Remembering Tomorrow, Shaping Today: Jiho Won
Gallery Chosun will host a solo exhibition by Jiho Won from April 6 to April 26, 2018, titled 《Remembering Tomorrow, Shaping Today》. Won explores the history of modern sculpture through his installation work. Historically, sculptures sat on pedestals to inspire awe and patriotism. These heavy stone structures made viewers look up in admiration. However, modern art has changed this tradition. By removing or simplifying the pedestal, sculptures now connect directly with their physical surroundings on the floor.
Won attempts to apply the changing role of the pedestal, and what it suggests about monuments to contemporary sculpture. Traditionally, monuments symbolized state power and were placed in plazas or public gathering spaces as key tools for displaying national authority. Over time, as personal memory, remembrance, and mourning were added to these politically charged symbols, the meaning of monuments has gradually shifted.
Since the Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin, monuments have taken on a very different meaning for the public. Its low, horizontal form allows easy access for anyone, while the wide open space around it quietly overwhelms visitors. The horizontal surface engraved with individual names invites people to walk along it, turning remembrance into physical experience. Rather than imposing authority or tension through form or aesthetics, it asks viewers to reflect on personal sacrifice. This focus on empathy and lived experience, no longer authoritarian or one sided, closely aligns with Jiho Won’s practice.
Won’s work continues the form and history of the “expanded monument” by using materials commonly found at construction sites to create flags that are temporary and changeable rather than authoritative. He also lays monuments flat on the ground, giving them a horizontal, modular, minimalist form.
In this exhibition, he shifts the moment of war into the future and creates monuments for events that have not yet happened. At the center of the show is a large rubber sheet installed on the floor of the underground space, shaped as an expanded monument. Synthetic rubber is one of the most productive materials used in warfare and a byproduct of it. By placing this powerful material on the ground, strong enough for its chemical smell to fill the space, the artist spreads the history of war, once focused on heroes, into a horizontal process.
The work on the second floor presents a “future work” that reflects the past through transparent, modular forms. Although the viewpoint moves to the future, the piece follows the flow of existing history and creates a space that constantly reminds viewers of what could happen. Making a monument does not mean promoting war. Won’s work holds a hope that tragic events will not occur and an expectation that the systems of war and power will not operate.
Through this exhibition, viewers are invited to reconsider the rapidly changing present both inside and outside the gallery, and to reflect on their own expectations for the first time to come.
A War Memorial Built in Advance (Artist’s Note)
Looking briefly at past war memorials, the first type is vertical monuments that link the tragedy of war to the sun or to religion. Obelisk-like monuments rising toward the sky encourage people to connect the deaths of the fallen with the heavens, giving their deaths a sacred meaning. In times before skyscrapers, such vertical structures were especially powerful in visually linking earth and sky.
The second type consists of ideological monuments that portray soldiers as heroes. These were common during the Cold War and are still widely seen in Korea. The third type marks a shift from monuments that were only looked up at to monuments that function as spaces people can touch, walk on, and move through, allowing critical reflection on past tragedies.
A well-known example of this kind of war memorial is in Washington, D.C. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by Maya Lin, features black marble walls laid horizontally, engraved with the names of individual soldiers who died. As visitors walk along the wall, they see countless names and their own reflections on the dark surface. Unlike traditional vertical monuments that emphasize collective memory, this memorial remembers individuals. It also leaves space for names to be added as surviving veterans pass away, introducing the idea of time as something ongoing rather than fixed.
This exhibition is an attempt to shift this sense of time into the future. Because it is based on the unique situation of North and South Korea, still frozen since the Cold War, it may not be a perfect vision of the future. Even so, it is clearly a memorial for an event that has not yet happened. This work holds a wish that such a tragic event will never occur, and in that sense it may be a fragile hope. Still, it imagines whether this could become a place for awareness and serious discussion, a space to consider how we might find our own solutions so as not to become victims in global power struggles or in other nations’ attempts to escape economic crisis.