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Buk-SeMA's 10th Anniversary Exhibition - Anthologia: Ten Enchanting Spells
20230803-20231025

The show was held until 2023/10/25 at Buk-Seoul Museum of Art

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Exhibition Location

Buk-Seoul Museum of Art 1st floor Exhibition Hall 1
Buk-Seoul Museum of Art 2nd floor Exhibition Hall 2

Exhibition Period

2023.08.03~2023.10.25

Admission

Free

Exhibition Area

Painting, Installation, Video

Exhibition Genre

Participating Artists

Gijeong Goo, Hyewon Kwon, Seulki Ki, Sangjin Kim, Rho Eunjoo, Park Kyung Ryul, PARK, Seong Jun, Bahc Yiso, Byungkoo Jeon, Jaewon Che,

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LG Digital Signage

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Information on the Exhibition

Anthologia: Ten Enchanting Spells

Buk-SeMA's 10th Anniversary Exhibition

In celebration of its tenth anniversary, the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art (Buk-SeMA) presents Anthologia: Ten Enchanting Spells, an exhibition that brings together ten artists to imagine new landscapes bridging the past and future. Rather than simply maintaining the present through an archival listing of the trajectory of Buk-SeMA’s past, this exhibition gives thought to imagination as a positive act of creation that connects the past and future in an attempt to preemptively sense the time to come. To explore how the formal and thematic essence of imagination connects to art, the exhibition replaces the distinctive grammar of imagination’s language with the specificity inherent in contemporary artworks. This allows for a kind of aesthetic exploration and creative experiment on how our present embraces the past, welcomes the future, and pioneers, together, the unknown worlds that arrive from moment to moment.

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Exceeded Scenes Gijeong Goo This work is composed of digital images and videos featuring things that can be found all around us outside, such as soil, leaves, moss, and insects. Everything was photographed with a macro lens, and then composited in a 3D space. The artist was inspired by soil, which is created when the remains of plants and animals accumulate through erosion and weathering. Gijeong Goo has focused on the relationships that can arise between humans, nature, and machines, from the mind-body connection to the exploration of the relationship between nature and technology. Synthesizing the connected and disparate, while arranging them to make their separation perceptible, is more a process of absorbing heterogeneity into oneself, rather than appropriating and expanding it through technology. As static still images and moving video images combine and circulate to create an unfamiliar feeling, audiences can contemplate what it means for technology to embody what the human eye cannot see. This is a new version in the series Exceeded Scenes, which has been presented in various forms in the past. This is a site-specific work that has been reorganized to fit the theme and setting of this exhibition. The entrance space of the exhibition hall, where the work is installed, forms what seems to be a moving underground world―or an unknown space and time connected to reality―and constitutes a unique space to welcome visitors.

Berlin, A Candy, A Woman in a Hijab Byungkoo Jeon Byungkoo Jeon’s paintings depict ordinary moments of everyday life and objects. They are marked by the artist’s inherent gaze in the creative process, the reconstruction of reality from selected and edited images, and affect that makes the object deeply adhere to the canvas. In addition, they have an unknown power that strongly attracts the viewer. This intensity of everydayness cannot be limited to the representation of images, and the curiosity and the sense of emptiness that comes from the questions about the origin of this sensibility lead to a closer look at the artist’s work. Some of the new works produced for this exhibition introduce new themes and styles that defy many of the hallmarks that have characterized the artist’s oeuvre. In this exhibition, the artist presents paintings with peculiar ambiance where the entire space becomes a part of the object with the simple yet concrete strangeness, as well as the depiction of objects and landscapes collected from everyday scenes shown on the canvas. Despite the change in subject matter and form, these ordinary yet often bizarre paintings retain their uniqueness, transforming our memories into an unknown time. Just as we revisit a specific moment in the past to recall a memory, this unique painterly space becomes a passage through which we bypass our memories and advance to another disparate scene. It’s where some of us get caught up in the moment while others experience a wild ride of emotions that flows and fluctuates in continuation. Because words cannot express the unequal experiences of each person and the subtleties of sentiments that diverge to thousands of variations, we cannot but share what we sense with each other in unspoken agreement. Therefore, any confident interpretation of Byungkoo Jeon’s work merely reveals the uselessness of the act and the moment of speaking.

Meeting Place Park Kyung Ryul Meeting place presents a place for encounters between the materials that make up paintings, sculptures, and objects, the emotions that float between them, and our unique experiences that mediate them. The works that reside here exist as fields with their own independent significance, and they exist in a form that endows a visual image to the space that defines their place and reveals its structure. The individual works are extended through connection and redefined by cross-referencing, generating a new context for the space. The relationship between these works is continuously redefined in a state that can be rearranged through the relationship with the audiences who visit and mediate this place. Therefore, space does not determine the hierarchy of components in this work. Instead, potentially fragmented elements form an organic ecosystem that drives the structural transformation of space. Park’s imaginative language, which invokes the unrepresentable in a system of representation, creates a point where the work continuously differerniates from itself through such a double encounter. Therefore, Meeting place is a space of dynamic nomadism without hierarchy, which constantly creates connections and divergence instead of exploring its own grounding and origins. Thus, it does not resemble a tree with roots growing into a trunk and branches. Instead, it resembles a rhizome, where the stem has burrowed into the ground, blurring the distinction from the roots. In the end, in the midst of the encounter between the material and the immaterial, this space of potential creation becomes a “square” where each component welcomes the time to come and transforms a private space into a public one.

That body of yours is absurd Sangjin Kim Exploring the changing state of existence and the world through the theme of reality’s absurdity, Sangjin Kim’s work is characterized by a process of sensing and savoring the work at the moment of encounter, and then expanding it into full-fledged thought through the complex system of perception and insight into the nature of reality contained within the work. The way in which internet memes are borrowed and visualized to reveal aspects of absurdity amplified by the contemporary digital environment shows Kim’s world of art in a condensed way. The large-scale installation on view at this exhibition is also inspired by a meme. Not long ago, when the infidelity scandal of Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine was revealed, the text message “That body of yours is absurd,” which he allegedly sent to Instagram model Maryka, was parodied in various memes on social media. In this sentence, which makes the other person’s body an object of explicit desire, Kim not only modifies the context by changing the owner of the desired body from “you” to “me” but also inverts the conventional meaning of what “absurd” means. As a result, the completed sentence “This body of mine is absurd” is transformed into a ludicrous meaning. Furthermore, this method of reappropriation, which directly utilizes “absurdity”, a core theme that runs through Kim’s world of art, is accompanied by the double process of decontextualization. This work, which seems to start with a meme and distort it to provoke absurd laughter, is also a metaphor for our world, which operates on the basis of language and sign systems. Here, “This body” can be seen both as our physical body and as a signifier that makes up the sign system of language. In other words, a chain of signifiers that is constantly sliding―a world of abstract signifiers that never corresponds to reality―is indeed absurd. This work also reinforces this thematic aspect through the symbolic form of a sentence that disappears from the shadow projected on the wall. Thus, this sentence, which constitutes the content and form of the work, reveals its presence by disappearing, and remains a future-past that drives the present by no longer arriving. Furthermore, the title of the work and the text inscribed on the work reveal an ambivalence of the object, in the structure of pointing to each other. This exceptional scene―in which presence and disappearance exist simultaneously―raises epistemological questions surrounding existence and the world, illuminating the current state of contemporary art and sparking our imagination.

Under the Magnolia Tree Jaewon Che Poet Jaewon Chae presents a text-based work consisting of eleven new poems for Anthologia: Ten Enchanting Spells. Celebrating the past ten years of the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, and looking ahead to the next ten years, the work employs the theme of “language of imagination.” It takes the form of serial poems where unique and independent poems are interconnected, presenting a linear yet non-linear mixture of narrative and non-narrative structures. Under the Magnolia Tree follows a journey through ten imaginary languages to explore the unknown and discover new voices. Each disparate voice guides us to construct a chain of cause and effect that unravels the mysterious events. While the voices are telling their own stories, they present a feast of language that imagines other beings and other worlds. American mystery and crime writer Jeffery Deaver once articulated what separates thriller and suspense from mystery: thrillers and suspense are all about “what’s going to happen in the future?”; the classic question of mystery narratives is “what happened in the past?” In this sense, Under the Magnolia Tree ticks both boxes: The audience may solve puzzles presented in the work or discover a downhill slope, taking it like a ride in an amusement park. In the meantime, the eleven poems will leave their own pages and generate a creative experience that is more than the sum of each part. Jaewon Che says, “The nature of the transcendent imagination, the one that greedily explores, delights in, and affirms even in moments of introspection and pessimism, intrigues me.” This work is not showing something different from the artistic language presented by other nine participating artists of the exhibition. It is a “surplus” that adds to the richness of the exhibition full of imaginative language or a “void” inside, and it operates as a possibility for the exhibition to differentiate from itself. In showing both the fullness and the deficiency of the exhibition, Under the Magnolia Tree stands as a third space, a bookmark that creates another gap in the exhibition.

Cinema Experience(#Tribunalism) PARK, Seong Jun Cinema Experience (#Tribunalism) is a media installation consisting of excerpts of scenes from the artist’s interactive exhibition/performance titled Cinema Experience, with Space Without Screen II (2021). As anxiety and desires in contemporary society grow at the same time, the psychological boundaries of individuals as well as groups collapse while people are replacing one's own anxiety with the anxiety of others and “substituting one desire for another”(Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, 2004). The work audiovisually depicts the violence and conflict structure of a relationship that is never simple in this process. The work cinematically edits the fragmented voices of the so-called “those who can’t go on without going crazy” and “those who don’t see they’re crazy” to create a sense of psychological terror and tension, revealing multiple layers of desire. Symbolically revealed through fragmentary words and sentences are the insanity that the media produces and encourages in collusion with the capitalist system and the schizophrenic conditions that come from it. In this work, it is possible to hear common phrases in our daily lives, such as “I loved you” and “It’s all in the past,” or cliches that often appear in the news or movies. Although these phrases and cliches are not visible, but they sound like a poignant sound sculpture that sparks a myriad of imagination. There are fragments of a voice that appeals to authority, as in testimony at a trial or hearing, or one that reveals itself in an intensely personal tone, which interlock and mutate with slight differences. It suggests that conflictual relationships that appear to stem from oppositional structures are not actually defined in terms of good and evil or black and white. For example, a threat to render the present obsolete by preempting the future is revealed as a situation in which the voices of those who are sacrificed or excluded under the arbitrariness of the law exist outside the law just like the sovereign. In the exhibition, three sofas occupy the space, symbolizing beings outside the boundaries of the so-called “law of integrity.” In this fictionalized situation with blatant references to reality, the audience goes through an indirect experience of becoming the subject or object of desire. Although the work depicts a very specific situation, the emotional universality is segmented into different sections. It invites the audience to reflect on the interaction between social reality and the inner world of individuals. Elaborately designed interactive sound and lighting effects are combined with the exhibition space, which is set up like a movie set with sofas, objects, and walls with wainscoting. This provides an optimal environment for the audience to be immersed in the work.

Palace of Green Porcelain Hyewon Kwon Set in a “museum,” Palace with Green Porcelain is a science fiction short film with a complex insight into time. The screen shows a virtual space-time simulation program being played somewhere in the future. Tracing the player’s perspective as they navigates the past through time and space, history, memory, and fiction are blended, while truth and fiction are mixed and distorted. It depicts a future without museums. There is no physical entity, and all that remains are fragmented records. As the player searches through the museum’s records, they enters the past where there were museums, using a high-resolution simulation program that vividly recreates a specific time and space as if it were a reality right in front of one’s eyes. The player enters a date, time, and location, and uses the simulator to wander through a museum that no longer exists. This imaginary program transports the player to a specific time and place, and it can also use hidden portals to jump through time and space. In addition, there are different types of portals. They could take the form of an unknown shape or light, or a space behind a door, or perhaps the act of opening a particular door itself. Viewers watching them play are invited to the scene via a live-streamed screen. As such, the entire museum operates as a simulation platform. The player travels through time and space from the stories of six characters and three old sf novels as historical documentation. The memories of the six people are vividly visualized as individual places the player visits. However, scenes that appear to be from someone’s past are also fictional since they are presumed as simulations. Whether they are a numerical result or a calculated coincidence, the scenes provided by the imaginary program of the future are a mere combination of past fragments and are not guaranteed to be true. Instead, they are likely to be distorted and skewed by an incomplete record. In other words, they could be from someone’s memory, or they could be imaginary images that a program has created in the backdrop of an art museum. Furthermore, some of the archives appearing as additional references to traveling through time and space are science fiction texts. This seems to prove that the whole narrative is fiction in and of itself. For example, a player in the future might take a version of the future, which has been imagined by an old sf novel and has already been passed, as a reference point. This creates a proxy for the past that has become the future (which is the present explored through the viewpoint of the screen). As such, the screen moves back and forth between the entangled space and time. It shows a museum where the future and the past are blended together―each fictional simulation is accompanied by a distortion of time, gradually leading to an unrecognizable identity. The fragmented, shattered record does not serve to locate the origins of the museum. Rather, it serves to the understanding of the remainder that cannot be conceptualized by the museum. There, past records that cannot be reasoned remain as possibilities that have not yet been realized. The work is a metaphor for the nature of the archive, which is split between the past and future on the player’s screen. What could not be fully realized in the past interrupt the present in the guise of the future, and the archive ceases to be an immobile past in fossilized time, leading to encompassing the future. In the archive, the future continues to haunt it as long as it remains a thing to come.

Silver Circle Rho Eunjoo Rho Eunjoo captures the temporality of the image in motion on the canvas. Rho’s work seeks to capture the formativeness of moving objects and synthesize moments of continuation in flux. As such, the work ultimately seems to pursue painting as a trace. Thus, it is quite natural for the artist to depict primarily incomplete, easily deformed, crumbling, or running down objects that are fragmented into pieces. Rho creates her simulations from drawing and modeling done in physical space, transferring them to painting. This can be understood as a process of eliminating the materiality and spatiality of an object and acquiring its temporality by repeatedly reproducing an actual object. In this process of circulation, the initial object is transformed into a sculptural and tactile canvas. Imagining and focusing on the things in between and those that are vague and obscure converge on the canvas. They converge like a clearly shining sign with its own context, fragmented with delicate sensations.

A deep realm where no shadows draw Gijeong Goo Gijeong Goo works on the various layers of nature that we encounter today, including nature informatized by image processing technology, or nature that is tamed and displayed by humans, such as bonsai and terrarium (a form of horticulture that doubles as interior decoration, where small plants are grown in an enclosed glass bowl or vase). The work is designed to condense nature in a dense, thin box so that nature in an artificial ecosystem and the image of nature augmented by digital technology can be captured in a single scene. The combination of these two disparate objects―nature and the image of nature augmented by digital technology―creates a sense of immersion throughout the audience’s viewing experience, while at the same time creating moments of potential rupture that allow the audience to recognize the heterogeneity. The interior of the terrarium is filled with preserved moss (moss that can be chemically treated to preserve its shape for a long time), dead tree bark, and other elements of nature to make it look lively for an extended period of time, giving audiences a chance to experience an image loop that refers back to the real and imaginary forms respectively on the installed monitor screen. Creating a new landscape, one in which real nature and the nature of digital images projected on a monitor screen intermingle, the work imagines a new cultural and artistic ecosystem where the interaction between the real and the virtual is further expanded in an audience’s experience with technological advances. Through this work, audiences experience the subtle balance and harmony that flows between nature and machines in mixed reality, while perceiving the work as a single image where nature and machines circulate in a connected condition. Throughout this whole viewing experience, people are presented with new definitions of nature in contemporary times. Ultimately, this is a decoration cabinet that could be placed in a living room of the near future with nature as its content. At the same time, it is a digital terrarium that shares a small ecosystem.

Your Bright Future Bahc Yiso There are overly bright lamps that are blinding the viewer’s sight. Your Bright Future is a crucial work of Bahc Yiso, a pioneer of Korean contemporary art, and it paradoxically shows our “unbright reality.” Does this mean that dreaming of a bright future is no more than chasing an illusion―and we should resign ourselves to living in the present? Are the overly bright lamps illuminating the wall a mere presentation of cynical resignation? The very future that Bahc saw in 2002 has now become our present or past, or it still remains as our future. As such, this work became a symbolic sign that illuminates our time. Built by combining simple materials like wood, electrical wire, and lamps, it works as a symbol that writes the past and future within the present. More precisely, it inscribes the past carried by the now-iconic work into our present as the outlook of the future. In other words, Your Bright Future is a sign of contemporaneity that Bahc has inscribed in his time, looking toward the future. In this way, the work becomes a sign that raises countless questions to lead us to the past and the future at the same time. When the excess of being is tamed by meaning, the kind of art that resists it acknowledges that excess is fundamental to the human condition before balance and harmony. Bahc Yiso’s artistic spirit is still youthful as he is “a person at odds with the times” and “a person who sees the darkness of the times,” shedding a bright light on contemporaneity.

Current Exhibition Seulki Ki Installed on the wall connecting the first and second floors of the exhibition gallery, Current Exhibition references posters of exhibitions held at the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art over the past decade since it was inaugurated. The artist was provided with 90 exhibition poster files for the archives of the museum and removing most of the text information on the posters (such as exhibition title, date and venue, participating artists, and sponsorships). In cases where the poster design itself was based on text, the artist altered it in a way that compromised the readability of the text or typeface that organized the information. Once the information was deleted, the remaining images were printed and installed in chronological order. Exhibition posters are typically visualizations of an exhibition work or theme. They function as temporary promotional materials created primarily for publicity purposes and displayed in public spaces, both online and offline, until they are replaced. Therefore, after a certain period of time has passed and the purpose of conveying information has been fulfilled, exhibition posters lose their relevance and are discarded. Current Exhibition repurposes such promotional items, which have expiration dates, by removing information from them. Posters with text removed come to exist as images by themselves, endowed with new vitality. As images replace the precise text, the work becomes a metaphor through a visual language for the shape of the future that wears out over time.

Monument to exhibitions in the past and upcoming Seulki Ki This work is an installation that symbolically recreates the piles of one-off prints left in public spaces. As the succession of past images, layered beneath the accumulated sheets of print, creates a new pattern, it constitutes a physical mass resembling a tomb of images. The promotional prints are still randomly pasted onto construction sites and outdoor spaces, and they are essentially printed “images.” Nevertheless, once they fulfill their intended purpose, they lose their utility value and become useless. This work embodies the phenomenon. Using the sculpture-image as a mass made of the same poster repeatedly pasted onto each other, the work metaphorically presents the production, sharing, and deletion of digital images in our time. This pillar made of prints consists of posters for the exhibition on display, Anthologia: Ten Enchanting Spells. It is a symbolic sculpture in the form of a monument that sculpturally replaces the notion of the present as a boundary between the past and the future.

In the Air Rho Eunjoo Rho Eunjoo captures the temporality of the image in motion on the canvas. Rho’s work seeks to capture the formativeness of moving objects and synthesize moments of continuation in flux. As such, the work ultimately seems to pursue painting as a trace. Thus, it is quite natural for the artist to depict primarily incomplete, easily deformed, crumbling, or running down objects that are fragmented into pieces. Rho creates her simulations from drawing and modeling done in physical space, transferring them to painting. This can be understood as a process of eliminating the materiality and spatiality of an object and acquiring its temporality by repeatedly reproducing an actual object. In this process of circulation, the initial object is transformed into a sculptural and tactile canvas. Imagining and focusing on the things in between and those that are vague and obscure converge on the canvas. They converge like a clearly shining sign with its own context, fragmented with delicate sensations. The four new works in this exhibition are part of a series titled In the Air. The moving energy expressed in each work is a condensation of time within itself that is gradually trickling out from it. Each work is a trace of a dynamic image that lasts from appearance to disappearance. The trace is repeated by being erased and lost. With the possibility of iteration, the finitude of the trace becomes irremovable. In Rho’s paintings, the same object is featured in different scenes and the past and future of an object are captured in a single scene. Through such paintings, Rho continues to attempt to approach the essence of creation and disappearance.

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Exceeded Scenes This work is composed of digital images and videos featuring things that can be found all around us outside, such as soil, leaves, moss, and insects. Everything was photographed with a macro lens, and then composited in a 3D space. The artist was inspired by soil, which is created when the remains of plants and animals accumulate through erosion and weathering. Gijeong Goo has focused on the relationships that can arise between humans, nature, and machines, from the mind-body connection to the exploration of the relationship between nature and technology. Synthesizing the connected and disparate, while arranging them to make their separation perceptible, is more a process of absorbing heterogeneity into oneself, rather than appropriating and expanding it through technology. As static still images and moving video images combine and circulate to create an unfamiliar feeling, audiences can contemplate what it means for technology to embody what the human eye cannot see. This is a new version in the series Exceeded Scenes, which has been presented in various forms in the past. This is a site-specific work that has been reorganized to fit the theme and setting of this exhibition. The entrance space of the exhibition hall, where the work is installed, forms what seems to be a moving underground world―or an unknown space and time connected to reality―and constitutes a unique space to welcome visitors.

Berlin, A Candy, A Woman in a Hijab Byungkoo Jeon’s paintings depict ordinary moments of everyday life and objects. They are marked by the artist’s inherent gaze in the creative process, the reconstruction of reality from selected and edited images, and affect that makes the object deeply adhere to the canvas. In addition, they have an unknown power that strongly attracts the viewer. This intensity of everydayness cannot be limited to the representation of images, and the curiosity and the sense of emptiness that comes from the questions about the origin of this sensibility lead to a closer look at the artist’s work. Some of the new works produced for this exhibition introduce new themes and styles that defy many of the hallmarks that have characterized the artist’s oeuvre. In this exhibition, the artist presents paintings with peculiar ambiance where the entire space becomes a part of the object with the simple yet concrete strangeness, as well as the depiction of objects and landscapes collected from everyday scenes shown on the canvas. Despite the change in subject matter and form, these ordinary yet often bizarre paintings retain their uniqueness, transforming our memories into an unknown time. Just as we revisit a specific moment in the past to recall a memory, this unique painterly space becomes a passage through which we bypass our memories and advance to another disparate scene. It’s where some of us get caught up in the moment while others experience a wild ride of emotions that flows and fluctuates in continuation. Because words cannot express the unequal experiences of each person and the subtleties of sentiments that diverge to thousands of variations, we cannot but share what we sense with each other in unspoken agreement. Therefore, any confident interpretation of Byungkoo Jeon’s work merely reveals the uselessness of the act and the moment of speaking.

Meeting Place Meeting place presents a place for encounters between the materials that make up paintings, sculptures, and objects, the emotions that float between them, and our unique experiences that mediate them. The works that reside here exist as fields with their own independent significance, and they exist in a form that endows a visual image to the space that defines their place and reveals its structure. The individual works are extended through connection and redefined by cross-referencing, generating a new context for the space. The relationship between these works is continuously redefined in a state that can be rearranged through the relationship with the audiences who visit and mediate this place. Therefore, space does not determine the hierarchy of components in this work. Instead, potentially fragmented elements form an organic ecosystem that drives the structural transformation of space. Park’s imaginative language, which invokes the unrepresentable in a system of representation, creates a point where the work continuously differerniates from itself through such a double encounter. Therefore, Meeting place is a space of dynamic nomadism without hierarchy, which constantly creates connections and divergence instead of exploring its own grounding and origins. Thus, it does not resemble a tree with roots growing into a trunk and branches. Instead, it resembles a rhizome, where the stem has burrowed into the ground, blurring the distinction from the roots. In the end, in the midst of the encounter between the material and the immaterial, this space of potential creation becomes a “square” where each component welcomes the time to come and transforms a private space into a public one.

That body of yours is absurd Exploring the changing state of existence and the world through the theme of reality’s absurdity, Sangjin Kim’s work is characterized by a process of sensing and savoring the work at the moment of encounter, and then expanding it into full-fledged thought through the complex system of perception and insight into the nature of reality contained within the work. The way in which internet memes are borrowed and visualized to reveal aspects of absurdity amplified by the contemporary digital environment shows Kim’s world of art in a condensed way. The large-scale installation on view at this exhibition is also inspired by a meme. Not long ago, when the infidelity scandal of Maroon 5 singer Adam Levine was revealed, the text message “That body of yours is absurd,” which he allegedly sent to Instagram model Maryka, was parodied in various memes on social media. In this sentence, which makes the other person’s body an object of explicit desire, Kim not only modifies the context by changing the owner of the desired body from “you” to “me” but also inverts the conventional meaning of what “absurd” means. As a result, the completed sentence “This body of mine is absurd” is transformed into a ludicrous meaning. Furthermore, this method of reappropriation, which directly utilizes “absurdity”, a core theme that runs through Kim’s world of art, is accompanied by the double process of decontextualization. This work, which seems to start with a meme and distort it to provoke absurd laughter, is also a metaphor for our world, which operates on the basis of language and sign systems. Here, “This body” can be seen both as our physical body and as a signifier that makes up the sign system of language. In other words, a chain of signifiers that is constantly sliding―a world of abstract signifiers that never corresponds to reality―is indeed absurd. This work also reinforces this thematic aspect through the symbolic form of a sentence that disappears from the shadow projected on the wall. Thus, this sentence, which constitutes the content and form of the work, reveals its presence by disappearing, and remains a future-past that drives the present by no longer arriving. Furthermore, the title of the work and the text inscribed on the work reveal an ambivalence of the object, in the structure of pointing to each other. This exceptional scene―in which presence and disappearance exist simultaneously―raises epistemological questions surrounding existence and the world, illuminating the current state of contemporary art and sparking our imagination.

Under the Magnolia Tree Poet Jaewon Chae presents a text-based work consisting of eleven new poems for Anthologia: Ten Enchanting Spells. Celebrating the past ten years of the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art, and looking ahead to the next ten years, the work employs the theme of “language of imagination.” It takes the form of serial poems where unique and independent poems are interconnected, presenting a linear yet non-linear mixture of narrative and non-narrative structures. Under the Magnolia Tree follows a journey through ten imaginary languages to explore the unknown and discover new voices. Each disparate voice guides us to construct a chain of cause and effect that unravels the mysterious events. While the voices are telling their own stories, they present a feast of language that imagines other beings and other worlds. American mystery and crime writer Jeffery Deaver once articulated what separates thriller and suspense from mystery: thrillers and suspense are all about “what’s going to happen in the future?”; the classic question of mystery narratives is “what happened in the past?” In this sense, Under the Magnolia Tree ticks both boxes: The audience may solve puzzles presented in the work or discover a downhill slope, taking it like a ride in an amusement park. In the meantime, the eleven poems will leave their own pages and generate a creative experience that is more than the sum of each part. Jaewon Che says, “The nature of the transcendent imagination, the one that greedily explores, delights in, and affirms even in moments of introspection and pessimism, intrigues me.” This work is not showing something different from the artistic language presented by other nine participating artists of the exhibition. It is a “surplus” that adds to the richness of the exhibition full of imaginative language or a “void” inside, and it operates as a possibility for the exhibition to differentiate from itself. In showing both the fullness and the deficiency of the exhibition, Under the Magnolia Tree stands as a third space, a bookmark that creates another gap in the exhibition.

Cinema Experience(#Tribunalism) Cinema Experience (#Tribunalism) is a media installation consisting of excerpts of scenes from the artist’s interactive exhibition/performance titled Cinema Experience, with Space Without Screen II (2021). As anxiety and desires in contemporary society grow at the same time, the psychological boundaries of individuals as well as groups collapse while people are replacing one's own anxiety with the anxiety of others and “substituting one desire for another”(Alain de Botton, Status Anxiety, 2004). The work audiovisually depicts the violence and conflict structure of a relationship that is never simple in this process. The work cinematically edits the fragmented voices of the so-called “those who can’t go on without going crazy” and “those who don’t see they’re crazy” to create a sense of psychological terror and tension, revealing multiple layers of desire. Symbolically revealed through fragmentary words and sentences are the insanity that the media produces and encourages in collusion with the capitalist system and the schizophrenic conditions that come from it. In this work, it is possible to hear common phrases in our daily lives, such as “I loved you” and “It’s all in the past,” or cliches that often appear in the news or movies. Although these phrases and cliches are not visible, but they sound like a poignant sound sculpture that sparks a myriad of imagination. There are fragments of a voice that appeals to authority, as in testimony at a trial or hearing, or one that reveals itself in an intensely personal tone, which interlock and mutate with slight differences. It suggests that conflictual relationships that appear to stem from oppositional structures are not actually defined in terms of good and evil or black and white. For example, a threat to render the present obsolete by preempting the future is revealed as a situation in which the voices of those who are sacrificed or excluded under the arbitrariness of the law exist outside the law just like the sovereign. In the exhibition, three sofas occupy the space, symbolizing beings outside the boundaries of the so-called “law of integrity.” In this fictionalized situation with blatant references to reality, the audience goes through an indirect experience of becoming the subject or object of desire. Although the work depicts a very specific situation, the emotional universality is segmented into different sections. It invites the audience to reflect on the interaction between social reality and the inner world of individuals. Elaborately designed interactive sound and lighting effects are combined with the exhibition space, which is set up like a movie set with sofas, objects, and walls with wainscoting. This provides an optimal environment for the audience to be immersed in the work.

Palace of Green Porcelain Set in a “museum,” Palace with Green Porcelain is a science fiction short film with a complex insight into time. The screen shows a virtual space-time simulation program being played somewhere in the future. Tracing the player’s perspective as they navigates the past through time and space, history, memory, and fiction are blended, while truth and fiction are mixed and distorted. It depicts a future without museums. There is no physical entity, and all that remains are fragmented records. As the player searches through the museum’s records, they enters the past where there were museums, using a high-resolution simulation program that vividly recreates a specific time and space as if it were a reality right in front of one’s eyes. The player enters a date, time, and location, and uses the simulator to wander through a museum that no longer exists. This imaginary program transports the player to a specific time and place, and it can also use hidden portals to jump through time and space. In addition, there are different types of portals. They could take the form of an unknown shape or light, or a space behind a door, or perhaps the act of opening a particular door itself. Viewers watching them play are invited to the scene via a live-streamed screen. As such, the entire museum operates as a simulation platform. The player travels through time and space from the stories of six characters and three old sf novels as historical documentation. The memories of the six people are vividly visualized as individual places the player visits. However, scenes that appear to be from someone’s past are also fictional since they are presumed as simulations. Whether they are a numerical result or a calculated coincidence, the scenes provided by the imaginary program of the future are a mere combination of past fragments and are not guaranteed to be true. Instead, they are likely to be distorted and skewed by an incomplete record. In other words, they could be from someone’s memory, or they could be imaginary images that a program has created in the backdrop of an art museum. Furthermore, some of the archives appearing as additional references to traveling through time and space are science fiction texts. This seems to prove that the whole narrative is fiction in and of itself. For example, a player in the future might take a version of the future, which has been imagined by an old sf novel and has already been passed, as a reference point. This creates a proxy for the past that has become the future (which is the present explored through the viewpoint of the screen). As such, the screen moves back and forth between the entangled space and time. It shows a museum where the future and the past are blended together―each fictional simulation is accompanied by a distortion of time, gradually leading to an unrecognizable identity. The fragmented, shattered record does not serve to locate the origins of the museum. Rather, it serves to the understanding of the remainder that cannot be conceptualized by the museum. There, past records that cannot be reasoned remain as possibilities that have not yet been realized. The work is a metaphor for the nature of the archive, which is split between the past and future on the player’s screen. What could not be fully realized in the past interrupt the present in the guise of the future, and the archive ceases to be an immobile past in fossilized time, leading to encompassing the future. In the archive, the future continues to haunt it as long as it remains a thing to come.

Silver Circle Rho Eunjoo captures the temporality of the image in motion on the canvas. Rho’s work seeks to capture the formativeness of moving objects and synthesize moments of continuation in flux. As such, the work ultimately seems to pursue painting as a trace. Thus, it is quite natural for the artist to depict primarily incomplete, easily deformed, crumbling, or running down objects that are fragmented into pieces. Rho creates her simulations from drawing and modeling done in physical space, transferring them to painting. This can be understood as a process of eliminating the materiality and spatiality of an object and acquiring its temporality by repeatedly reproducing an actual object. In this process of circulation, the initial object is transformed into a sculptural and tactile canvas. Imagining and focusing on the things in between and those that are vague and obscure converge on the canvas. They converge like a clearly shining sign with its own context, fragmented with delicate sensations.

A deep realm where no shadows draw Gijeong Goo works on the various layers of nature that we encounter today, including nature informatized by image processing technology, or nature that is tamed and displayed by humans, such as bonsai and terrarium (a form of horticulture that doubles as interior decoration, where small plants are grown in an enclosed glass bowl or vase). The work is designed to condense nature in a dense, thin box so that nature in an artificial ecosystem and the image of nature augmented by digital technology can be captured in a single scene. The combination of these two disparate objects―nature and the image of nature augmented by digital technology―creates a sense of immersion throughout the audience’s viewing experience, while at the same time creating moments of potential rupture that allow the audience to recognize the heterogeneity. The interior of the terrarium is filled with preserved moss (moss that can be chemically treated to preserve its shape for a long time), dead tree bark, and other elements of nature to make it look lively for an extended period of time, giving audiences a chance to experience an image loop that refers back to the real and imaginary forms respectively on the installed monitor screen. Creating a new landscape, one in which real nature and the nature of digital images projected on a monitor screen intermingle, the work imagines a new cultural and artistic ecosystem where the interaction between the real and the virtual is further expanded in an audience’s experience with technological advances. Through this work, audiences experience the subtle balance and harmony that flows between nature and machines in mixed reality, while perceiving the work as a single image where nature and machines circulate in a connected condition. Throughout this whole viewing experience, people are presented with new definitions of nature in contemporary times. Ultimately, this is a decoration cabinet that could be placed in a living room of the near future with nature as its content. At the same time, it is a digital terrarium that shares a small ecosystem.

Your Bright Future There are overly bright lamps that are blinding the viewer’s sight. Your Bright Future is a crucial work of Bahc Yiso, a pioneer of Korean contemporary art, and it paradoxically shows our “unbright reality.” Does this mean that dreaming of a bright future is no more than chasing an illusion―and we should resign ourselves to living in the present? Are the overly bright lamps illuminating the wall a mere presentation of cynical resignation? The very future that Bahc saw in 2002 has now become our present or past, or it still remains as our future. As such, this work became a symbolic sign that illuminates our time. Built by combining simple materials like wood, electrical wire, and lamps, it works as a symbol that writes the past and future within the present. More precisely, it inscribes the past carried by the now-iconic work into our present as the outlook of the future. In other words, Your Bright Future is a sign of contemporaneity that Bahc has inscribed in his time, looking toward the future. In this way, the work becomes a sign that raises countless questions to lead us to the past and the future at the same time. When the excess of being is tamed by meaning, the kind of art that resists it acknowledges that excess is fundamental to the human condition before balance and harmony. Bahc Yiso’s artistic spirit is still youthful as he is “a person at odds with the times” and “a person who sees the darkness of the times,” shedding a bright light on contemporaneity.

Current Exhibition Installed on the wall connecting the first and second floors of the exhibition gallery, Current Exhibition references posters of exhibitions held at the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art over the past decade since it was inaugurated. The artist was provided with 90 exhibition poster files for the archives of the museum and removing most of the text information on the posters (such as exhibition title, date and venue, participating artists, and sponsorships). In cases where the poster design itself was based on text, the artist altered it in a way that compromised the readability of the text or typeface that organized the information. Once the information was deleted, the remaining images were printed and installed in chronological order. Exhibition posters are typically visualizations of an exhibition work or theme. They function as temporary promotional materials created primarily for publicity purposes and displayed in public spaces, both online and offline, until they are replaced. Therefore, after a certain period of time has passed and the purpose of conveying information has been fulfilled, exhibition posters lose their relevance and are discarded. Current Exhibition repurposes such promotional items, which have expiration dates, by removing information from them. Posters with text removed come to exist as images by themselves, endowed with new vitality. As images replace the precise text, the work becomes a metaphor through a visual language for the shape of the future that wears out over time.

Monument to exhibitions in the past and upcoming This work is an installation that symbolically recreates the piles of one-off prints left in public spaces. As the succession of past images, layered beneath the accumulated sheets of print, creates a new pattern, it constitutes a physical mass resembling a tomb of images. The promotional prints are still randomly pasted onto construction sites and outdoor spaces, and they are essentially printed “images.” Nevertheless, once they fulfill their intended purpose, they lose their utility value and become useless. This work embodies the phenomenon. Using the sculpture-image as a mass made of the same poster repeatedly pasted onto each other, the work metaphorically presents the production, sharing, and deletion of digital images in our time. This pillar made of prints consists of posters for the exhibition on display, Anthologia: Ten Enchanting Spells. It is a symbolic sculpture in the form of a monument that sculpturally replaces the notion of the present as a boundary between the past and the future.

In the Air Rho Eunjoo captures the temporality of the image in motion on the canvas. Rho’s work seeks to capture the formativeness of moving objects and synthesize moments of continuation in flux. As such, the work ultimately seems to pursue painting as a trace. Thus, it is quite natural for the artist to depict primarily incomplete, easily deformed, crumbling, or running down objects that are fragmented into pieces. Rho creates her simulations from drawing and modeling done in physical space, transferring them to painting. This can be understood as a process of eliminating the materiality and spatiality of an object and acquiring its temporality by repeatedly reproducing an actual object. In this process of circulation, the initial object is transformed into a sculptural and tactile canvas. Imagining and focusing on the things in between and those that are vague and obscure converge on the canvas. They converge like a clearly shining sign with its own context, fragmented with delicate sensations. The four new works in this exhibition are part of a series titled In the Air. The moving energy expressed in each work is a condensation of time within itself that is gradually trickling out from it. Each work is a trace of a dynamic image that lasts from appearance to disappearance. The trace is repeated by being erased and lost. With the possibility of iteration, the finitude of the trace becomes irremovable. In Rho’s paintings, the same object is featured in different scenes and the past and future of an object are captured in a single scene. Through such paintings, Rho continues to attempt to approach the essence of creation and disappearance.

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A cherished gem of northeastern Seoul, the Buk-Seoul Museum of Art is SeMA’s first and largest branch opened to the public in 2013. It seeks to invent new forms of exhibitions and learning programs of contemporary art. Buk SeMA is particularly animated by vibrant local communities including a dozen art colleges as well as many other educational institutions. The experimental spirit of a younger generation of artists plays a vital part in the diverse transdisciplinary programs of Buk SeMA, which aims to become a collaborative station for the future. (Photo: ⓒ Kim YongKwan)

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