Hwang Yunju — Residues

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Born in 1972, Hwang Yunju earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in western painting from Seoul National University and a master's degree in fine art from Brighton University. She has held several solo exhibitions about memories in venues such as CR collective, Vostok and Park Soo-keun gallery.

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Hwang Yunju with her dishes and plates

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Compassion for neglected and discarded objects

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In the fall of 2016, I was walking around the neighborhood where my studio had been located until a few months before. Marked by the disappearance of the three sibling feral cats that I had been feeding, the area entered redevelopment. The once cherry-blossomed neighborhood was soon covered with inconceivable amounts of waste, growing more and more desolate by the day. I happened upon a neat stack of tableware dumped out in a corner. The dishes, wine glasses, and rice and soup bowls, set in a line side by side under the trees amid piles of fallen leaves, seemed less like trash and more like something waiting to be found by a new owner. I brought them home and washed them clean, imagining their food-brimmed past while rinsing out the dirt. There I thought, washing the dishes, that endowing an object with a use is like giving it a new life.

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Memories embedded in objects

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The old, outdated, and chipped tableware spoke to me. Heeding quietly to the clattering of the dishes, I could hear them whisper, delineating the savory meals they once hosted, the dear guests they’ve served, the story of how they came to be abandoned.

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An ode to all abandoned things

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My preoccupation with old and no-longer-used objects began in 2011; my current project is also founded in my compassion for the mundane. Based on the idea that old memories can serve as a medium for social empathy rather than as vestiges symbolic of futility, I wanted to read out the layers of meaning in each object, narrating and recording the histories to bring to light the uniqueness hidden inside banality. Discarded objects are remnants, pushed aside and edged out by structural shifts in the society, and to me, the tableware was the epitome of the rueful abandonment. In collecting and washing the dirt off of found vessels, I think about memory reinstatement. And through the history accumulated in the objects, I want people to see the beauty of trivial objects, the never-recognized yet ever-justified power of triviality.

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Shin Jaehyun – Trash as Instruments of Local Sound

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Born in 1982, Shin Jaehyun earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art from Sungkyunkwan University. He has held eight solo exhibitions in venues such as the KAIST Gallery and Take Out Drawing, and continues to host various performances and workshops, exploring his curiosities about spaces and bodies. Also recognized as an artertainer, among his quirky achievements is winning the reality competition show.

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Shin Jaehyun, 〈The Temporal World〉, 2015.

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Since 2007, I’ve been concerned with urban issues, especially redevelopment and gentrification. I began sneaking into redevelopment sites to take photos and videos, which was when I realized that there were some interesting household goods thrown outside the deserted houses. I started collecting these items to make furniture out of them, chairs and bookcases and such. At the time, I happened to be working on a project, which was about transforming spaces into musical instruments, and so I started making musical instruments out of the found objects.

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I made about five to six instruments a year, skimming through Seogyo-dong, Hannam-dong, and Seodaemun neighborhoods as I continued to perform. Soon, dozens of instruments piled up and formed an archive of sounds that represent each gentrified region. The different instruments yielded from the characteristic debris of different areas ultimately symbolize their place of origin, both visually and sound-wise.

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For example, I would make instruments out of mannequin bodies and clothes hangers thrown outside the closed fashion boutiques in the Hongik University area, out of damaged guitars and empty liquor bottles disposed outside musical instrument stores, out of antique furniture and old cuckoo clocks dumped out on the furniture alley in Itaewon.

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The sound boxes of these instruments are basically the same in terms of size and material because musical notes are universal and the instruments should be able to play them. This, put backwards, means that because the notes are universal and indistinctive by geographical region, one can produce a sound unique to a specific area by making a musical instrument out of the local materials.

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These local materials used in the instruments are more than just junk; each item once belonged to someone who was forced out of the neighborhood under the name of gentrification. Since 2015, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time protesting in solidarity against the forced eviction and demolition of Take Out Drawing, Ujangchangchang in Sinsa-dong, and the Okbaraji Alley in Seodaemun, getting caught up in legal entanglements with the building owners and getting assaulted by their yongyeok (“errand men”). The instruments, in this sense, serve not only as a sculptural work of art, but also as a device of social activism, bridging art and society in many ways.

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My works mostly use contextually-charged materials rather than value-neutral media, and just as there’s the expression “site-specific,” I feel like certain materials make an artwork more persuasive or interesting in a “material-specific” way—things like the candy legally sold in Korea that’s classified as a toxin overseas, the semen of the men who fall under different marriage bureau categories, discarded war weapons, and wild marijuana all deliver a lengthy message just on their own. — From the artist’s statement

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Lee Chunghyung – Trash as Byproducts

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Born in 1983, Lee Chunghyung majored in craft and glasswork as an undergraduate student and sculpture as a graduate student at Hongik University, and currently lives and works in Seoul. He’s held solo shows at Space: Willing N Dealing, SongEun ArtCube, and P21, and has participated in numerous group shows including the 《2018 SeMA Artist Guild:萬Lab》.

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Lee Chunghyung

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For a while now, I’ve been observing, recording, and collecting things from exhibition spaces. This habit of mine derives from my belief that the records of the happenings inside the space where I spend most of my time will eventually become stories about what I do, i.e. stories about art. I began by taking photographs of the exhibition spaces: behind-the-scenes stories which would be forgotten with the opening of the exhibition, events during the preparation processes, moments I found interesting. I named the series of photographs “points of overlap” and continued to accumulate data related to exhibition sites. The different exhibition environments and conditions force categorization of each exhibition and its characteristics, and such distinctive attributes are stored as memory.

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From the most ideal moments to the most discouraging, the memories of each exhibition space become the medium for my works. In addition to taking pictures, I began to muster the byproducts of the exhibitions to turn them into new works of art (〈Painter〉, 2016; 〈Dust Collection Device〉, 2017; 〈Weight of Seeing〉, 2018).

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I collectively call these objects, settings, and memories “exhibition byproducts.” From waste produced during the exhibitions to photographic records and site-specific notions representative of certain moments in time, the byproducts hold a broad significance for me. Just as we can predict the gift from its wrapper or the wrapped state, the exhibition byproducts tell us what happened at the exhibition, the rules the show abided by. The byproducts collected from the characteristically and environmentally unique venues of exhibition raise questions about art as well as the institution and culture of exhibition. Through these byproducts, I want to address some of the fascinating aspects about the systemic and environmental ways in which contemporary exhibitions are materialized. Hence the byproducts are, in a sense, art found in the process of practicing art.

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Exhibitions are inherently fleeting and self-evolving. For a while, I’ve produced works discussing the evanescence and finiteness of exhibitions (〈Light Construction〉, 2017; 〈The Site Before Your Eyes〉, 2017). And more recently, I’ve attempted to produce a more solid and lasting form of art as a countermeasure to the temporary quality of exhibitions (〈Pedestal Stacked〉, 2018). Ever since, I’ve been observing the qualities of exhibition platforms through their byproducts, and now, I’m wondering whether it would be possible to materialize my findings into two different forms, something lightweight and makeshift and something of a solid sculpture, all the while discussing the qualities and meanings of exhibition. — From the artist’s statement

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UMALONG– Trash as Abandoned Objects

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Born in 1986, Um majored in visual information design and environment modeling at Namseoul University, and earned a master’s degree in sculpture from Sungshin University. He has held solo exhibitions at venues such as Seoul Art Space Mullae and Seongbuk Yesul Gaapjang , showcasing works that recombine discarded objects. His works are currently shown at 《2019 Seoul Focus: Nothing Twice》, a Buk Seoul Museum of Art exhibition on the Anthropocene (Feb. 26–Jun. 9).

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UMALONG, 〈Himalaya〉, 2019.

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I begin my works by walking around the nearby neighborhoods and salvaging waste materials. The myriad plastic containers, glass shards, old furniture, and disposable products discarded in the vicinity become the media for my works. In our society, we witness so many things being consumed then set aside, so many things simply being wiped by the tide of new things. Having been born and raised in Seoul, I also have an experience of being evicted due to redevelopment, and I’ve witnessed first-hand the consumption and oblivion, which raised many questions in my head.

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What hit me the hardest was the amount of things left behind by the people moving out, departing from their long-time abodes.

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At first, I started bringing home some of the usable junk. Then I came to really think about the objects being disposed of, which naturally led me to observe trivial objects around me, then to turn them into new objects by shifting and twisting the perception of their characteristics. Naturally, my thoughts on life, social issues, and the environment seeped into my work to beget new stories. I once used the now-obsolete medium of vinyl records to reflect on the phenomena of abandoned or endangered animals.

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My most recent work is 〈Himalaya〉, a tall mound of old objects piled up in a long range. This work symbolizes the emotional stress I felt during a series of relocations in Seoul and during my hike in the Himalayas; these two disparate experiences seemed oddly in line with each other in that I had to move all my belongings with me. Being a subject of eviction due to gentrification made me think of myself as an unrooted plant, which is reflected in the artificial plants collected and rearranged as part of the work. Played in the monitors in between the works are videos of my time in the Himalayas in 2018, my scurry around Nowon-gu in search of usable materials, and black box footage from my car during the logistics of my works. Logistics, material collection, storage, and art production all require space, yet I always feel deprived of it.

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Working as an artist, I can’t help but think about space. 〈Himalaya〉 also deals with the saturation of emotions and objects, which leads to the thirst for and lack of space.

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Throughout the piece, there’s an underlying contemplation on consumption—the culture of indiscriminant use and disposal, the culture that glorifies the new and simply obliterates the old. — From the artist’s statement

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Read this article : This Is Not Trash (1), This Is Not Trash (2), This Is Not Trash (4), This Is Not Trash (5)

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※ This content was first published in the April, 2019 release of Wolganmisool Magazine and has been re-published on TheARTRO.kr after a negotiation was reached between Korea Arts Management Service and Wolganmisool Magazine.