Homin and Jaehwan is a duo exhibition featuring the works of Joo Jaehwan and his son Joo Homin. Joo Jaehwan is an artist who presents humorous yet acerbic insight on the key issues in Korea’s modernity, and his son Homin is a renowned “webtoon” (online comics) creator who rose to stardom for his webtoon exploring the notion of afterlife in Korean mythology. By presenting the interplay between the distinctly different genres of the two artists, this exhibition sheds insight on how the role of artists as storytellers have evolved and manifested differently across generations.
In order to do so, the exhibition presents “the integration of images and text” as a common means of storytelling that the two artists employ. In turn, the exhibition examines the differences in the artists’ storytelling method present in their respectively dissimilar personalities and media of choice. In Joo Jaehwan’s works, the text serves as a poetic metaphor that prompts the viewers’ imaginations of the narrative implied in the works. On the other hand, Joo Homin’s works explicitly present text as a narrative message in the comics-like speech bubbles, providing a more cinematic experience of imagination.
Sometimes dubbed homo narrans, humans are instinctively driven to storytelling. According to the American scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell, such incessant drive for storytelling stems from the desire to establish a relationship with the world, i.e to reconcile our lives with reality. Likewise for the two artists, storytelling is a manifestation of the instinct or efforts to constantly speak about the world and reality.
Homin and Jaehwan presents a father and a son, and two artists of distinctly different genres sharing the experience of storytelling in the collocated space of the art exhibition. As the viewers partake in this process, they may be able to view the two artists from an entirely novel perspective and even come to understand the relationship between the artists and their surroundings. Perhaps this exhibition will serve to expand the storytelling of the Joo family into further narratives between the artists and the audience, and among the audience itself.
