Installation view of 《Rumors and Villains Night》 © Wumin Art Center

Such things often emerge somewhere between truth and falsehood, reality and fiction, knowledge and ignorance, developing at times into stories that seem extraordinarily realistic and at other times into utterly far-fetched tales. They rapidly grow and diminish between belief and disbelief, spreading and changing form through the imagination and interpretation of different people.

Sometimes they unsettle the human mind, moving between gray anxieties and worries and rosy expectations and fantasies. Rumors exist and acquire their power because there are people whose minds respond to them.

Taking rumors as its central theme, this exhibition turns its attention to the lesser-known aspects of the city of Cheongju. Beginning with the simple expression "They say that...," the exhibition attempts to tell new stories about the region.

By embellishing narratives as rumors do, allowing them to circulate like rumors, and tracing how they move closer to or further away from their original forms, the exhibition seeks to gather new imaginings of the region while navigating the subtle boundaries between truth and falsehood, reality and fiction.

《Rumors and Villains Night》 presents intriguing images and narratives, as well as new forms of speculative storytelling that emerge as individuals encounter a place and either approach the truth or naturally slip away from it. The five participating artists—Jaemin Lee, Mira Park, Jeisung Oh, Eunyoung Lee, and Jung Jungho—engage with the city of Cheongju, reconnecting fragments of time and space severed from the present and giving concrete forms, voices, images, and narratives to things that have remained only vaguely known.

At the intersections of past and present, loss and continuity, change, memory and forgetting, they turn their attention to places, spaces, objects, and stories that survive, or will survive, only in someone's memory or as faint rumors. The exhibition moves beyond conventional representations of Cheongju's places, objects, histories, and stories, revealing how each artist encounters and interprets them from an individual perspective.

(Omitted)

From Daenong and G-Well City to the stone Buddha statues at Yonghwasa Temple along Musimcheon Stream, Sajik-dong, Sangdangsanseong Fortress, and sites associated with dragons, including Dragon Cave and Dragon Rock, the five artists encountered various places and objects throughout Cheongju and met with local people.

By tracing someone's records and remaining traces, the exhibition reconnects gaps in time that have been severed from the present landscape, inviting viewers into the multiple layers of stories preserved within the city of Cheongju. Here, viewers become additional participants who imagine and investigate the origins of rumors.

Rather than undertaking an anthropological "journey toward truth" that seeks to trace facts and information, the exhibition attempts an uneven process of mistranslation and reconstruction around an original narrative. It revisits urban landscapes that have become almost invisible through familiarity, illuminating them from new and unfamiliar perspectives.

Furthermore, by sharing these artistic approaches with the community through the exhibition, it seeks to consider how the places, objects, and histories belonging to the region might be sensed and understood from the perspective of the present.


❋ The exhibition title is borrowed from An Sung-bum's poetry collection 『Rumors and Villains Night』, inspired by the following passage from the poem "Moving Away, Bleeding as Though All Is Well": "As distant forests and distant names remained silent, I could not bring myself to finish the oolong tea that lacked objectivity.

Here, I had been writing letters to memories that existed before meaning. On those nights when stories wondering where they belonged arrived without warning, he ultimately could or could not speak of them."

References