Gallery Chosun will present 《차이의 공간》 from January through March 2013. The exhibition will unfold in two parts.
From January 10 to February 1, Kim Jisun, Manna Lee, Minjung Lee, and Leeje will present works that capture the worlds they have traversed, rendered in their own distinct colours and tonal sensibilities.
From February 13 to March 7, Yujung Chang, Won SeoYeoung, Junho Song, and Gim Deok Yeoung will unfold their individual artistic languages within a shared space.
“There are no facts, only interpretations” – Friedrich Nietzsche
When we perceive an object and designate it through language, a proposition is considered valid only when the object and its designation correspond. Through such concepts that point to specific objects, we come to judge and understand the world.
Yet today, as reality is filled with replicas and staged simulations, an era in which copies can appear more real than the original, it is no simple task to determine what truth is. Truth can only be realised from within ourselves, emerging from immeasurable depths of meaning. Such pluralised truths lead us to adopt particular perspectives in order to understand the world. In the realm of art, which has long offered viewers complex illusions, this recognition recalls the notion of the “beautiful semblance.”
In contemporary art, this awareness appears in the form of chance, apparent meaninglessness, or works indistinguishable from everyday (real) objects. On the one hand, art attempts to suspend the distinction between reality and illusion; on the other, it establishes boundaries between them. Through media that shape materials such as physical surfaces, paint, and spatial arrangements (so that forms may be perceived as art), works both present illusion and simultaneously negate it. In doing so, they construct a dual framework.
When diverse media gather to produce difference, interpretation, analysis, and evaluation follow, and form emerges. The appearance of forms shaped by necessity will generate communication, relying on diverse modes of perception.
Human beings have always assigned meaning to everything that exists in the world. To perceive an object is essentially to harmonize what is perceived with one’s own perspective. That “essence” consists of objects or forms that accord with our cognitive capacities, or that are given to use without question.
Artists caution against viewing objects and forms solely from fixed situations or established perspectives. By revealing the confusion that arises when existing meanings are lost, they invite new modes of perception. The represented images and objects thus exit as realities while simultaneously evoking illusion. Through such stimuli, the body, serving as the passage through which the self encounters the world, responds.
These responses shift in meaning depending on how elements occupy structural positions within space and how components are organised into relations and sequences. Figures revealed through the relationships and differences between substance and illusion, reality and image, lose their previously assigned meanings and become newly formed parts. Unwilling to leave meaning in suspension, we are compelled to extract narratives, from satire to moral reflection, from fragments of reality, producing meaning anew.
Ultimately, such attempts question ideas preserved by fixed perspectives. By understanding meaning not as something pre-given but as something constituted, they offer an opportunity to reconsider the notion of absolute value in the world.
_Lee Sangho (Gallery Chosun)
Translated by Gallery Chosun