Seoul, June 25 – August 23, 2015, Maison Hermes Dosan Park, Seoul, http://maisondosanpark.hermes.com/en/
The show was very beautifully installed with all attention to detail, as neat as the Hermes bags, shoes and accessories one floor above or the stylish cafe right next to it. Inside were three video installations and two related sculptures.
The first installation (1 channel) “Women with a Movie Camera” was a romantic dream-story of an Asian girl wandering around some French city (the voiceover was French). It contained a lot of random street shots, and a surrealist-like narrative with a black guy in a bunny/swan costume. On top of that, sometimes the image cut to a blurry shot of the two “editors” (the artists themselves) commenting on the scenes to leave in or take out.
The second room was circular with pink curtains on the perimeter and one screen hanging in the middle. Also a one channel video installation, “Nude Model” was slightly making fun of the traditional ‘beauty’ ideals represented by a nude model. In all art disciplines students come across the task of sculpting, drawing or shooting a female nude. In the video, the ‘nude’ is wearing a dress simulating nudity (with breasts and vagina represented on the dress). Surrounding actors are all slightly over-acting, creating a funny feeling. The nude dress itself is displayed as an object nearby.
In the gallery atrium, one notices another sculpture, consisting of two hands in the form of binoculars, made from white plaster material in 1:1 size – another representation of the artists’ gaze at the nude model’s body on display.
The last room features a three channel video installation (three vertical screens). It alludes to traditional Korean dance and shamanist practice. In the video, three “Makers” (ghosts/supernatural with masks instead of faces) are discussing how to produce a soundtrack for disasters that are going to happen in the near future. They then make the sounds by performing a ritual dance. Sometimes a video of a foley artist cuts in, showing him producing the sounds. Another screen occasionally cuts in blurry and close to illegible footage probably taken from some on-line video footage.
Overall the exhibition presents a balanced experience. I would only lament the length of the videos. I tried to sit through them, but didn’t manage it, and I was just observing lots of other visitors who usually spend between one and five minutes watching the pieces which has about 30 – 40 minutes each. “Woman with a Movie Camera” was obviously a reference to Dziga Vertov, presenting a feminine version of his masterpiece. I sensed an underlying questioning of the masculinist/modernist aesthetic, contrasting it with a female sentimentality. “Nude Model” was similarly questioning a different art historical concept – of the nude grace/muse/goddess – and the obsession with the nude as an artistic ideal, contrasted with prudery surviving side by side to it. The “Makers” broke with this pattern and did not really fit in, in a good way. The multi-channel format and repetitive structure made them most suitable for an installation setup. It was a refreshing encounter at the end of the show, a work with an intriguing idea, balancing between the real and impossible. It was most of all reflecting on the human obsession with time and causality, which is always beyond control.
