On view through August 8; witnessing the substance of space and time
Only by cutting the looping chain of repetition do the beginning and the end emerge
PERIGEE GALLERY presents <Tail>, a solo exhibition by Lee Chang-hoon, the twenty-second Perigee Artist, on view through August 8.
Lee Chang-hoon continually examines the fluid and immaterial boundaries of our lives and strives to recognize the values and essence that have been assigned to space and time. In particular, he pays attention to the things witnessed in the movement and transformation of the residential spaces of the city where so many people live. As an artist, he works on the basis of reflective questions about how to read the various layers of meaning held by the space unfolding before his eyes at this very moment.
The title of this exhibition, <Tail>, is used to convey the idea that only when the looping chain of repetition—a circulation that continues on and on, tail to tail—is cut away do the beginning and the end, previously unseen, finally emerge. In a space and time of the same repeated rhythm, we cannot fully grasp the flow of its change. Yet only when a crack appears in the firm flow of time through the artist's intervention does that arrangement become visible. The exhibition title thus signals that what he considers important in the spaces he observes is nothing other than an intervention in the sequential flow of time.
Lee Chang-hoon's new works presented in this exhibition begin with creating a device that captures the invisible moisture in the air and installing it in the spaces he has been interested in and observing. The spaces the artist selected are places he has long approached with interest: a house in an area slated for redevelopment whose residents have already left, the space where the artist's own mother actually lives, and a natural space that anyone can visit.
The water obtained through the collection process in these three spaces is frozen in vessels and in molds shaped like scholars' stones (suseok) that the artist made. Based on this, the works appearing in the exhibition hall are a three-channel video capturing the spaces mentioned above, an installation in which the ice frozen from the collected water is melted and the water is once again received into vessels, and ice in various forms displayed in a freezer.
His act of collecting water in three different places is an act of transferring the time he experiences intact into the exhibition hall. The water thus obtained is deeply connected to the lives of the people related to those places, but it also signifies the physical condition of the space itself apart from any people, or time accumulated regardless of all of this. Every form appearing in the exhibition hall is a 'tail' briefly revealed now—one that, having been collected and transformed by the artist, repeatedly freezes and melts before vanishing at some moment.
His recording of these present spaces in his own way through his work is an effort to build a medium for witnessing the substance of our space and time. Furthermore, he hopes that his work will also become a kind of 'tail' serving as a medium within the lives of viewers. 070-4676-7091