Installation view ©Art Space Hyeong

Exhibition Statement

The desire for pure bloodlines has historically asserted its superiority in discussions concerning the human species. In contrast, hybridity has long been regarded as something tainted or impure, and thus easily perceived as incorrect or deviant. In the cultural dimension, however, phenomena of hybrid alliances and convergences have long been accepted as natural. Particularly as a positive utility that embraces heterogeneous elements to enable new forms of becoming, hybridity has been venerated. Yet when addressed in terms of bloodline-based communities, such as the category of nation or ethnicity, an entirely different dynamic unfolds.


Installation view ©Art Space Hyeong

Even today, when the meaning of diversity has become self-evident, hybridity remains precarious in groups that prefer to impose specific standards. In an era reluctant to acknowledge identities beyond singularity, can the value of hybridity truly persist? To overcome the discrimination and contempt historically imposed upon hybrid attributes, what kind of shift in perception is required? Perhaps merely revealing the distinctive qualities that certain objects or individuals inherently possess is sufficient for hybridity to assert its essence. That essence, which both differentiates itself from others and simultaneously defines a set of types, is in itself grand.

Hybridity must be considered as unrepresentable—a magnificence that escapes both physical and metaphysical measures of reproduction and imitation. It should be understood as a unique process and outcome that expands by following nature’s law of excluding recessive traits, thereby creating characteristics of extension. White, symbolizing the meaning of noble achromatism, is extracted through the method of additive mixing, confronting us with the very time–space of hybridity. Thus emerges the sublime of hybridity, which may manifest as an intensely personal categorization or as a sensation traversing the communal strata shared by many. Concepts of hybridity and the sublime, which seemed forever irreconcilable, finally converge into union.

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