Venue: Art Sonje Center

Performance: Hankil Ryu, SocioFrequency : [-1(1)]
17 March 2018, Sat, 5pm
Art Sonje Center 2F, 3F

ByungJun Kwon, Between the Floors
7 April 2018, Sat, 5pm
Art Sonje Center 2F, 3F

A point is formed – like the first brushstroke touching the empty paper, the point of the pen touching the floor plan’s grid, the first click of cursor on screen. Standardized planks of wood are placed on the gallery floor, and as the knot of a strand of wire tied to the ceiling forms a point, the artwork is created out of the relationships springing from it. The points connect into a line that transects the space; lines combine in layers to yield volume and form. As we zoom out from these connected points, they become interpreted as positions. The positions respond to the space, to other neighboring works, to works with differing layers – and most of all to the viewer taking in the work.

The work of the five artists in Point Counter Point – Donghee Kim, Minae Kim, Jong Oh, Soosung Lee, and Goeun Choi – uses the spatial form and context of Art Sonje Center’s second and third floor galleries as its material and starting point. Each shows a different artistic exploration, rooted in his or her own perspective in response to the space: reacting to the gallery’s shapes, using architectural components and materials as points of reference, or altering viewpoint, distance, and size to subvert perceptions of space.

Space is a basic condition for works of sculpture, which possess form and mass. It is like air for the medium, and so the attention to it may seem obvious. In galleries where the “white cube” has become a norm, sculpture’s descent from the pedestal has long made space into an element of the work’s content and form rather than its backdrop. Yet in the work of artists in their thirties who are active today, we find attempts to expand the relationship between art and space to more of a macroscopic level. By inviting artists who have actively interpreted and responded to space in their recent sculpture and installation pieces, the exhibition shows the perspectives they have adopted in interrogating the relationship between space and art and experimenting with it in new ways. Its focus goes beyond the harmony formed between the work and its setting to examine what issues the work raises for the space, how the context of externally invisible space is employed, how specific sites determine the form and character of sculptures and installations, and, conversely, how works of sculpture and installation alter the form and character of a space. For the most part, the work derived from these perspectives employs interior and exterior architectural materials such as wood and glass, its form situated somewhere between artwork, architectural component, and functional object. No events eternal to the space are suggested; there is no concrete representation of objects through which stories might emerge. There are only serene minimal forms, the exclusion of added narrative only serving to underscore the artists’ attitudes in response to space.

As materials for the artists’ work, Art Sonje Center’s second and third floor galleries have been provided. The two galleries have quarter-circle structures, each with a floor area of around 450 square meters. Created to match the shape of the land when the center was designed, they became emblems of the center, serving in its logo until 2015. Another feature of the setting can be found in the cylindrical columns exposed along the curves of the gallery’s interiors; these curves and columns have been taken into account in all of the many exhibitions staged here over the twenty years since the center’s opening in 1998. What determines the space’s character is not merely this shape, but also the spatial context of an art center and the memories of past exhibitions. The layers of experience from all of those exhibitions appearing and disappearing, and the lingering memories of spatial experience for the individual artists, serve as underpinnings for the individual pieces.

The exhibition title Point Counter Point references the idea of “contrary points” (notes), which provides the origin for the musical term “counterpoint,” or the juxtaposition of two or more independent melodies. The term was adopted to describe the experience of reading an exhibition as the juxtaposition of independent melodies through structural explanations yielded by different possible relationships of response. As with counterpoint in music, the processes of mutual reference, repetition, and development emerging between artwork and space, between one artwork and another, and between different layers usher the exhibition into a structure of tension and rhythm.

 

+http://artsonje.org/en/pcp/