When done alone it would be just daily routine whereas with two people, it becomes an event. Sleep is the state required for survival, a part of normal life, an act bearing a sexual image. If the standing pose, or the state of being awake is our body moving while defying gravity, the act of putting oneself to sleep to stop one’s conscious activities exposes the body which has lost its motility. The exhibition focuses on the state of ‘sleep’ as an event of the encounter of 2 people, Ahnnlee Lee and Youngjoo Cho, and traces images that lack motility. Then, the ‘orange’ reminding us of the image of vigor as in vitamin, energy, is invited into the picture to reveal the scene of conflict between vitality and dormancy. “Orange Sleep” summons daily objects and each person’s secret memory onto the common ground. The memories like natural history specimen are not about a specific scene; they are non-registered memories, related with the sense preserved yet considered as something trivial, lying beyond an object or landscape.

Let’s begin the journey with the lighting of the space. Upon entering the venue, you will find a white landscape under white lighting. There are slight variations according to the works, but the lighting in the venue consists of standardized white light of 4000K except for special cases. This was to maintain the neutral state as much as possible to minimize the color of the venue in order to support the intrinsic tone of the works. The color that we normally refer to as white is a color without any color, reflecting all lights. Strictly speaking, the white color does not have a value as color; it is instead a sign remaining as an empty place open to all the spectrum of colors. For the exhibition, Ahnnlee Lee and Youngjoo Cho focus on the emptiness of the white color. The white which absorbs all colors yet reflects all lights. The artists devoted their attention on the light and color as standardized existence which becomes a background for objects. It is to discover the other elements that a single standard has ruled out.

When the viewer goes up the stairs, one can witness the conflict between bleached light and orange wavelength created by Lee. We may think that ‘orange’ suggested by the exhibition to be a symbol reminding us of a certain light and color, but it is given a status as a material object with a certain shape to be examined. The thick-skinned orange is different from the tangerine, it does not easily rot and it tends to preserve its original shape even when it is dried. This deceptive fruit which slowly disappears while remaining in its intact form indicates the things which bear and hold out against time. Ahnnlee Lee and Youngjoo Cho pick and collect such remnants of time. Due to the state of ‘original form’ preserved by the orange, the impurity of white composed of all kinds of ray is inclined to question the standard of origin and what a source should be like. Bleached lighting, white paintings, white carpet. In between white landscapes, red or yellow fragments seep into the space. The minute traces that could be found here and there imply certain modes of life. It is about capturing the aesthetics found in ‘our living room’ to integrate daily traces into work material. 

Ahnnlee Lee who has worked with objects easily findable in one’s surroundings to create installations and paintings, presents for this exhibition a sculpture made of coral, dry orange, soap, and 3 new paintings. Lee has explored ways to draw the invisible by erasing objects from our view, since we are attached to what is visible. For this exhibition, he has focused on the ‘soap’ as the motif. As he had often mentioned ‘white dirtiness,’ he points out the moment an object which washes off impure material gradually loses its original shape and takes on the dirtiness. This is the peculiar state of the soap which becomes a reduced matter which nobody wants to really touch after having been touched several times by many. It is a clean-dirty, smooth but undesired matter. Lee’s contradictory view on the soap can be also found in his drawing process. Contrary to Orange Sleep(2023) which displays a cozy image, the surface is rough, damaged, set upon the image of a drawing disappeared in white. This is the making of an image of the object in a tactile manner by remembering the volume of the disappeared soap, the form lost by the rubbing of flesh. In Moth-like stars(2023), Lee discovers a flat soap in a corner of the bathroom as a relic which has been totally used up. Relics are different from normal objects since they are remnants brushed with time left for us to see, and Lee takes note of things of the past discovered today like fossils. As tiger moths that burn themselves instantly upon flying straight into the light, it is to search amid ashes of objects destroyed by an instant of time. Angel (2023) portrays the image of an angel who survived from the ashes. Lee had conjured up the bodiless being from the materiality of the disappearing soap when rubbed against the skin, imagining the volume of bodiless matter. By repeatedly grinding off and covering the canvas surface to smudge the images of his paintings, he created a still life of hardened objects like fossils, as well as a landscape painting of a dramatic scene of an object disappearing like foam.

Youngjoo Cho mainly creates live performance and video, focusing on the manner in which human body engages in the world such as housework, caretaking labor. For the exhibition, Cho invites ‘sleep’ as the keyword to put our body to sleep. Her exhibits are 2 installation works made of wool thread, some related photography, and 3 drawings. These seem to be different from her recent performances which display emphasis on the body, but actually the exhibits are talking about the physicality of human beings more than ever. The works imply traces left by the female body such as menstrual blood, vaginal discharges. In the middle of the venue, you can find the work titled True Stories 1: Cold(2022). The image resembling a small flame is the expression of the trace of matter discharged from the cold female body. Body secretion is a sort of symptom of reacting to outer stimulus. When a certain symptom is considered as an indicator diagnosing our current state and understanding the conflict between the outside and the body, Cho discovers resistance from the substance that is easily dismissed as impure and dirty. The fluids activated by bodily activities are the symbol of struggle against the stimulus that the body had to endure. Rather than following the cause of this outer stimulus which displays itself as a sort of symptom, Cho shows the image itself. The artist places her own body on this image to create the photography True Stories 2: Warm(2022) and expose the female body of various age groups. Including Cho, 3 female bodies convey the skin-to-skin warmth without a speck of sexuality. Exposed body on the traces on the floor, the artist’s glance toward the camera and her upright pose collide with the cold air to confer tension. The work installed on the wall titled Full Time-Double: 9 Oct.(2022) is a graph displaying dates and time; a single day of 24 hours among months and months of parenting journal keeping has been transformed into symbols. It was first created in 2019, then printed on wool thread that documents the baby’s breast-feeding, bowel movements, sleep patterns. Hence the work visualizes the curve of working and resting body, of repeated sleepless days and nights.

Object which repeatedly appear in our everyday routine, bodily labor which is practised daily. The artists have summoned a common object and boring movements into a single scene. Cho’s installation of a white structured work called Humangarten (2021) was set as the background of the body in the live performance Human beings don't spring up like mushrooms(2021), video work Com pani(2021), live performance Cohabitating with Yellow Benjamin(2022), and video work Colere(2022). Lee makes use of Humangarten, which was set as a site of body in various manners, as his working material. If Humangarten worked as the stage for human movement until now, Ahnnlee Lee confers new status of independent sculpture from his perspective for this show, to be used as the stage of objects. Youngjoo Cho’s white structure, which finds its usage with new character in different places each time, is an incomplete object for Lee, a temporary sculpture which has not settled with its final shape. The notable feature of Lee’s Clockwork Orange I, II, III(2023) is the inside-out cover of the structure. A part of the structure made of faux leather cover revealed its inner skin under objects such as dry coral, dried orange and lemon. Blue sponge, hidden stitch marks, a label indicating it was an industrial product are all exposed between the gap between the outer skin which is not zipped up. The material of faux leather shows its inside as textile, the different side which was hidden. Even the cover’s usage of protecting and hiding an object is overturned. As inside and outside are both flipped, the object becomes weak against outer force and becomes dirty-white.

Now is the time to bring back the word ‘sleep’ which the show had put forward. The act of sleeping guided to the mental state of dreaming becomes a condition which guarantees a distance between the outer world and oneself. The dream as an unconscious activity is a process of making one’s own symbolic structure, projecting how a person understands the world. Rather than reflecting conscious activities, the dream brings scenes which the consciousness had omitted, as the manifestation of memory embedded in our body. Ahnnlee Lee and Youngjoo Cho search for dream scenes from places in reality which we are aware of, instead of projecting reality onto the form of dream. The lost aspects of things which were impossible to grasp their substance or original form in the first place, volatile body movements. It is about imagining the image without identity, which had been already lost, not to be found anywhere. The artists both display a sort of archaeological attitude of following traces of life and objects. They search for the origin of imagination from the object of reality as the dream considers awareness in reality as its source. In this world today where everything transforms into a virtual space, one carefully observes objects and phenomena that the skin can sense, documenting traces of disappearing matter into images. Yesterday solidified like a fossil, today dead like a relic, tomorrow disappearing like a soap. In the circulation of production and consumption, the artists dream of scenes preserving today while polishing the fruit which the current time swooshing away could not bear. 
 
Ahnnlee Lee(b.1985, Korea) received DNAP and DNSAP degrees from École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, France. He has held solo exhibitions at Drawing Space SAALGOO, Seoul (2018); Drawing Space SAALGOO, Seoul (2016). Participated in group exhibitions at ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul (2022); Space So, Seoul (2021); HITE Collection, Seoul (2020); Jeju Museum of Contemporary Art, Jeju (2018); SEONGBUK Creation Center, Seoul (2017) and others.

Youngjoo Cho(b. 1978, Korea) received her B.F.A in Departments of Art Education from Sungkyunkwan University, studied in Master of Fine Arts, University Paris8. Also she received her DNAP and DNSEP from Ecole nationale supérieure d'arts de Paris Cergy. She has held solo exhibitions at Seoullo Media Canvas, Seoul (2020); Alternative Space Loop, Seoul (2020);  Place Mak Laser, Seoul (2019); Corner Art Space, Seoul (2013)  and others. Participated in numerous group exhibitions including those held at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Gwacheon, Gyeonggi (2022); Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Gyeonggi (2022); Busan Museum of Art, Busan (2022); Gyeongnam Art Museum, Gyeongnam (2021); Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul (2021); MMCA Residency Changdong (2022, 2021, 2021); Song Eun Art Space, Seoul (2020); National Museum of Modern And Contemporary Art Deoksugung, Seoul (2018) and many more. She was awarded the 20th Song Eun ArtAward, Grand Prize in 2020 and participated in the artist-in-residence program of MMCA Residency Changdong, Seoul Art Space Geumcheon, Incheon Art Platform and others. Her works are in the collections of the MMCA Art Bank, Korea; Song Eun Art and Cultural Foundation, Korea; SeMA Seo-Seoul, Korea; Museum of Contemporary Art Busan, Korea and more. 

References

• ONE AND J. Gallery