Installation view of 《Solidification》 © Art Space Pool

The Aesthetics of Artificial Scenery

In Kwon Yongju’s work, “stone” (石) is not inherently a solid substance, but rather the resulting state of assorted materials that have been combined, covered with cement, and hardened through a “process of solidification.”

The process of attaching (附) plants to these stones, tending them, and allowing them to take root—that is, the process of combining artificial materials with artificial nature and thereby creating (作)—provides both the title and the thematic keyword of Kwon Yongju’s solo exhibition.

“Mounting on Rocks” thus refers to the artist’s working method and attitude of transforming improvised, temporary, ongoing, and mutable states into solid works, while also addressing, on a more reflective level, his own sense that his practice had become stagnant and hardened.

Kwon Yongju reinterprets Mounting on Rocks—a hobby in which plants such as moss, wind orchids, and wild grasses are transplanted onto and cultivated on stones resembling natural rock, allowing one to commune with a miniature simulacrum of nature—as a method for his own practice.

Applying cement to fragments of cement, egg cartons, wastepaper, mops, and the tops of brooms, he uses a sprayer to form shapes resembling rugged cliffs, then attaches wind orchids, which thrive in harsh cliff-like environments, and tends them until they take root. The resulting works combine labor, hobby, and play.

Cement mountains gently covering tangles of mop and broom fibers, convex cement peaks rising above roughly intertwined and dangling electrical wires, and comical formations of bizarre cliffs made by loosely binding recycled wastepaper and other materials with twine and coating only one side with cement—together with wind orchids clinging precariously to them—provoke laughter while simultaneously inviting viewers to imagine what might lie beyond their summits.

This seems to correspond to what the artist describes as “the function of a portal through which a small landscape can, if only in the imagination, arrive at a spectacular vista (fantasy-paradise).” Mounting on Rocks (2016) became a pivotal work through which Kwon Yongju approached, on another level, his ongoing explorations of the point where art and everyday life intersect, while also addressing a period of stagnation in his artistic concerns.


Installation view of 《Solidification》 © Art Space Pool

Kwon Yongju began his artistic practice in the late 2000s and, for more than a decade, has developed his body of work while simultaneously pursuing art and other forms of labor, negotiating the tension between the two. Yet in most cases, his work does not deliberately address artistic labor or the labor of the artist.

Rather, it is a process through which identities almost inseparable from the artist’s body—as a laborer, maker, and exhibition technician—are manifested and deepened across multiple levels. The skills Kwon acquired through the various jobs he took on to sustain his life became so thoroughly embodied that they inevitably found their way into his artistic practice, even when he did not consciously intend to apply them.

These experiences have also profoundly shaped his way of thinking, and at times the artist thinks and acts with the attitude of a “worker.” This solo exhibition by Kwon Yongju loosely connects works that emerged from different facets of the life and everyday realities he has experienced and encountered, following the textures of the narratives they collectively produce.
 
He draws out what is meant to be concealed behind a smooth surface—the tricks that should remain undetected—or what is supposed to stay hidden beneath it, such as miscellaneous waste and construction materials, and turns them into sculptural forms. Rather than being finished objects made to fulfill a particular purpose, his sculptural installations emerge by chance from things that exist only for the sake of a process and are destined to disappear, or from things that have been or will be discarded.

These works give form to the provisional lives of ordinary urban residents and, further, speak to the incompleteness of our present condition. In one corner of the exhibition space is We'll See You at the Top (2009), in which a crater-shaped cement mountain occupies the center, while photographs of Mount Baekdu, commemorative snapshots, and images of neighborhood corners hang on the wall behind it.

Recalling how the sight of a puddle prepared for mixing cement at a construction site reminded him of the crater of Mount Baekdu, the artist explains, “At the time, I spent an entire year making cement sculptures. Because I was making cement puddles every day, I naturally came to apply that material and form to my work.” Yet the title of the work is ironic.

Although it says “We'll See You at the Top”, the crater of the cement mountain he constructed is too wet to stand on, while the summit of Mount Baekdu that it symbolizes is likewise difficult to reach, both physically and ideologically. Like the emptiness of the phrase “Let’s meet at the top someday,” often tossed around boastfully by young men over drinks, the title begins to drift hollowly when it encounters the actual work.

Better a Live Coward than a Dead Hero (2009) also uses cement as its primary material, but here the artist employed finished cement blocks rather than cement powder. Between the Korean phrase “Better to roll in a field of dung than to leave this world,” engraved neatly into the cement blocks, and its English title, “Better a Live Coward than a Dead Hero”, the work reveals a concern with survival itself—the imperative that one must stay alive—and, beyond that, with one’s attitude toward life.


Installation view of 《Solidification》 © Art Space Pool

If Mounting on Rocks, We'll See You at the Top, Better a Live Coward than a Dead Hero, and works not included in this exhibition—such as fake rocks made of Styrofoam, stone monuments, and signboards engraved with phrases—were derived from labor the artist experienced firsthand, Tying (2013/2016) addresses the world of real labor from a somewhat more objective distance.

Moving into the adjacent exhibition space, one encounters an installation of dyed yarn under fluorescent lights in a worn interior resembling a small-scale cottage factory. Behind it, a video cuts across time and space by alternating between the calm recollections of the artist’s mother, who worked at a textile mill when she was young, and an interview with a present-day factory worker in Thailand.

The aged atmosphere of Art Space Pool evokes the textile mill preserved in the mother’s memory, while the video reproduces the repetitive movements of machinery in today’s automated factories. Silk fabric woven by fully automated machinery in the video hangs across one wall, bearing the phrase, “A person who would survive even if dragged onto a field of gravel, and who would go to a field of sand, make a foundation stone, build a house, and live there.”

Its insistence is more tenacious and forceful than the hesitant will to live expressed in “Better to roll in a field of dung than to leave this world.” Installed in a small room on one side of the exhibition, Basement Sewing Rainbow amplifies the lyricism and nostalgia felt in the dyed-yarn installation of Tying, pushing them toward the realm of fantasy. In this work, bowls of water, shards of glass, mirrors, and other materials meet light passing through the wall to create a rainbow, conveying a somewhat hopeful message, like a ray of light entering a life marked by hardship and sorrow.

In the basement of the neighboring building stands Waterfall (2016), a work that seems to merge the scenery of a construction site with that of an artificial waterfall in the city. Since Waterfall_Structure of Survival, first presented in a solo exhibition at Mullae Art Factory in 2011, the artist has produced six or seven different versions of Waterfall.

The Waterfall installed in the basement courtyard of Art Space Pool is constructed from only the most basic elements, closely resembling the drawing of an imagined urban leisure facility that Kwon made when he first conceived the series. This waterfall differs from earlier versions, in which water gushed over structures piled high with recycled objects, discarded materials, and assorted found items, intensifying their material presence only to dissolve it through the flow of water.

Here, as though recreating the two-dimensional flatness of a drawing, outlines were sketched onto several wooden panels, cut out, and erected like two or three layers of walls. These were then covered with blue waterproof tarpaulin and tightly bound with industrial rubber straps. The result resembles construction materials stacked in a corner of a building site and covered for protection, or goods loaded onto a truck, wrapped and tied down to keep them from spilling out.

If the earlier Waterfall works seemed to pull out and expose everything that might ordinarily be hidden beneath a tarpaulin, this work instead wraps and covers those things, moving—like the Mounting on Rocks works—toward an aesthetics of artificial scenery resembling the ridgelines of mountains and cliffs.

Perhaps because of the familiarity of this construction-site-like scene, Kwon Yongju’s artificial waterfall feels more natural and more real than the artificial waterfalls found in cities that imitate spectacular natural scenery. On a small screen placed on a table in front of the waterfall, videos showing water cascading through earlier Waterfall works play continuously.


Installation view of 《Solidification》 © Art Space Pool

Might the concept of the portal proposed by the artist through Mounting on Rocks—the spectacular scenery (fantasy-paradise) he sought to reach, if only in the imagination—ultimately reveal itself more clearly through the familiar strangeness of the blue artificial waterfall and the realistic artificial landscapes shown on the small screen?

Visitors are invited to pause for a moment before the artificial waterfall installed in the courtyard, a basement rest area, and encounter the portal created by the artist: between reality and paradise, imitation and imagination, nature and the artificial, the raw and the refined, solidity and fluidity. With luck, one might even witness a dazzling moment of radiance as shafts of sunlight falling into the courtyard strike the glossy blue tarpaulin.

References