NOTE FOR AHN(安), GALLERY 175, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, 2019
Exhibition Note for AHN (安) was a two-person exhibition I organized with Ahn Jaeyoung, which began from the question of whether an individual could escape from being possessed — one of the mysterious symptoms containing elements of superstition from Korea. The exhibition, tracks how images attained from one’s superstitious beliefs relate to mythical and religious images, then recombines and deconstructs them. Under our collaboration lies the hope to contact invisible but clearly existing sensual phenomena, and to together overcome anxieties, interpreting phenomena as the destiny of artist/mediator.
Paying attention to the number of tattoos on Ahn Jaeyoung‘s body (the Chinese character 安, a blue diamond, an arrow, a red-haired Anne, Piglet, Mickey Mouse, and an epitaph of Nikos Kazantzakis), I interpreted each image as a charm to ward off Ahn’s anxieties. I then, researched mythical and religious imagery in order to strengthen the shamanistic narrative. Observing that the number 12 frequently works as important motive in the myths of many different cultures, I set Ahn Jaeyoung‘s birthday, December 12, as a central axis and tried to discover the references to god-related signs from the number 12. Combining the symbolic world of the image, language, color, and numbers from ancient myths from twelve animals that guards tombs, I created a chart for a system of faith and proposed a psychological space for a praying man, just like the secret connotation of the ancient character, 安
NOTE FOR AHN(安), GALLERY 175, SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA, 2019
Exhibition Note for AHN (安) was a two-person exhibition I organized with Ahn Jaeyoung, which began from the question of whether an individual could escape from being possessed — one of the mysterious symptoms containing elements of superstition from Korea. The exhibition, tracks how images attained from one’s superstitious beliefs relate to mythical and religious images, then recombines and deconstructs them. Under our collaboration lies the hope to contact invisible but clearly existing sensual phenomena, and to together overcome anxieties, interpreting phenomena as the destiny of artist/mediator.
Paying attention to the number of tattoos on Ahn Jaeyoung‘s body (the Chinese character 安, a blue diamond, an arrow, a red-haired Anne, Piglet, Mickey Mouse, and an epitaph of Nikos Kazantzakis), I interpreted each image as a charm to ward off Ahn’s anxieties. I then, researched mythical and religious imagery in order to strengthen the shamanistic narrative. Observing that the number 12 frequently works as important motive in the myths of many different cultures, I set Ahn Jaeyoung‘s birthday, December 12, as a central axis and tried to discover the references to god-related signs from the number 12. Combining the symbolic world of the image, language, color, and numbers from ancient myths from twelve animals that guards tombs, I created a chart for a system of faith and proposed a psychological space for a praying man, just like the secret connotation of the ancient character, 安
The rapt of Proserpina,Joseph-Marie Vien, 1767, Musée de Grenoble
Installation view at 698-9 Seonosong-dong, Jeonju
( February 21 - March 06, 2020), as part of Print/Out,
Photo by Minkyoung Choi
Installation view of Jan van eyck academie openstudios 2021 Still cut, The geometry of the hunter, Single channel video, 2021
He vs. It
2024.12.1 - 12.22
Art these days, Seoul, KR 2024
Artist talk 2024.12.14 2pm
The exhibition He vs It takes its title from my 2017 solo show documenting deer and other animals killed on the road. It originates from the question: “When an animal dies, how should its body be addressed— as he, a personal pronoun, or as it, an impersonal thing?” The work begins in the emotional tension between the two: the animal is not intimate enough to be called “he,” yet calling it “it” produces an unsettling sense of discomfort.
By tracing newspaper archives from the 1960s to the present, the exhibition expands this dilemma into a broader inquiry about how Korean society names and relates to nonhuman animals. It also reconsiders the hierarchical structures embedded in the distinction between “he” and “it” through my ongoing research on microbial fermentation—materials that are themselves extensions of both human and animal bodies.
The exhibition reorganizes Smart Skin Farm (2023), a project that critiques factory farming, placing its video works, research materials, drawings, and collages from different periods into new constellations. The space becomes a site where collected fragments of human personal data are combined with the characteristics of plant-based microbial cultures to create and exchange customized skins.
Within this attempt to document and preserve the growth of “hybrid species” that consume tea and sugar shaped by human birth data and color preferences, the exhibition invites viewers to remember animals not as an inexhaustible material resource or an object of extraction, but as beings with singular histories of their own.
He vs. It
Myoung-san Inn, Jeonju, KR, 2017
The act of naming is a privilege granted only to humans, and one of the primary ways we establish relationships with the world before us. But does the human who names an animal stand above it? After witnessing animals killed by road accidents and looking directly into the eyes of those who died, I began to question my relationship to their deaths, and the hierarchy that structures how death is recognized.
The exhibition site—Myeongsan Inn—consisted of a narrow, extended corridor, six small rooms, and an outdoor area of roughly eight pyeong. This architectural structure, combined with the absence of electricity, became a place for encountering the state of dead animals. Visitors were asked to borrow a flashlight in the first room at the entrance. With only this beam of light, they moved through the dark hallway and rooms to read the epitaph-like texts installed within. The flashlight acted both as a literal light illuminating the records of roadkill and as a metaphorical stand-in for a car’s headlights.
Biblical passages were placed throughout the space to trace how humans have historically named and described animals. At the exit, an animal mask suspended in midair invited visitors to momentarily inhabit the position of the animal—to imagine becoming the one who is usually named.
