Jewyo Rhii (b.1971) has utilized variable, temporary, and non-rigid mundane materials as the primary materials for her work, capturing the processes of change and adaptation within given conditions. Starting from personal narratives rooted in her own experiences, Rhii's work often expands to question societal structures, systems, and the marginalized elements within them, seeking to uncover their latent values.
 
To achieve this, Rhii employs a wide range of mediums, including drawing, installation, and public sculpture. She challenges conventional exhibition methods by proposing new approaches and perspectives, while simultaneously bringing to the surface the conflicts and tensions created by established norms, encouraging viewers to see these issues from a fresh viewpoint.

Night Studio is an open house project by Jewyo Rhii, in which she invited a certain number of visitors into her home and studio located in Itaewon, where she lived from 2008 to 2011. During her time in Itaewon, she adapted found furniture to suit her height, built devices to protect herself from the cold and heat using materials she found nearby, and devised security measures to guard against theft.
 
Through objects and drawings that reveal practical decisions, aesthetic and sematic choices, the artist explored her environment and living conditions, while also experimenting with the inevitable moments when artistic decisions occur. This accumulation of processes and objects in her home-studio was presented to a small visitors through four separate Night Studio projects, each with a unique subtitle reflecting the situation or theme, and each lasting for two weeks.

The works in Night Studio—having departed the Itaewon in 2011 and traveled through museum exhibitions at various cities—became to meet the ‘public moment’. In Korea, in 2013, Art Sonje Center held an exhibition to conclude the long journey of Night Studio.
 
The exhibition presented a newly conceived version of Night Studio, focusing on the meaning of works that have been added to and accumulated over time, location, and social relationships.

In the exhibition at Art Sonje Center, the artist expressed her fears and anxieties about her new residence in Itaewon through new installation methods, including works that reflect the fear and anxiety she experienced while living there. For example, Rhii installed a Moving Floor made of the same material as the exhibition floor and invited the audience to walk on it, allowing them to physically experience the anxiety she experienced in Itaewon through their bodies.

A decade later, in 2017, these forgotten works took center stage, becoming the protagonists of a performance. The performance explored the dynamic interaction between objects and artworks, as well as between the life of the artist and the life of the artworks themselves. Through elements like speech and silence, movement and sound, and light and shadow, these pieces resonated and conversed with each other on stage, illuminating the boundary between art and life.

The experimental recontextualization of previous works that Rhii explored in Ten Years, please was expanded upon in her collaboration with artist Jihyun Jung in the project Dawn Breaks. This project included multiple installation pieces and a parade performance, where the narrative continuously evolved and transformed based on the people and situations involved. Through these objects, a variety of stories were created and reshaped in real-time.
 
Dawn Breaks was first showcased at the Queens Museum in New York in 2015, followed by its presentation at the Gwangju Biennale in 2016 and the Art Sonje Center in 2017. This was the first performance by the two artists, from different generations, and began with a dialogue in which they shared their respective creative histories through the objects and images they suspended and displayed on the stage.

Later, through the parade performance, the numerous images and objects that existed in fragmented forms were given order and time through the physical framework provided by the artist, forming a narrative without the need for words or text. Additionally, they also invited fellow artists and makers to place or hang their poems, paintings, and sculptures on the apparatuses and activate them creating a series of narratives. In this way, the objects were transformed into a small theater that moved and changed according to the six chapters of the parade, functioning as mechanisms that wove together various narratives.

In 2019, at the MMCA's “Korea Artist Prize”, Jewyo Rhii presented Five Story Tower and Love Your Depot, offering a new form of creative space and artwork storage system. Five Story Tower is a five-story art storage unit designed to maximize the use of limited space. During the exhibition, works by contemporary artists such as Jihyun Jung, Park Jihye, Hwang Sueyon, and Hong Seung-Hye were entrusted to the tower. The structure could be installed in eight different configurations depending on the conditions of the exhibition space.

Love Your Depot, presented alongside Five Story Tower, serves as a proposal and a prototype for an alternative storage system that the artist wishes to implement in the future. This project, which consists not only of Jewyo Rhii’s works but also those of other artists, is designed to function as an 'open storage' system for preserving and exhibiting works that have been marginalized by the logic of the mainstream art market.
 
During the exhibition, Love Your Depot was researched and recorded in various ways by participants who were present in the exhibition space. At the same time, a platform operated that allows for the online broadcasting of content generated on-site, creating a living communication hub. In other words, Love Your Depot is an alternative proposal that seeks ways to delay the disappearance of artworks that have been left behind after exhibition or have not been exhibited at all, while also exploring ways to share art. It represents a political stance towards the institutional framework of art.

Rhii was selected as the final winner of the 2019 Korea Artist Prize, and Love Your Depot was subsequently installed as public art in 2021 at the Gungmaeul Park in Suseo-dong, Gangnam-gu. Love Your Depot_Gangnam Pavilion consists of the Turn Depot, a storage and exhibition center that is the core of the project, and the Under Depot, a cube-shaped structure where immaterial works such as smoke, light, sound, video, and performance are screened and stored.
 
The Turn Depot rotates at a very slow speed once every three minutes or so, allowing the audience to stand in one place and view the stored works through the windows of the storage. The outer surface, made of special aluminum, changes its appearance over time as it reflects the surrounding environment.
 
Meanwhile, Under Depot adjusts the transparency of the large glass windows through the manipulation of electronic signals to move between the exhibition space and the screen, breaking down the stereotype of artworks as fixed and unchanging, and expanding the audience's perception to accept works that are characterized by change and disappearance as art.

And last year, Jewyo Rhii presented an expanded version of Love Your Depot in her solo exhibition “Of Hundred Carts and On” at Barakat Contemporary. “Of Hundred Carts and On” departs from the publication ‘Of Five Carts and On’ (2009), which chronicled the journey of the artist's works that were on the verge of being discarded due to no place to store them after completing her previous overseas residency programs.
 
Since the 1990s, the artist has been making art that adapts to and survives the unstable conditions of traveling between cities in various countries, which has since evolved into Love Your Depot, an alternative art storage that stores and exhibits works by other artists. Barakat Contemporary showcased the journey from just five carts to hundred carts, a journey that began as a personal narrative and progressed toward a consciousness of the fragile periphery outside the institutional framework.

Additionally, in this exhibition, the artist also presented a version of Love Your Depot that the previously wooden works were recast in metal, enhancing its durability and sustainability. Alongside this, an indoor version of Turn Depot, which was featured in the Gangnam Public Art Project, and the steel frame work Painting Plate, which can be slid left and right to view from multiple angles, were introduced.
 
Through these works, Rhii has begun by expressing the issues of others, as well as the anxieties, anger, and fragility of individual existence, experienced while moving between unfamiliar cities. This expression is conveyed through non-formal, temporary, and variable works and installations. She is now advancing into the public domain, proposing and implementing alternative systems while creating a foundation that can mobilize while firmly supporting fragile and unstable existences.

“Ultimately, my work is about 'physicality.' This word encompasses various physical meanings, such as corporeality and materiality. The way this world operates is inherently physical.
 
I have been experimenting with and documenting the process of fragile existences passing through an unwavering physical world from multiple perspectives. Initially, I focused more on the physical and personal aspects caused by the harshness of this physical world, but now I am concentrating on the harshness shaped by the macro environment of life.”

(Art in Culture, August 2010)

이주요는 이화여자대학교에서 서양화과를 전공하였고, 이후 펜실베니아 대학교 대학원과 첼시미술대학교에서 순수미술 석사 학위를 취득했다. 주요 개인전으로는 “백 개의 카트와 그 위에”(바라캇 컨템포러리, 서울, 2023), “올해의 작가 ‘러브유어디포_런던’”(주영한국문화원, 런던, 2020), “The Day 3, Walls and Barbed”(Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, 런던, 2017), “Walls To Talk To”(프랑크푸르트 현대미술관, 프랑크푸르트, 독일, 2013), “Walls To Talk To”(반아베 미술관, 아인트호벤, 네덜란드, 2013), “나이트 스튜디오”(아트선재센터, 서울, 2013-2014) 등이 있다.
 
2019년 올해의 작가상(국립현대미술관, 서울, 2019), 제11회 광주비엔날레(광주, 한국, 2016), 제3회 파리 트리엔날레(파리, 2012) 등 다수의 국제적인 단체전에 참여하였으며, 2019년 국립현대미술관 올해의 작가상, 2010년 제3회 양현미술상을 수상한 바 있다.

References

• 올해의 작가상, 이주요 (Korea Artist Prize, Jewyo Rhii)
• 바라캇 컨템포러리, 이주요 (Barakat Contemporary, Jewyo Rhii)
• 아트선재센터, 이주요: 나이트 스튜디오 (Art Sonje Center, Jewyo Rhii: Night Studio)
• 남산예술센터, 이주요: 십년만 부탁합니다 (Namsan Arts Center, Jewyo Rhii: Ten Years, please)
• 아트선재센터, 이주요/정지현: 도운 브레익스, 서울 (Art Sonje Center, Jewyo Rhii/Jihyun Jung: Dawn Breaks, Seoul)
• 국립현대미술관, 이주요 | 파이브 스토리 타워 | 2019 – 2020 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), RHII Jewyo | Five-Story Tower | 2019 – 2020) 
• 강남구, “강남구-강남문화재단, 수서동 궁마을 공원에 ‘공공미술 프로젝트-러브 유어 디포_강남 파빌리온’ 오픈”, 2021.11.20