Poster image of 《This is tomorrow》 © CAN Foundation

We sense the changing seasons first through our senses rather than through the passage of time: the lengthening daylight hours, humid air, and warmth rising from the ground against our bodies.

Yet sensations preserved in memory can also be evoked without direct physical contact, as in the experience of watching videos of flickering flames or traveling virtually. How, then, should we understand contemporary life, in which we inhabit both contactless and face-to-face environments, online and offline, simultaneously?

The future society that once seemed distant and uncertain arrived without warning due to COVID-19. Technological advancements previously encountered only through media reports or abstract knowledge became embedded in everyday life as means of establishing and verifying our identities.

Online meetings, once limited to particular professions, became a compulsory substitute for almost all face-to-face interactions for a time. The spread of an invisible disease thus began to regulate daily life, obstruct physical contact, and restrict our sensory experiences.

The exhibition 《This Is Tomorrow: The Future Has Arrived》 takes its inspiration from the title of the 1956 exhibition 《This Is Tomorrow》 at London's Whitechapel Gallery, where architects, painters, sculptors, and artists from various disciplines gathered to critically examine the emergence of mass consumer society and its impact on everyday life.

In a future society that arrived unexpectedly through the COVID-19 pandemic, this exhibition seeks to explore, together with participating artists, the direction of contemporary art amid the restrictions imposed on daily life by the pandemic, the loss of sensory experiences, and the transition toward online environments.

It also aims to express, through various approaches, the changing attitudes toward life brought about by digital environments. Reflecting the current circumstances in which physical and virtual exhibitions coexist, the exhibition is presented simultaneously as an online VR exhibition and an offline exhibition. Divided into two parts under the same title, the exhibition begins with works by Kim Jee Soo and Soljee Ahn.


Installation view of 《This is tomorrow》 © CAN Foundation

Artist Kim Jee Soo presents work centered on the sense of smell, which remains difficult to experience through contemporary contactless technologies. The manifestation of scent within an exhibition space, with its specific location and temporality, is a distinctive feature of in-person exhibitions and a form of sensory expression.

Her work The Scent of the Here and Now evokes primordial sensations through the humidity and air of July and August, when the exhibition takes place, and through scents brushing against the rafters and renovated walls of a nearly century-old house. Another work, The Scent of the Future Fallen Upon Us, presented through online VR, introduces an imaginary fragrance that cannot physically manifest, rather than simply reproducing or duplicating the offline exhibition.

Although described as a scent and associated with olfactory perception, it represents a sensory memory that cannot be generated through direct experience, while simultaneously functioning as a visual sensation conveyed through language. Furthermore, because this virtual fragrance has never been physically experienced, it becomes an expression of individual imagination and creativity, reflecting what Jacques Lacan describes as the way “the signifier slides without ever reaching the signified.”

Artist Soljee Ahn explores bodily responses associated with sight, touch, and hearing, excluding smell, among the senses that adapt unevenly to the new conditions of contactless interaction. On four panels depicting human figures that represent both the artist and the other, images expressing each sense visualize the linguistic and sensory condition of “feeling change on one's skin.”

An era has arrived in which we must experience things we can neither touch nor hear, and similar conditions may continue to emerge in the future. The visual homogenization of diverse sensory experiences under these circumstances is expressed through fragmented images resembling those circulating on social media, much like the tiled boxes supporting the four panels.

Another work by Ahn, the 'Loss' series, presents a world without images in contrast to a world saturated with them. By placing the symbolic “No Image” icon on acrylic surfaces representing screens, the artist negates the existence of images. The forms created by the gravitational pull of sand, in contrast to the industrial acrylic, symbolize primordial sensations and their transformation.

Drawing on Henri Bergson's conception of the totality of “images,” which precedes consciousness and objects, representations and things, the artist raises questions through her work about how her images will be consumed.

References