets the floor is dyed the color of the red bricks used on the museum’s exterior.

There is no separate inside and outside; relationships endlessly emit other information. Information is closer to a relationship between an object and another object, between the elements that compose an object, or between an object and the subject who grasps it, rather than to the properties of the object itself.

Its outcome can change endlessly according to the subject, time, context, object, and countless other factors. In the end, information is less content than an “event” like an “attempt to grasp.”

Seen from a distance, form for Shinae Kim is ultimately no more than one mode of notating information. It consists of countless events that always hold the possibility of endlessly circulating and being substituted into other forms, or that are already in that process.

Taking this context as a straw rope, information, event, and form are all naturally tied together like a string of dried yellow corvina. This solo exhibition may be described as a quietly arranged, frugal exhibition that lays out such a string without weaving it too tightly.

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