Originality & Identity

Part-time Suite is an artist collective whose practice emerges from shared concerns about socioeconomic conditions and explores the structural contradictions surrounding individual lives and artistic production. Founded in 2009, the collective sought independent modes of artistic practice in response to the restrictive institutional environment of the art world and precarious labor conditions.

For Part-time Suite, collaboration extends beyond the division of roles, functioning as a process in which differing perspectives and experiences intersect and individual limitations are transformed into collective action. This collective identity informs their ongoing inquiry into how art can foster relationships and generate small but meaningful changes within society.

In their early works, Part-time Suite focused on spaces marginalized by urban growth and redevelopment, as well as the traces of everyday life embedded within them. Rather than treating urban space as a mere physical backdrop, the collective understands it as a social construct shaped by economic interests, political power, personal memories, and emotions.

Their investigation of space, initiated through works such as Under Interior (2009) and Off-Off-Stage (2009), expanded into questions of private property, community, ownership, and occupation in the 'The Ballad of Real Estates' series (2015–2016). By juxtaposing spaces abandoned according to economic value with communities that have emerged within them, the collective seeks to uncover possibilities for living that cannot be explained through the logic of development and growth alone.

These concerns extend beyond the physical spaces of the city to an exploration of the social imagination through which history and the future are constructed. Wait for Me in a Crashing Airship (2016) connects the sense of weightlessness experienced by individuals unable to establish a place within society with ruined urban spaces, questioning what has been excluded and sacrificed in the name of promised future growth.

People, the Next People (2017) brings memories of Minjung Art and the democratization movement of the 1980s into dialogue with today's digital media environment, examining changing forms of resistance and the political role of images across generations. For Part-time Suite, the past and future are not separate temporal realms but conditions that continuously reshape contemporary life and perception.

Part-time Suite has further expanded its inquiry into the ways technology and media organize human perception and behavior. In the solo exhibition 《AIR》 (2019), the collective explored an environment in which humans and the world are captured and classified as data through surveillance cameras, computer vision, and real-time image-processing technologies.

While acknowledging the new possibilities offered by technology, the artists question how human autonomy and sensory experience can be sustained within underlying systems of control and automation.

Style & Contents

Part-time Suite works across performance, video, installation, music, and publishing, adopting flexible forms according to the subject and site of each project. In their early practice, the collective temporarily occupied vacant buildings and urban lots, transforming them into spaces for artistic production and exhibition.

Following Under Interior (2009) and Off-Off-Stage (2009), Loop the Loop (2009) extended the boundaries of the exhibition space into the city by inviting viewers to collect maps at DOOSAN Gallery and travel to the rooftop of a nearby building. This approach demonstrates how the collective incorporates the constraints of a given site into the work itself, creating new spatial experiences through the movement and participation of viewers.

The integration of video and music also plays a significant role in Part-time Suite's practice. Formed in 2010, their project band Part-time Suite Sound expanded music into both an independent artistic activity and a means of expression connected to their visual practice. The 'The Ballad of Real Estates' series (2015–2016) combines footage of ghost towns, squatted sites, and abandoned development projects in Spain and South Korea with music composed by the collective.

In particular, The Ballad of Real Estates (2015) brings together two-channel video, sound, and objects such as a belt holding numerous keys, juxtaposing the landscapes and emotional atmospheres of different spaces. By layering recorded realities with music and the symbolic presence of objects, the collective imbues documentary images with lyrical and sometimes paradoxical sensibilities.

Part-time Suite has subsequently explored the possibilities of digital media, experimenting with visual perspectives and viewers' sensory experiences. Wait for Me in a Crashing Airship (2016) employs a 360-degree camera and a VR head-mounted display to create an immersive experience in which viewers seem to encounter ruins and underground spaces firsthand, while simultaneously exposing the paradox of their own bodily absence within virtual reality.

In People, the Next People (2017), images associated with Minjung Art and the democratization movement of the 1980s are juxtaposed with children's performative actions, smartphone screens, and online broadcasts. Unstable camera movements and rough editing render visible the distance between historical imagery and contemporary digital culture, making the very processes through which images are produced and received an integral part of the work.

These formal experiments expanded toward real-time imagery and computer vision technologies in the solo exhibition 《AIR》 (2019). Neighbors ver.1.1 brings together live feeds from IP cameras installed inside and outside the exhibition space, publicly accessible webcams, and real-time computer vision monitoring, generating an unpredictable flow of images.

Presented alongside it, Auto confronts bodily and sensory actions with the operations of machines that measure and track them, revealing tensions between automation and autonomy. Rather than treating media simply as tools for transmitting images, Part-time Suite incorporates the conditions under which technologies operate, along with the contingencies and sensory experiences they produce, into the structure of their works.

Through this approach, the collective has developed a visual language that moves fluidly across the boundaries between documentation and fiction, reality and virtuality, and human agency and machine processing.

Topography & Continuity

Part-time Suite occupies a distinctive position within the emergence of self-organized artistic practices in South Korea during the late 2000s. When the collective was founded in 2009, its members established an independent foundation for their practice by securing spaces and organizing projects themselves rather than relying on established art institutions.

These early initiatives reflected an effort by young artists facing precarious labor conditions and limited opportunities for artistic production to create their own working environments. As their activities expanded to institutions such as Art Sonje Center, DOOSAN Gallery, and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, the collective continued to question conventional exhibition systems and reconsider relationships among artists, spaces, and audiences.

Although Part-time Suite's practice initially emerged from an engagement with urban spaces and social conditions in South Korea, it gradually developed into an international practice connecting the histories and economic circumstances of different regions. The collective presented works at Sharjah Art Foundation and Gertrude Contemporary in Australia in 2012, and at the Institut d'art contemporain in France in 2013. In 2015, a residency at Matadero Madrid in Spain provided an opportunity to investigate local issues surrounding urban development and community.

Their residency-based projects and exhibitions at ARTZONE in Kyoto, Japan, in 2017 further incorporated specific locations and cultural contexts into their artistic practice. These activities can be understood as a process of examining social contradictions and living conditions across different cities, connecting localized experiences to broader contemporary concerns.

While expanding its fields of activity and artistic media, Part-time Suite has maintained a sustained interest in the structures that shape social reality and the experiences of individuals within them. Its early exploration of physical urban spaces gradually extended into questions of history, memory, digital media, and technological environments, as demonstrated by the Seoul Mediacity Biennale in 2016 and the solo exhibition 《AIR》 in 2019.

The collective subsequently participated in exhibitions including 《Solidarity Spores》 at the Asia Culture Center in 2020 and 《The Part In The Story Where Our Accumulating Dust Becomes A Mountain》 at the Seoul Museum of Art in 2023, situating its practice within ongoing discussions of solidarity, community, and the social role of art. Rather than remaining committed to a particular medium or subject, Part-time Suite's trajectory reflects an expanding field of inquiry responsive to changing social conditions.

Another essential aspect of Part-time Suite's continuity lies in its collective mode of working. Operating as a duo comprising Miyeon Lee and Jaeyoung Park since 2013, the artists share authority and responsibility throughout the creative process, embracing disagreement and negotiation as integral elements of collaboration.

For them, collaboration is not an efficient division of labor directed toward a predetermined consensus, but a process through which differing perspectives coexist and generate new possibilities. This approach suggests that individual artistic autonomy and collective practice need not be mutually exclusive, and that the act of working together can itself become a driving force for artistic production amid uncertain circumstances.

The continuity of Part-time Suite's practice therefore lies not in the repetition of a fixed artistic language, but in the ongoing renewal of shared questions in response to changing realities.