Artists Take Dongducheon Project to New York
By Cathy Rose A. Garcia
Staff Reporter
Four Korean artists are participating in an Insa Art Space (IAS) project to be introduced at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, Saturday.
Koh Seung-wook, Sangdon Kim, Rho Jae-oon and siren eun young jung are contributing their work for ``Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision.'' The IAS was one of the four partner institutions asked to participate in the New Museum's ``Musuem as a Hub'' project, along with Mexcio's Museo Tamayo, Egypt's Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art and the Netherlands' Van Abbemuseum.
Museum as a Hub is described as a ``21st century cultural laboratory exploring art and ideas through a global partnership,'' using the main theme of ``neighborhood.'' The exhibition, which opens Dec. 1 and runs through Feb. 24, offers a sneak peek into each of the institution's main exhibitions that will be held starting March.
Kim Hee-jin, the curator for international projects at IAS, said each of the partner institutions will be taking over the ``hub space'' for two months. IAS will have its main exhibition of 12 new pieces from May to June 2008.
IAS picked Dongducheon, located 30 kilometers northeast of Seoul, as a representative neighborhood of Korea. Located close to the North Korean border, Dongducheon is also the site of a large U.S. military base. As a result, the city's economy relied heavily on the U.S. military, especially the sex industry. IAS noted the government has ignored the local citizens' aspirations to build its own autonomous community.
``Therefore, making art in Dongducheon is seen as an act of raising consciousness among the people through dialogue and participatory activities,'' the IAS said.
As part of the exhibition, Korean artists came up with conceptual projects for Dongducheon.
Koh proposed transposing the Sangpae-dong public cemetery, a burial place for unidentified dead people, into a public park. Koh's public park will ``set out to illuminate the erased and masked aspects of Dongducheon and modern Korea.''
Kim's ``Discoplan'' is a community participatory art education workshop to open dialogue among the city's residents. Part of the project involves residents creating ``flying objects'' to be thrown over the barbed wire at Camp Nible, a vehicle maintenance facility that is suffering from serious soil contamination. The flying objects contain seed packets that will burst open upon landing on the soil. ``Hence, the artist and residents will be engaged in a performance, revitalizing the contaminated soil in an environmentally friendly way,'' the IAS said.
Rho created ``Bite the Bullet!'' a flash trailer where he disregards images of Dongducheon, and instead recomposes images from classical Hollywood movies with his own photos. He speculates on the history of the American military in Dongducheon. This forms part of web publishing project ``(Someone) Walked Together With Zombies'' to be presented in May.
For siren's ``The Narrow Sorrow,'' she is interested in recording ``invisible'' people or those who live in the area but are not included in the official administrative records. ``In an attempt to make a social map of Dongducheon, siren has made a series of posters with photos and text that tell of social and gender issues inherent in Dongducheon that have thus far not been uttered,'' IAS said.
Meanwhile, ``speech act'' is the focus of IAS current project ``Tongue, Liberated!'' A speech act refers to a ``purposeful statement made by the speaker to induce the listener to engage oneself in particular acts and linguistic behavior.''
There are plenty of opportunities to explore speech act at the IAS, where artists, poets, performance artists, and curators engage in conversation, lectures, speeches, theatrical readings and performances. Joseph Beuys' monumental lecture videos, where he combines performance and lectures in the U.S., are being shown.
Voiceoverhead presents a ``sound archive project to explore the questions of memory and performance of speeches,'' by selecting vinyl records of famous speeches, and reconstructing them in a live performance.
Japanese-Indian curator Keiko Sei will hold a lecture on ``Voice in Art Work'' at 5 p.m., Dec. 12. Various performances and presentations will also be featured during ``So-rry Pa-rry'' at 8 p.m., Dec. 14.
Visit www.insaartspace.co.kr or www.museumashub.org.