‘Intern Show’
Kai Hyeonkyung Kim & Lee Nanjoo
05.11-13.11.2016
Space One wraps up the year with Nanjoo Lee and Kai HyeonKyung Kim’s two person’s exhibition. The two artists have worked with Space One throughout the year 2016.
Kai HyeonKyung Kim presents three video works based on her one-year intern program at Space One, focusing on the environment and visitors of the space. She keeps a contemplative approach on how off-site spaces reach out to people from various backgrounds.
The three video works show the wall of the gallery, the way to the gallery, and the people visiting the gallery in the market. These three journeys are very familiar to some, but others may find them quite strange. Raw scuffed walls, dilapidated market, and random market people... these elements do not seem to belong to a typical commercial gallery space.
KIM’s one-year experience ends without a clear answer as to how and if off-site spaces produce any kind of value, or why people flock to them. She might conclude these spaces are simply on a different layer of the world, like sacred religious spaces, coexisting but not integrating.
Lee Nanjoo presents a three-part installation based on her observation during internship at Space One located in Shinheung market. With the changes the market is going through under the banner of ‘urban regeneration project’, Lee feels a sense of kinship in the way its ‘appearance’ is shifting through constant construction and renovations. She sees herself in this process of the market’s painstaking alteration to meet the standard of a ‘good looking art space’.
As a woman living in a Korean society, she tries to remind herself of the meaning of body image. The pressure of various strict standards of beauty, especially for women, in Korean society is very high. Women who do not meet these criteria, such as the old, the fat, the more masculine types, are denied of their femininity from both men and women in patriarchal Korean society. Her struggle to free herself from these social criteria and pressure continues yet she finds herself very much tied to them.
In the exhibition space are three different legs. One is a photo of a leg in the perfect golden ratio framed; the second is a leg installation filled with golden trash and construction wastes; and the third is a video of a leg carrying out a holy ritual. These three individual works embody ‘calves’, representing Lee's issue of her own body image. They are organically connected, throwing questions to the viewers about the meaning of ‘appearance’ and ‘body image’ in Korea.
