LABORATORY02: Picnic on the City
June Kim
Mark Jenkins
Donghee Park
Yangachi
Jin Yang
Jeewon Yoon
Sanghyun Yi
Yileighkheri
Ji Lee
Jongwan Jang
Jinyeoul Jung
Donghoon Cha
Eune Grace Jung
Laboratory is not just an exhibition but a collection of multilayered events that include workshops, performances, and seminars. The first Laboratory was held last year under the theme of “social intervention” and showcased artworks that use media to intervene in social issues. Titled “Picnic on the City,” this year’s Laboratory will consist of projects that meditate upon life in the city from different angles and sensibilities. It will introduce ten artists from
Preface
I step out of a building during lunchtime and allow myself to hold my breath and only think about myself while I walk slowly. There are sometimes when I suddenly let out a gasp in my daily life. Everything flowing around me seems like acting and even my relationships with people become unmanageable. Further, I come to have doubts about whether all the proceedings I’ve taken so far are led by my own intention and desire or not. My actions could have been dictated by another larger system like society and the media or maybe even another person. To a certain extent, anyone can observe himself by merely looking at his own life like a spectator viewing a virtual experience.
But such a frightened awareness usually goes away immediately and we become led back to our ordinary days once again. In fact, this is often the same route for anyone who belonging to a capitalist society. We eventually get immersed in our exchangeable system of values and consistently grasp these values as sublime objects without awareness of their real worth, since everything of great worth in our life is converted into capital. The experiences making up of the fragments of our daily lives like education, career, love, etc. have been merely valued on social terms and have relied on the values of society rather than their real substance. This situation of applying our own values for the sake of the measurement of others should be a serious concern, as it is equal to a neglect of our own life as it becomes a mere practical application of something exchangeable and virtual.
Although we often believe that we’ve hardly had to work for something that makes us happy, we’ve actually been controlled by a social system and been played like a puppet, as one who merely adapts to the system. Such, the challenge of endeavoring for new value in life is not that easy. It follows the hard struggle against something that makes us look better, an object we’ve always chased after, a daydream that drives us in the virtual happiness, and also a sense of uneasiness without such the physical feelings.
more..
Artists and Their Work's Images
Embed #1 Mark Jenkins
American artist Mark Jenkins makes street installations with ordinary tape and plastic wrap. His works use everyday formless materials to create new forms right in the streets. By installing headless dummies or creating unexpected situations in the middle of lifeless public places such as near street lamps or garbage cans, or against walls, he brings vitality to ordinary streets. The artist himself calls his works “taping sculptures.” Through the process, Jenkins seeks to transform each public place into something controversial, where various groups of people including the government, advertisers, artists, and citizens can produce discourses. By disguising his sculptures as new performances everywhere in a city, Jenkins performs urban intervention.
The Bubble Project Ji Lee
For this project, over 60,000 stickers in the shape of speech bubbles are printed. They are then stuck on billboards, bus stops, phone booths, and subway advertisements. In addition, they are left blank, therefore inviting passersby to fill them in. Later, the results are photographed. The Bubble Project thus transforms the monologues of the anonymous masses into entertaining public dialogues. Everyone is invited to express himself or herself freely, without any censorship. Moreover, everybody wins with the Bubble Project. While ordinary citizens have fun interacting with and looking at the transformed speech bubbles, advertisers are happy because hundreds of photographs of their advertisements, with the speech bubbles stuck on them, are posted at TheBubbleProject.com. Here, people can also download the free bubble template, which they can print out and use to bubble their own towns, and upload their bubbled photographs. In fact, thousands of Bubblers all around the world have started the Bubble Project in their respective cities.
Pools on the Street Jinyeoul Jung
Jinyeoul Jung studied philosophy and design in
Transparent Theatre Jin Yang
The Transparent Theatre intends to bring distanced realities into the corporeal and sensory dimension, thus destabilizing them in ways that can be obtainable and revelatory. A visual recording of a chosen building’s interior will be projected onto its façade on a one-to-one scale. An overlay of the actual perspective and an image of the perspective projected on the exterior surface brings visual transparency to the enclosed space, along with ambiguity between realities and media representations. The work presented at the Laboratory02: Picnic on the City explores redeveloped areas in
Catacomb Series Donghoon Cha
Donghoon Cha has created a series of paintings that contain a kind of sympathy for objects that have lost their original functions or have been abandoned. For this exhibition, he will display paintings outside, at Seogang and
The Land of Plenty Jongwan Jang
Jongwan Jang’s Eden Painting series will be displayed in an obscure corner on a small street near
For this exhibition, Yangachi will display artworks that actively enter and intervene in society. Through them, he focuses on the “order” that is imposed on urban spaces. According to him, cities are the sites of appropriate relationships mediated by order, and this order most clearly shows the purposes of such urban spaces. His works therefore begin with the proposition that the images not only of artificially created spaces but also of naturally created spaces within cities are the results of thoroughly calculated order. Avoiding hours when the order of cities is most active, he seeks to introduce changes into urban spaces without interfering with the functions of the city. For instance, he visits the Myungdong and Hongdae areas in early morning, during which the order of the city is relatively lax, and collects garbage and ordinary objects, turning them into new sculptural works. Focusing on the by-products or residues of the order of urban spaces, he demonstrates the possibility for these discarded objects to become the agents of new urban intervention.
Shopping Jeewon Yoon, Sanghyun Yi
These two artists, one of whom just graduated from a K__ University and the other of whom is still enrolled in yet another K___ University, thought hard about how to spend the production budget of 300,000 won. Instead of spending it themselves, however, Jeewon Yoon and Sanghyun Yi decided to give 100,000 won each to three elementary school students and to observe how the latter would spend the money. The artists set a precondition that the three primary school students had to spend the entire 100,000 won in one day and proceeded to record the pupils through photography and video. Yoon and Yi nearly blindly carried out the project, refusing to change the idea or the process in the middle for a better result. It was more about the process rather than the outcome. The project focuses on how an idea can create a form by itself through a process rather than through the artist’s control over the work.
Guidelines for Citizens’ Emergency Stress Management Yileighkheri
This video by Yileighkheri begins with the idea of relieving today’s people from the great stress that they suffer. Proclaiming that stress is an inescapable chronic disaster, he suggests certain guidelines for individuals to manage emergency stress on the spot. Consisting of a series of videos including “When Others Aren’t Aware of Your Discontent,” “When Your Whole Body Aches and Is Stiff,” “When You Are Suddenly Hit by Exhaustion on the Street,” and “When You Need a Vacation to Loosen up Your Body and Mind,” this work records the artist’s performances in unexpected locations such as flower gardens and buses.
Workshop
Tape Casting Workshop Mark Jenkins
In Mark Jenkins’ playful “Tape Casting Workshop,” participants will create castings with packing tape and plastic wrap, which make sculpturing easy. Participation in the workshop will involve no restriction of any kind such as age, and the participants will be able to make castings either of their own bodies or of objects that they bring. The artist will then turn these works into cheaply manufactured street installations. With the artist, the participants will explore how their tape sculptures will be situated in which contexts of the city.
Making an Urban Life Map June Kim, Donghee Park
The "Making an Urban Life Map" workshop stems from the critique by the architect Christopher Alexander, who argues that modern architecture ignores the opinions of the prospective residents in the process of building buildings, and therefore buildings which, in fact, are not suitable for residents are built. Through his work, he has inspired others to think about ways to allow the intervention and participation of the residents in the whole process. In this workshop, the participants will walk around the Hongdae area and experience Alexander's thoughts while performing given tasks and consciously looking for spaces that make the city and the people alive and whole. Once places that seem to have life in them are found, these will be marked and turned into a map, through which the participants will experience the process of creating an artwork. The participants will program their mobile phones using Python programming language and explore routes in the city that have been randomly selected by a computer program. When they find spaces that are alive and whole, the participants will take and send photographs to each other in real
time, and they in turn will look at the map that is being updated in real time and adjust their action according to the changing map. Through this collaborative process, the participants will observe, update, discuss, and complete the Life Map.
Connecting Dot. Dot. Dot. Eune Grace Jung
At this process-oriented creative workshop, the participants will look at what it is that connects the individual to the street and to others. In the midst of fast-moving life and sensually provocative surroundings, it is difficult for us to feel such connections deeply. Moreover, it is all too easy to forget that we are, in essence, all connected even though we exist separately, like dots, in the universe. In order to move beyond passive and consumptive relationships, this workshop will use art therapy methods and creative art-making. The participants will first explore their inner voices and inner wisdoms, so that they can look inside to unfix fixed ideas, to learn what is already there, and to experience other individuals’ ideas resonate within the group. After exploring potentials for communication and creation, the participants will once again examine relationships between individuals, with the city, with the objects in the city. As such, the workshop will concentrate not on producing an outcome but on connecting the dots to bring out the links that one has created based on what is already there. Like connecting dots to make a line, it will involve both discovery and creation.
Workshop participation application: gallery@sangsangmadang.com
Events
Pin Hole Box, 80 + 1 | http://www.80plus1.org
5 PM-9 PM, 9/4 (Fri.)-9/7/2009 (Mon.)
Have you ever been to
PARK(ing) Day | http://www.parkingday.org
Originally created by Rebar, a San Francisco-based art and design collective, PARK(ing) Day is an annual, one-day, global event where artists, activists, and citizens collaborate to temporarily transform metered parking spots into “PARK(ing)” spaces: temporary public parks. Anyone can participate in PARK(ing) Day, though it is strictly a non-commercial project, intended to promote creativity, civic engagement, critical thinking, unscripted social interactions, generosity, and play.
※ For more information, please refer to the Sangsangmadang website; here(http://blog2.sangsangmadang.com) and the PARK(ing) Day Seoul website at http://my.parkingday.org/group/seoul (English).
Seminar
Seminar 1: The Urban and Art
7 PM - 9 PM, 10/9/2009 (Fri.)
Henri Lefebvre once stated, “the word ‘creation’ will no longer be restricted to works of art but will signify a self-conscious activity, self-conceiving, reproducing its own terms, adapting these terms and its own reality…, being its own creation.” In this context, to understand the system and history of a city is a way to understand the conditions of human life and to search for ways of changing those conditions. In addition, it is very important to understand the contexts and histories of Korean cities to understand further the meanings and influences of various works that explore cities that are being created right now in
Seminar 2: Subversion and a Stroll
4 PM-6 PM, 10/10/2009 (Sat.)
When hope for political subversion was non-existent over ten years ago, many people looked for such possibilities in art and culture. Today, however, only very few attempt to subvert society through art or even discuss such ideas. Of course, there have always been artists who come out to the streets and create art, and the number is growing. The artworks displayed in Picnic on the City clearly reveal the characteristics of urban art. At this seminar, a presenter will adopt a standpoint of criticizing various works that intervene in the city—ranging from works that attempt to intervene in the city from the personal realm of everyday life to public works that intervene in the city on a large scale—and panelists with different opinions will discuss the topic among themselves and also with the audience.
Presentation: “Subversion and a Stroll: The Social Possibility of Artistic Praxis” | Panel discussions
※ The seminars are planned and conducted jointly with Moonji Cultural Institute Saii.
