Sangsangmadang Gallery

The Game for Respect

  Seogyo Sixty 2009 – The Game of Respect is organized as an extended and subsequent edition to the previous year’s The Battle of Taste. We will prepare this edition of Seogyo Sixty, inviting a list of artists recommended by art professionals as they have proven their own artistic tastes and values, willingly or unwillingly, in the Korean contemporary art scene. Today a variety of values, systems, and powers collide and conflict with each other forming a balance. This is the case not only in the field of art, but also everywhere in politics, economics, society, history, and so on. The Game of Respect is what we find in common among people who coexist in such the increasingly convoluted society of today. The Game of Respect is a fight for respect and the desire for respect. And then, what is this respect actually for? When asked this question, it will eventually be up to each individual’s matter of taste.

<Sata, SaTARLIT, Dgital C-print, 60x90cm, 2007>

  The world of pluralism and diversity is, on the other hand, based on only a single truth of strict monism. It is a single truthful value and strength of direction to the value that leads us to a spiritual birthplace, safely or throughout the vicissitudes of life and leads us to not to lose our way or our mind in the middle of such diverse values of pluralism. The reason that the miniature universes of people, which are as numerous as grains of sand, go glimmering and disappear while the world still operates normally is the very singular value that jumps out of the net of pluralism. A lot of people combat each other individually for their own individual values. This still seems valid in contemporary visual arts.

<Park Jaeyoung, Suitable Sculpture, Installation,
Various sticks, cotton string, rubber band and clay, Dimension variable, 2008>

  Emerging artists as emerging artists, established artists as established artists, and master artists as master artists all present their aesthetic experiments and explorations in the unknown world in the name of art. All jump on the wagon of competition in an effort to be recognized by others. There are of course some who refuse to join the secular game of respect. However, it is a foul in the rules of the game. Their choice is no longer considered in the context of art. Such choice now becomes more of an outlook on life or a certain way of living. It is not a matter of criticism and it is also an admirable and even respectable choice. Therefore, we could say that “The Game of Respect” we are dealing with here is very small in area, which still deserves respect as well. Standing in the middle of a justifiable choice, we will gather as many opinions of art professionals working in the field as possible. We would like to show the utmost respect to their views. We think it is also a process in the game of respect.

<Sin Donggeun, Suit, Mixed media, 171X286cm, 2008>

Some will find the idea of a respect game in the concept of “respect battle” by Alexandre Kojéve (1902∼1968). Kojéve understood the progress of history in Hegel’s philosophy based on “struggles between masters and slaves” and the “life-death dialectic” and defined a “respect battle” as the main concept. Kojéve stated that the slaves or the subjects of productive activities play a crucial role in the progress of history. It may sound ironic in the distinction between the master and the slave. It is an inversion of values. For the master, the slave is a laborer. Making a logical leap, the creative laborers, or artists are the heroic slaves in the progress of history. And they are the subjects in the battle of respect. We can catch a glimpse of the relationship between the subject and the other through this process of a respect battle.

<Woops, Evolution, Acrylic on canvas, 91x72.5cm, 2008>

  Some could think of a pro wrestlers’ battle shown in the World Wrestling Entertainment or Smack Down on a cable TV network. The wrestlers twist the arms of each other and yell at each other. Spitting at their opponent, they bawl at the rivals furiously “Respect Me!” It sounds like the roaring of a lion in battle. Even these powerfully-built muscular men, seemingly to have descended from an Olympian mountain, shake their fists to get respected.

<Lee Jaehoon, Unmonument – Is This Reality?, Fresco , 180x140cm, 2008>

  We can sense such desire for respect in the spectacular scene of contemporary art. A lot of artists around us display their artistic tastes and abilities quite freely. The goal of the values and tastes they have may be different, but no one can deny the simple and basic desire to be recognized and respected. The game of respect in art is, ultimately, an effort to transcend a sense of futility and something ephemeral for the limited being and to seek after eternity, which is immortality. However, such respect is a respect between limited beings and a respect from oblivion, whether it is unilateral or bilateral.

<Ha Joonsoo, Just, 6min_DVCAM, 2002>

SeogyoSixty 2008: The Battle of Taste

1. The Battle of Taste

“SeogyoSixty 2008: The Battle of Taste” presents a chaotic arena and festival of images made by 60 new artists, taking place at Sangsangmadang, Seogyo-dong, also known as the “Hongdae” area. One of the most brilliant achievements in 21st century East Asia has been the establishment and globalization of contemporary art. At the turn of the century, Korean, Chinese, and Japanese contemporary art was in a mixed state of competition and unity, whereas now, each country is able to stand on its own as a cultural hub.  With its reputation as a special art district, Hongdae, in Seogyo-dong, has become a laboratory where we can measure and test the direction of Korean youth culture. 

“SeogyoSixty” was conceived to introduce young artists who are expected to have an impact on the Korean contemporary art scene and take a look at their attitude and visions for the future. Starting in 2000, due to the expanded scale of the art market and revitalization of the domestic art scene, there have been a lot of star-artist, centered solo exhibitions and international exchanges. Compared to more general art events like biennales, “SeogyoSixty” is a new type of exhibition that attempts to identify a unique vision and possible model for the contemporary art of tomorrow.

However, this type of exhibition is not completely unique. There have been several previous exhibitions connecting the minds of young artists and the institutions of art world organizers with these efforts in mind.  Insa Gallery held such special exhibitions as “Collective Spirit” (1995) and “Factory Art Fair” (2000) that gathered the ideas and desires of young artists in their twenties who were actively working in the center of the Korean art scene.  The vision of Korea’s young artists has also been shown during the past 10 years at the Seoul Fringe Festival beginning in 1998.  There were also several other experiments of this kind held at such venues as the Haja Center and Artsonje Center, as well as the Anyangcheon Project.  This exhibit is in the same vein as many recent exhibitions held at local art museums, like the Seoul Museum of Art, which have organized young artists and art organizers together.

Never bound to a strict set of narrow themes, these past attempts planned in a period of creative outburst at these museums and galleries were successful in bringing young artists’ passions and explorations together. “SeogyoSixty” aims to present a chaotic collection of images with innovative vision and form, as I still believe it is meaningful to hold an art festival showing the interests and desires of young artists.


As the phrase, “There is nothing new under the sun,” suggests, these days, creating something from scratch is quite difficult.  I believe that living in a realm of countless images and materials, creating something from something that existed before can actually be a more natural process of creation.  “SeogyoSixty” represents the quest to find today’s young artists who are able to re-discover, re-interpret, and newly express someone else’s ideas, images, and forms that have existed before them.  During the process, we will reaffirm the defiance and fearlessness of contemporary art, which cannot easily be taught in a conventional manner.  Because contemporary art uses the whole way of living we should lead and endure as a workbook.

The phrase, “in and out” can reveal something about the general direction and idea behind “SeogyoSixty,” which is a response to certain phenomena that happen “in and out” of us.  The exhibit will attempt to find an underlying structure or idea formed by the conscious and un-conscious activities of the artists, where their sensibilities and expressions meet and collide with each other. 


2.”In Figure” and “Out Figure”

“SeogyoSixty” is composed of two parts.  Part one, “Out Figure,” is held from February 16th to March 16th and part two, “In Figure,” is held from March 21st to April 20th.  By exhibiting in two parts, more than 60 artists will participate, whose explorations, experiments, and images are expected to make a dynamic impression at “SeogyoSixty.”  During the exhibition, workshops, participatory art, and performances will also be featured to further reveal these new artists’ vibrant visions for the future. 

The categorization of “SeogyoSixty” into “In Figure” and “Out Figure” is not meant to divide the world around the artists, but as a rhetorical metaphor to express a sense of direction and structural frame containing both common artists’ questions as well as young artists’ ideas and reflections about the world. 

Participants are active artists who have been spotlighted in the last 2 or 3 years for their unique and consistent work, as well as brand new artists, just entering the scene.  The exhibition includes paintings, objects d’art, photography, video, multimedia, interactive media art, and sound art and attempts to show the various experiments and new forms of young artists working in the contemporary art scene.  

For contemporary artists, the concept of the figure is always dealt with in relation to ideas of reality, fantasy, or image.  For the average member of capitalist society, matters of emotion and feeling cannot be separated from materialism.  However, it is not that different from artists wrestling with this idea of the figure.  Many artists have already chosen to focus on the ebb and flow of images that perpetually rise and fall in and out of our consciousness and have regarded reality itself as the origin and the cause of this phenomenon.  Following the path of contemporary art, these new artists are also in the process of expanding and deepening aesthetic diversity in the environment of today’s society.

Tae-joon Hyeon: Made in Korea

Sunshine of A-Jeo-Si

Kim No-am l Director of Gallery Sangsangmadang

Why Tae-joon Hyeon?

It is impossible to describe a person’s behavior and work in a few lines. Especially when the theme is very broad, crosses over various genres and forms, and handles several layers of visual culture.

Hyeon would fall in this category. He was once a dreamer and an open-hearted wanderer who collected, created, and introduced unusual objects. Through drawings, comics, illustrations, and essays, Hyeon pleases and puzzles us at the same time with his unique taste and by depicting how he felt during the work process.

“…personally I like the Hong-dae(Hong-ik University) area because it’s a place where young people gather, and that’s where the new cultural scenes are concentrated in.” – from an interview 2005 –

He once commented on his affection for the Hong-dae area in an interview, and it was probably fate that invited him as the first artist to Gallery Sangsangmadang launched in the Hong-dae area.

Why did we choose Tae-joon Hyeon after all the brain-racking discussions? Does this mean he has stepped up from being just another subculture artist and has entered a more refined level?

We focus on Hyeon as he represents those whose youth were shaped in the culture of typical college districts and also due to his significant role in forming such cultures, as he spent his time in the Hong-dae area during the 80s and the 90s. Of course he is not the only one with these credentials. Actually there are so many of us who have contributed to shaping the area as it is now by spending their young college years drinking, dancing and wandering around with hangovers in the Hong-dae area. Looking back, the Hong-dae area has been spotlighted as a place of a unique culture since the 2002 World Cup, with a tight interaction between the consumer culture of mass democracy and high capitalism as well as a being a symbolic place of youth culture.

An anti-academic, nihilistic and individualistic world view has been promoted in front of universities which symbolize the typical Korean conservative academic atmosphere. Now it is the time for those issues of resistance and recreation to be brought to the surface as main issues in the aesthetic critique of our generation.  Hyeon, as well as his contemporaries who are now in their 40’s, is able to introspect on himself and contemplate the prospects of the future. We Koreans often call men of this age group A-Jeo-Si, which means middle-aged man. With bittersweet experiences and the aesthetic taste of their youth, they involuntarily have arrived at an age to be role models for the next generation.

The significance of this Solo Exhibition comes from the fact that his works were a deviation from or a break through against the ideology unique to 1970’s Korean society, where all that mattered was rapid economic growth, the demand for economic Puritanism, and a workers’ mindset. This viewpoint is grounded on his eccentric characters, way of talking, taste, imagination and rhetoric as well as his works that deconstruct the aesthetic and ethical norm of established traditions. On the other hand, the current standard of taste and competence of common art appreciators and critics today have come far enough to understand his work properly.

It is necessary for us to find an appropriate way to understand and evaluate Hyeon’s work and his aesthetic world.  It is reasonable to expect a certain success in this undertaking since the surroundings and the cultural contexts where he was brought up are not too far from what average people experience in their lives. This is why we are looking forward to an encounter with his world.

Who would love an ‘A-Jeo-Si’

Often a person’s appearance and his or her interior don’t go quite match up. The artist’s personal traits are as follows: Hyeon is a friendly looking A-Jeo-Si, well-built, likes Korean spicy pork barbecue and sweet and sour pork, and is always soaked or stained with sweat. He seems to prove his existence with his own body. His fine physical presence even got him a call from a credit card company asking him to be in an advertisement campaign. Why are we looking for typical A-Jeo-Si features in him? And why do all men after their 30s merge into an A-Jeo-Si-type life style? Why was Hyeon so attracted to ‘A-Jeo-Si’ since his younger days? What makes an A-Jeo-Si so admirable?

The significance of Hyeon’s ‘A-Jeo-Si’ is revealed in areas of the human body like excrement, farts, and snot.  The artist indulges in activities that only immature children might get excited to do, but this ‘A-Jeo-Si’ dares to expose himself to the whole world. The artist indulges in eating, which modern people who pursuit elegance and a shaped body often restrain from, like the “potlatch” of Polynesians or North American Indians.

In Korean society, the word ‘A-Jeo-Si’ is used as frequently as the word ‘A-Jum-Ma’ (a friendly word to call married or older women).  However, rather than describing a man who has overcome social obstacles to successfully stand on his own, the word refers to a man who barely makes a living which prohibits him from being invited to major dignified social meetings. These days, the word may even convey a not so respectable characteristic.

The dictionary defines the word as; 1)a word to call a man in the same degree of relationship as parents, except brothers of father 2) a word to call unmarried younger brother of father 3) a familiar name to call an adult man 4) a word to call uncles 5) (North Korean) a word to call an older sister’s husband.

“A word to call a man who has not achieved a good social position…well, this doesn’t sound so nice ~. There is no reference to a kind and friendly average Joe, but being an A-Jeo-Si isn’t so bad as anybody might think, because A-Jeo-Si’s can often meet people very casually. Approved(?) An A-Jeo-Si can build relationships more easily without any personal interest, and people are also more generous when an A-Jeo-Si makes a mistake. I keep telling myself that it is good to be an A-Jeo-Si to enjoy all those privileges.

Sometimes people call me “teacher” to show respect, but then I soon get nervous with my words and behavior under the pressure of having to be exemplary. It even forces me to bear boring conversations which make my body uncomfortable. After that I realized how much happier it makes me to be called an A-Jeo-Si. 

 Considering that signifier and signified unite arbitrarily, Hyeon’s A-Jeo-Si could be read from a different context. It turns out to be a matter of text in the understanding of the artist.

 The word ‘A-Jeo-Si’, which refers to the protagonist (Hyeon)’s other self in his illustrations and essays, is constantly confessing a narrative excluded from images that reflect authority, major discourses, and social order, which Hyeon questions. As repetition is a core factor in myth, the concept of A-Jeo-Si in his work is upgraded from a daily word to a symbolic word.

 The aesthetics of an A-Jeo-Si creates a black comedy in the enlightenment poster series including ‘have an affair on every 18^th (how-to-maintain-a-happy-family-movement)’, ‘kiss during bright day for the healthy society (anti-unhealthy kiss community)’, to escape from the standardized and generalized social ideology such as the patriarchal system taught to citizens with an anticommunist spirit and the Saemaeul Movement.

However in the context of modern popular culture, this symbolic ‘A-Jeo-Si’ is not necessarily paired with the word ‘A-Jum-Ma.’ Hyeon’s A-Jeo-Si is often matched with an ‘A-Ga-Si (miss)’ or a ‘So-Nyu (girl) in his work. Usually he uses the word ‘A-Jum-Ma’ to refer to the wife of a protagonist rather than what it means by definition.

 Because the word A-Jeo-Si in his work gets paired with ‘A-Ga-Si’ or ‘So-Nyu’, the word becomes an attempt to dismantle the preexisting ‘language order’ and ‘aesthetic ethic’ without the artist’s intention. From a phenomenological perspective, such ‘black comedy’ or ‘humor’ as Hyeon’s unique ‘eroticism’ is being sarcastic about life and the desires of modern people. ‘A-Jeo-Sism’ and ‘eroticism’ unite passively to reveal the objectified 'sexual ideology' or 'sexual complex' of timid modern and disrupts the matrix of ethics and order.

 How would it be if men like Richard Gear from Pretty Women fart, pick their nose, and sweat all over white eating?

Logic of Collection and Sence
 Tae-joon Hyeon once owed a toy store in late 90s called 'Sinsiggongjaksil' and designed weird toys and rubbish objects. However, his unique traits are very complicated and suggest that he would be seen as someone who is a bit deviant from average people his age rather than simply a unique person.

 He reminds us of the ideal child often descrived in children's journals from the 60s and the 70s introduced various themes of education and of a realistic mediocre boy from the 80s. He used to be a person who madly collected lifeless vintage toys or creepy and unusual objects.