Installation view of 《Elsewhere》 © Atelier Hermes

Is turning one’s gaze toward ‘elsewhere’ an escapist act that turns away from the intensity of the ‘here and now,’ a reality filled with urgent agendas? Is it merely an imaginative gaze directed toward a world beyond, unrelated to the reality in which we live?

Reality is often obstructed by countless difficulties and boundaries, and throughout history, heroic narratives, revolutionary movements, and artistic visions have continually sought ways to transcend it. Belief in the arrival of a political realm not yet realized, along with desires for happiness and freedom, has persistently led us toward a vast and unfamiliar ‘elsewhere.’ More often than not, this has culminated in utopia—a ‘nowhere’ imagined beyond reality.

Contemporary reality, however, changes and expands from moment to moment to such an extent that distinguishing its inside from its outside has become increasingly meaningless, continually crossing the boundaries of our perception. Diaspora across national borders summons geographically ‘other’ places we have never visited, places sometimes labeled as barbaric, while the divisions fundamental to modern society fragment the world itself.

We live cautiously on one corner of an unpredictable whole, standing upon a smooth surface beneath which countless sinkholes remain concealed. At the same time, new forms of time and space created by technological environments have established themselves as parallel worlds of reality, repeatedly connecting to it through processes of ‘synchronization’ and continually expanding its boundaries.

At a moment when reality itself constitutes a kind of heterotopia in which multiple mutually incompatible spaces overlap, looking toward ‘elsewhere’ can paradoxically be understood as a way of looking back at the ‘here and now.’ Like the strategy of mystery novelist Alice Arisugawa, who seeks to “turn reality inside out without escaping from it,” such a gaze enters the gaps within reality and reveals what has been concealed.

As Nicolas Bourriaud has argued that what we have called ‘reality’ is in fact merely a montage, and that the challenge for art today must therefore be “to reconstruct this montage,” contemporary artistic practice may need to become an exploration of countless forms of ‘elsewhere.’

The exhibition brings together five contemporary artists who continually explore the possibilities of media including painting, sculpture, video, and installation. Beginning with the keyword ‘elsewhere,’ these artists identify unusual points within reality, explore the realm of the unconscious, move across reality and history to examine the present tense, and look toward an uncertain era in which we will continue to coexist with the pandemic.

Looking toward ‘elsewhere’ does not mean turning away from the ‘here and now’; rather, it reflects an attitude of continually questioning and defining one’s position within the enclosed terrain of reality while imagining ways of escaping circuits from which there seems to be no exit. As individual contemporary artists, they question the realities they face and experiment with the possibility of escape by confining themselves within closed rooms, returning to places from the past, or inventing new or impossible forms of ‘elsewhere.’

Kim Donghee (b. 1986), whose practice intervenes architecturally in the physical space of exhibitions, analyzes the interior, passageways, and courtyard of Atelier Hermes and presents a site-specific installation in which interior and exterior are inverted, producing visual and perceptual confusion for viewers.

Kim Heecheon (b. 1989), who has focused on the increasingly blurred distinction between the virtual and the real, borrows the plot structure of detective fiction to construct a ‘locked room’ through video and physical space, tracing a ‘world’ presumed to have died following the spread of COVID-19. Roh Sangho (b. 1986), who observes the desires of others as they appear on social media, combines the mechanical act of imitation through carbon-copy drawing with his distinctive painterly expression, guiding viewers into entirely different imaginary spaces.

Film director Son Kwangju (b. 1970), in the documentary video Rock Paper Scissors, revisits the adult world—history—projected onto children’s play and learning while imagining a future that might differ from it. Cho Jaeyoung (b. 1979), who constructs sculptures by joining sheets of paper, presents an Alice-like imaginary space that resists the politics of urban space by overturning spatial structures that implicitly regulate and control the many.

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