East Contemporary

MMCA Seoul “Residency Changdong Report 2015”

Seoul, November 4 – 29, 2015, http://www.mmca.go.kr/eng/

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Jin Dallae 진달래

An exhibition of the three Korean artists-in-residence at the MMCA Changdong studios: Im Heungsoon 임흥순, Chang Yoonseong 장윤성 and Jin Dallae 진달래.

Given how different each of the artists works was, this exhibition felt like three mini solo shows. Im Heungsoon 임흥순 has risen to fame suddenly with the Silver Lion Award at this year’s Venice Biennale for his Factory Complex movie. In this exhibition he presented another movie dealing with the history of Jeju Island. As in the aforementioned movie, here he too tries to cover decades of time and a multitude of events and sites, using a quite traditional ‘metaphorical’ and highly aesthetic film language. IMG_20151105_130732_HDRIMG_20151105_125913IMG_20151105_133448

Chang Yoonseong 장윤성 exhibited a large-scale kinetic sculpture. On one hand it felt a bit ‘old’ in the way it was made, disclosing the artist’s age, on the other hand it was very well made and engaging and communicating well without the use of words. Another work by Chang Yoonseong was a rather violent installation of cameras and photo flashes that triggered when a person entered the installation. It was an obvious commentary on today’s economy of images, again a bit old-fashioned, but very well made and impressive. IMG_20151105_133419 IMG_20151105_130124_HDR IMG_20151105_130106_HDR IMG_20151105_130031 IMG_20151105_125400_HDR IMG_20151105_125439_HDR IMG_20151105_125531_HDR

Jin Dallae’s 진달래 work, whose work borders on the edge between art and graphic design, showed the most simple and most consequent work of all three. In the work about the ‘perfect A’, there was nothing superfluous and everything was just exactly right. As such the work could appear a bit cold, but actually it was very focused, discussing one very specific aspect of typographic ideology. A newspaper produced as part of the work was in Korean only, so some aspect of the work remained mysterious to me.IMG_20151105_133638_HDR IMG_20151105_133407 IMG_20151105_130656

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