Salted Messages, 2020
Inscribed Texts on Carpet with Sprinkled Salt, Installation in Studio 14′x19′ I laid a carpet on the floor in my studio and sprinkled salt. I sat on it and wrote down thoughts or words that interested me. The size and lines of the letters are measured by hand and engraved with a butter knife. As it takes a long time to write letters, I kept thinking about the same content and would change it back and forth. The act of writing became labor utilizing the whole body. If you enter a space of yours, you may wonder how to fill it. As I brought a few things with me from Korea, there was a limit to filling up a whole space. I wanted to look at the studio space from the perspective of a labor practice over time. The engraved letters on the carpet floor are bound to be exposed to movement in the studio. Traces of my own footprints and others, traces of flooding from rain, leaking from the ceiling, dust and mud intervened with the letters. Salt as a medium allows me to engrave, preserve, and remove my message.
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Chocolate Bars, 2020
Tempered White Chocolate with Inscribed Texts, 2″x2″x22″ each, Dimension variables This work aims to create a variable structure by casting two by two wooden bars into chocolate and assembling them. This work is based on personal experience with cannabis chocolate. After eating four pieces of it at once, I felt a strangeness in my body and had panic symptoms. I even went to the ER while crying and insulting people verbally around me. Eating the chocolate to have a little happiness of sweetness brought a fear of death. I seek to use other meanings of the word ‘bar’ as a structure, an obstacle, and behind bars as it is illegal for me to take marijuana. I wanted to reveal the irony of the nightmares that little chocolate brought that night.
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Eating Chocolate, 2020
Tempered White Chocolate Cast from Wooden Sculpture, 4″x8″x11″, Artist and Image of the process For this video performance I recorded myself eating a chocolate mold of my face for as long as I was able to endure the physical consumption. The mold was created from a wood carving, which is a root to my practice, and an important element to keep within my process. I used white chocolate specifically to draw a self-portrait of my expected ‘cast’ in Western society while living in the USA. During the time of recording I intentionally focused on eating the features of my face, until it was no longer identifiable to myself. Eating the chocolate represents personal euphoria, and also means the destruction of its shape which correlates with my personal experience when I accidentally ate chocolate once that was made with cannabis
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Banners, 2019
Paint on Clothes, Installed and photographed in Davis, CA, Dimension variables I often have video calls with my family while I am here in the United States. With no international phone call fees, I am able to see their faces in the video. Nevertheless, there are still things I cannot say to them. I think about those messages I feel shy to say, messages that feel too personal to share over the phone to loved ones. Using familiar words in Korean, I wrote what I could not say over the phone on banners and installed them in the public environment of Davis, CA. Although the words on the banners are private, I felt comfortable in my anonymity. I found during my time here that language was spoken too fast for me to understand. Through the making and displaying of my personal statements in large bold Korean text, I am able to slow down the viewer. This forces passersby to pay attention to the language separation they may not understand, as well as creating intimate communication with those that do understand. *(Banner says ‘Mom, I miss you’, ‘My English has not improved’ from the left)
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Taste of Labor- Hamburger, Pork Cutlet, Steak, 2015-16
Capture images, 3-Channel Video and Sound, 14:16 For this work, I record the consumption of meals that cost the same price as my hourly rate for a part-time job. The video is interrupted by a black screen with intermittent white text that pops up in alphabetical order. The text consists of a job description that includes the location of the job, the title of the job/post, and the hourly rate. In this way, the value and the content of labor inscribed in the text are revealed as the behind-the-scenes of my eating. By prioritizing my favorite foods regardless of my income, I try to find a way in which my labor connects to a form of personal happiness.
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Documentary – Successful Artists, 2015
Voice clips, 23:32, 2015 I asked four of my friends and family members (who did not study arts, but were familiar with my work) to imagine the ideal figure of the artist. The interviews were based on the questionnaire I prepared where I asked about the imaginary artist’s educational background, artist’s statement, advice for the younger generation of artists, daily life, and job. As the interviewer, I conducted the interview as if I were producing a real documentary on the successful artists, and my friends and family members played the role of the interviewees. Through the work, I looked for an artist from members of the audience who actively connected themselves with the fictional artists who were created by their own imagination. It seemed to me that the resulted interviews that described what my friends and family members had imagined were projections of what they wanted from me.
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Emergency Art Box, 2015
Acrylic box, prints, bottles of water, first aid kit, hammer, 37X69X25Cm The Emergency Art Box contains a first aid kit and an emergency supply of food, and provides museum visitors an escape route and a user’s guide for the outside of the museum on the occasion that the art museum encounters a natural disaster. The box only functions as an information map in normal situations, but in the case of an emergency situation visitors will need to smash it with the hammer hanging next to the box to access the first aid kit and the emergency supply of food. The information map does not show the visitor’s guide pathway but an escape route for visitors. I tried to set a direct relationship between the artwork and the audience by bringing to consciousness the reality of the exhibition space in order for the audience to perceive the museum space differently from the space’s intended design as an exhibition site for the display of art.
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Art Skill Certificate & Video as Proof of the Ability to Handle Wood Tools, 2015
Print, A4 size, Single Channel Video, 4:41, Variable Dimensions In the form of a video and a certificate in which I granted myself, the work legitimizes my skills as an artist. Labor has more often than not been valued as less than the final product. Because of this I have decided to focus more on these aspects of labor that are more closely linked to art as a particular skill. Additionally, I try to show that artistic labor is in close proximity to other forms of everyday labor – the use of wood tools is also used in everyday construction. Through the work’s self-certification process, the role or function of the artist is not given by art institutions but by the artist him or herself. As a result, the skills and techniques for an art practice, rather than being standardized are made diverse.
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Scribbling Wrapping Paper, 2014
Print on wrapping paper, photos, disposable camera, dimensions variable. In a stationery store near my university, many people scribbled on sheets of plain paper to test the different inks when shopping for pens. I designed and produced a wrapping paper for gifts by collecting the scribbled papers and sticking them together. Then, I asked the staff at the stationery store to use it as wrapping paper for their customers and to take a photo of the wrapped gifts with a disposable camera. I chose this wrapping paper to wrap gifts because it is similar to the colorful traces of scribbles on paper used to test inks, where both of which are supplementary or byproducts. Through the site-specific work at the stationery store, I portrayed the relationships between people intermingling with each other like the scribbles.
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Bowing to the Museum, 2014
Video still, Single channel video, 9:05 In this video, I walk away from the art museum’s entrance and I bow to the museum building twice, as I am participating in a Korean funeral ceremony. This gesture is performed to pay my respects to the art institution to which I belong as an artist, and at the same time, to say good-bye to its authority. After bowing, I walk to the opposite side of the museum, disappearing from of the frame, so the audience can no longer see me. In this context, the frontal shot of the enormous size of the art museum’s gate symbolizes its institutional authority. The video reveals the triangular relationship between the artist (as mourner), the art institution, and the audience (as witness).
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