As the Sharp Narrative Fades, A Revealing Map Emerges (Part2)

The exhibition seeks to create a map between the two territories—Korea and France. It is the second exhibition in an exchange program between Gallery Chosun and Le Wonder, a nonprofit organization and collective studio run by and for artists in France. The program comprises three exhibitions. The first, held earlier this year, focused on the theme, “Daily Life and Art”, exploring how individual artists work to transcend their personal “lucid” worldviews. The second exhibition examines how artists collectively construct a shared understanding under the theme of “Virtuality.”

To begin, we will consider the relationship betwen territory and map. Territory refers to land under the jurisdiction of a state. While territory denotes the boundaries that define a zone of authority, a map visually represents the conceptualization of that zone of influence.

Why do we create maps? Unlike landscape photographs or paintings that represent the reality, maps are symbolized in a language that has been agreed upon with each other; and maps point out unidentified locations placed between the marked locations. A map is an image imbued with a dominant desire to reduce the world to a place that can be seen immediately, and at the same time, it invokes romantic imagination about unknown places from the gaps in between. The exhibition visualizes the process of ten artists, each rooted in unique terrains, collaborating to create a single map. Meanwhile, the map does not implement clearly demarcated images; it rather enables for these artists to discover any space formed by microscopic cracks between the already divided lands and explore new paths to find gaps. In other words, the exhibition is an attempt to identify a space where we, who are quite different from each other and often difficult to integrate when standing in our own domains, can stand together. Additionally, the exhibition is an adventure imagining a new landscape beyond the current world.

Le Wonder is an artist collective established by and for artists in France, where members autonomously manage their own space. The artist collective uses an abandoned factory building on the outskirts of Paris as its primary base to carry out various experiments. How the collective is organized and managed is somewhat unique: these artists work individually and as a collective. The loose community of about 60 artists has gradually expanded in size and is now functioning as a kind of institution with a systematic way, including a professional administrator as its representative. Now we ought to wonder why Gallery Chosun intends to interact with Le Wonder that is neither a typical alternative space nor an ordinary art collective.

As a commercial gallery, Gallery Chosun has introduced contemporary Korean artists into the art market. In the meantime, Gallery Chosun has always been passionate about exploring new approaches to the marketability of art and the function of galleries by working with various media such as performance, video, and installation amidst large galleries. In other words, Gallery Chosun has collaborated with various artists by experimenting with the identity of the gallery space. Gallery Chosun seeks to connect with Le Wonder, a platform that defies a piecemeal definition, resonating with Gallery Chosun’s experimental ethos through the collaborative program with Le Wonder. Additionally, the gallery re-examines the conventional role as a distributor of art works in the art market, envisioning an extended function as a community. It is creating a whole new map that has never existed before, imagining a sustainable realm that can thrive in the market on its own without commercialization. Artists traveling between Korea and France eventually emerge as an individual artist as well as an art collective and promote political actions from a new geopolitical location beyond the territory of one country. As they move between Korea and France, these artists form a loosely bound yet collective presence, transcending national borders to develop political practices from a fresh geopolitical stance.

The current exhibition features ten artists: Yohan Hàn, Jeong Jeong-ju and Choe Sooryeon from Korea, alongside Axl Le from China and Martha-Maria Le Bars, Salim Santa Lucia, Antonin Hako, Elias Gama, François Dufeil, and Pierre Gaignard from France. These ten artists gathered around the central theme of “virtuality” as stated earlier. Assuming that a map is said to be an image that demarcates a zone of power and at the same time a medium that potentially allowed us to imagine a world where no one has ever been to, nine of them focus on the 'virtuality' of a map. The word “virtual” originated from the medieval Latin virtualos. In medieval philosophy, virtus signified latent power—an influence that, while not actualized, holds potential and exerts an effect on reality. The artists participating in the current exhibition examine universals and norms constructed within the safe boundaries setting up in the name of productivity and efficiency. Furthermore, they pay attention to forces that, though ambiguous, exert real influence in the world. As all these ten artists traverse between the two countries, they draw divergent zones of power and continue their imaginations into uncharted territories, unearthing the latent possibilities within these spaces.

The latest work by Jeong Jeong-ju is a body-scale media installation that captures the gaze of a camera scanning the façades of urban buildings and the interior of the space. The artist known for exploring light as a material, focuses on the interplay between city and space, and light and shadow. In this exhibition, Jeong portrays stereotypical gestures or people in the ever light-illuminated city. Through a monitor combined with a stainless-steel structure, video images are constantly played. The artist's recent works displayed in this exhibition are the videos that composed of intersecting images of exteriors and interiors of buildings, natural objects in the city, pacing hands, and moving woman. A sense of unease—the contrast between light and shadow, the eyes scanning architectural structures, the gaze spying on the interiors of a space— inherent in the comfort of the city permeates the interior through the exterior wall of an architecture. Stainless-steel installations erected at the right angle on a 190-cm-tall LED display board and low tri-faced objects are scattered throughout the exhibition space. Positioned horizontally or vertically, these objects rotate images continuously, embodying the relentless pace of the city. Through the works, the artist reveals aspects of humanity that are at odds with or marginalized by the fictional image of the city.

explores images that emerge from the geographical notion of the "East,” which reflects on what is deemed "Oriental"—a term that has been consumed with an outdated connotation in Korean society after the modernization. The generally accepted concept of the "East" or “Orient” is based on a dichotomous distinction based on the location of the “Occident” or the Western world. Choi, however, proposes new narratives to the concept of "East" or "Orient" that often, if not always, implies a hierarchy of power. The artist brings us into a space where cliché images have been monopolized and have been shared throughout Northeast Asia such as myths, women, ghosts, and orientalism, etc. have been neglected and otherized. Previously, Choi layered images and texts on a canvas much like scribbles on a piece of scrap paper or markings on damaged images. Meanwhile, in the more recent works, the artist adopts the form of Islamic illustration art and composes the canvas in a way that text and image have their own domain and are translated from outside the frame. The Chinese ideographs used for Korean word "translation" are "飜譯 (beon yeok)", which is a combination of "beon(번,飜)" meaning to turn over and "yeok (역,譯)" meaning to interpret. In other words, through the act of translation, the artist unearths new, reversible images from already written narratives and languages.

Axl Le, a digital artist and a filmmaker, uses technologies like AI and CGI to delve into themes of religion, nature, and cosmic perspectives. Furthermore, he examines the impact of internet media on society. The work for this exhibition, Joseph's Midnight Party (2024), is about the journey of a young man born in 1990s named Joseph. The work intertwines surreal imageries that are strictly neither fantasy nor reality reflecting the unique experiences of a generation raised in the rapid transformation of internet and media landscapes. Joseph, the protagonist, is an alcoholic and a drug addict, trying to save himself. Nevertheless, as the path to salvation and paradise becomes ever elusive, Joseph plunges back into his nightmare to escape his "damn pain." Amid losing his bearings in an endless labyrinth, Joseph encounters Freddie. The film unfolds within an airplane—a liminal space that transcends borders and does not belong to any place. Axl Le aligns the setting with the boundless, ever-expanding realm of the online space, mirroring the aimless wandering of the protagonist, Joseph as a metaphor representing the most of contemporary individuals who navigate a world without fixed coordinates. Through this character, the artist explores the disoriented state of modern identity in an era defined by limitless digital space.

Hàn engages with the images of the continent as a means of examining the criteria that classify populations by social, physical, and cultural attributes such as race. It is to observe what a large mass of land called a continent classifies. To this end, Han borrowed the Pangea or the supercontinent as a reference. There was one supercontinent on the early Earth, it was then widely accepted that the plate that formed the surface of the Earth was broken and divided by mantle convection to become what it is now. According to more recent research on the climate crisis, however, it hypothesizes that the scattered continents will eventually regroup and may form a supercontinent again in about 250 million years. In other words, land masses that separated through tectonic drift may eventually reconverge into one massive continent. The artist brings works composed of outer shells or skin. Drawing from the hypotheses, Han presents works composed of skin-like materials that function as walls or "membranes" across the exhibition space, evoking the image of a map. As Han explores the categorized images as skin, shells, and outer shells, the artist also questions the conditions of boundaries that prevent merging of heterogeneous beings such as human/non-human, female/male, impaired/able-bodied, etc.

Martha-Maria Le Bars explores the relationship between space and landscape through color. The artist, who focuses on themes of slowness, softness, and fragility as counterpoints to the hectic pace of the material world, observes the conditions that lead us to regard a space as a landscape. Le Bars establishes a new protocol for painting by expanding beyond the traditional canvas frame and a method of releasing the paints and colors onto the space. The series Peinture_Paysages Mémoires (2018-2023) is a ceramic-like work layered with paints and involves with the strata of time and “memory” through a surfaced material of colors. The objects, resembling organic minerals or ancient scholar’s stones called suseok(수석, 壽石) are put in the exhibition space like an island of solitude. As the artist states that geographical space is not necessarily continuous, these artworks create fragmented, uncharted islands of memories resisting to be integrated into the map.

Salim Santa Lucia explores themes of cities, territories, and boundaries through the medium of photography. Initially trained as an industrial designer and having worked in the fields such as the automotive and transportation industries, he presents fragments of a project co-led with Antonin Hako for this exhibition. The collaborative project, Motorama 360, is a documentary that records various landscapes through painting, photography, text, and sound recordings. A landscape is not merely a scene that depicts a place in which humans live or a part of nature, but also an image that reveals the worldview.

Santa Lucia focuses on automobiles, often seen on the streets in urban landscapes. His Beauregard series, in this exhibition, captures cars that wander through the city like "ghosts". In the works of photography, Santa Lucia captures an object completely concealed with a cover. The more obscured these objects are, the more they assert their presence. A painting performance was conducted on these covered objects, and the traces were captured through photography. These traces do not represent mere remnants or marks left by the objects, but rather the trajectory of pursuit—the path followed by the object. In this way, Santa Lucia investigates the traces left by cities and the pathways they form, exploring how the urban landscape is shaped and marked by its movement and history.

Antonin Hako explores the ways in which painting can engage with social and political events. Hako delves into the political nature of images rather than emphasizing a specific incident or addressing current political issues. He then moves on to question kind of events these images may create. Hako aims to offer the viewers a space to connect with social, historical, and political contexts through the images in his artworks. The works presented in this exhibition closely aligns with the photograph works of Salim Santa Lucia. While Salim Lucia abstracts specific photographic scenes, Hako attempts otherwise. Hako’s paintings resembles black-and-white images that seem to be flat scans of a certain space. The artist’s previous works featured abstract and symbolic images drawn with shapes and line of various colors. The current works seem as if a random space that may exist for real has been transferred onto a flat canvas. Just as a map is an image that translates the three-dimensional world into a flat two-dimensional drawing pad, the artist would like to discuss how our eyes perceive three-dimensionality and flatness.

Elias Gama explores the relationship between texts and images, the origins of language, symbol systems, and how information survives. Furthermore, Gama interprets the physical process of perceiving the world through the lens of symbols and information. The artist then explores the linguistic properties inherent in an image that a language contains in this reciprocal relationship. Gama assumes a painting as a way of writing based on the question of symbols that make up a language. It particularly focuses on the very moment when humans were about to systematize the customs of drawing and letters. Elias Gama’s works for this exhibition, By My Window (2024) and Dear Oscar (2023), which are attached to windows inside the exhibition space, point out the boundaries where our eyes cross through the windows and glasses. The light and fragile feelings of Gama’s works reveal the randomness and contingency of symbols and emphasize the vulnerability by sensitively affected by the natural phenomena.

François Dufeil  challenges the logic of capitalist production systems by seizing industrial materials. The artist, who creates “tool-sculptures,” by reusing industrial waste, focusing on the skills and know-how of artisans that go against the structure of automated production. Various artists, including musicians, painters, potters, etc. are invited to perform or to suggest the use of the tool-sculptures they have created, thus revitalizing the dead sculptures. Dufeil’s works for this exhibition are objects that had been previously used as gas cylinders and were given a new purpose. The objects, often shunned due to the risk of explosion or as hazardous substances, are transformed into tools that can be operated only by human body. Th sculptures are finally completely only when the human body and human actions intervene. Cloches sous pression (2022), as the title of the work suggests, Dufeil imagines the sound of “liberation" emanating from these objects under pressure, and anticipates dissonant sounds created by the physical movement of the audience within this context.

Pierre Gaignard has created documentaries or fictional works consisting of sculpture, performance, and experimental film. Adopting an archaeological or ethnographic approach, the artist seeks to minimize the distance between himself and his subjects. Gaignard discusses memory and forgetfulness of human through decaying bodies. In the video presented in this exhibition, the fireworks explode with the loud sharp roar. The carnivalesque video work, which swings between festivity and ritual, begins with a story about a street in Paris facing a dramatic decline due to the plummeting real estate values. Mourning gestures are shown on the streets of the city slowly fades into ghostliness. In the meantime, small objects such as light fixtures are installed throughout the exhibition space. When turned on, an intaglio image is revealed. Gaignard intends to capture the disappearing city streets and communities through such magical actions, or to explore the ways in which memories of the past are imprinted onto the present through subtle, unmanifested images.

Part 3 of the exhibition will feature these 18 artists from Part 1 and Part 2, showcasing their works in France.