Installation view of 《I guess that’s not the problem》 (Space Heem, 2023) © Space Heem

The Only Thing We Can Do
(At the close of the third artist workshop)

We first had to persuade ourselves of how useless it is to try making work together, and at the same time had to confirm once again how arduous a labor it is. We wanted to shake off the romance that easily clings to the word “workshop,” and to overcome the morally superior position, immune to criticism, that the word “experience” often carries.

In order to do so, we thought that beyond the simple act of making works and holding an exhibition, the results we produced had to become, at least for someone, objects of discussion. Even if that failed, we wanted to make clear to the artists beginning their lives as practitioners that their work should aim for this.

In order to overcome the limitations of narcissistic work that is easily accepted under the pretext of the specificity of personal history, it was first necessary to confirm the recognition that we exist as sedimentations of complex histories, and that we are working as members of contemporary society.

This had to do with a kind of professional consciousness that artists dealing with vision should possess: to suspect and overcome contemporary visual inertia, to propose new visual systems, and thereby generate social discussion. It was a promise to continue without avoiding the questions that those who choose to do this work must carry.


Installation view of 《I guess that’s not the problem》 (Space Heem, 2023) © Space Heem

But what is the contemporary? How is it possible to perceive something that has never once been defined? We began by asking what makes it possible to imagine the contemporary by tracing visual systems, rather than relying on the masochistic fantasies driven by technological capitalism or the irresponsible standards that divide generations by letters of the alphabet.

For a long time, we talked about finding the nodal points that divide before and now, and about what forms the beings that fell out in that process took as holes in the contemporary. We believed that holes of various shapes would serve as paradoxical indicators for perceiving the contemporary, while also hoping that they would reveal the problems of the present that we must overcome.

Dongkyung Kwak argues that contemporary capitalism has been reorganized around the capital of hype, and that all things and events are required to enter a hyped state. Shin Junghye focuses on Confucian culture returning in a new form, tracing how industry and institutions have controlled the bodies of male idols within the history of K-pop boy groups.

Kim Donggyeom records with his camera the three new seas created by the Sihwa seawall, while confessing the repeated desires and frustrations of the non-Seoul he felt growing up in the city of Hwaseong. Yang Jihoon, while watching the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests and the war in Ukraine, witnessed how the representation of tragedy rushes toward an extreme spectacle and becomes increasingly detached from reality; he then visits his grandfather, who has been inscribed only as a victim of April 3, and experiments with and proposes a new mode of representing tragedy.

Over the course of eight months, the four artists encouraged and critiqued one another from the position of fellow artist-critics. Curator Jin Seyoung then became a new companion to the works by observing the process of their updates and adding writing. We asked questions of one another’s thoughts without pause, and thought together in order to find answers.

Of course, these works cannot define the contemporary, but we decided to ask whether it is possible to speak of the contemporary without examining these problems. Certainly, the contemporary, which exists only as a fluid vector, may ultimately be the state of being undefinable itself.

And yet, not letting go of the expectation that this world will move very slowly toward the place led by the accumulation and leaps of such concerns—that is the only thing we can do. With this simple conclusion, the workshop comes to an end.

(Text: Hong Jinhwon)

References