Us Against You

Artists: Byungjun Kwon, Kyuho Kim, Jinah Roh, Samson Young, Sonia Khurana, Xeuzhe Shen, Acrobatic Cosmos, Art Labor, Woosung Lee, Jangwon Lee, Jinkyoung Jun, Part-time Suite, Yunju Hwang

Curator: Sooyoung Lee
Co-curator: Eunsol Cho

The exhibition Us Against You brings light to the world in which we will be living together soon and to the ways for us to “live together,” which has been changing already. The 13 groups of artists present facets of the world based on their personal experiences. The artists from different regions and various generations, show that the universal criteria that supported the modern world have been crashed down and that the world in not moving forward anymore.

The title Us Against You implies that “we” share the world we live in with “many other entities different from us.” It also means that we are already related with you in so many ways.

Who are “we” as human? What makes anyone “human”? It is not too difficult to consider a cyborg, who has a machine inside her body such as an artificial heart, to be human. It is, on the other hand, never easy to define the boundary between human and non-human. No matter how hard we try to stop new virus. it breaks the barrier and enters us. Our personal information, which is identifiable with ourselves, get leaked no matter how cautiously we guard them. There is no way to prove that we are today the same being as what we were yesterday. The way we construct a human subjectivity keeps changing. We are material-informational individuals constantly re-constructed.

Then who are “you”? You come from different places, sing in different languages. You have differently shaped bodies. And often, you exist outside the legal boundary. In spite of these trivial “differences,” you begin to be visible only when one steps outside Korea, maleness, political citizenship, straightness and finally human-centeredness. “You” are strangers, women, plants and animals, machines and the earth.

At Us Against You, the audience will meet those who they have to live together with as neighbor, and explore the kinds of coexistence and collaboration they offer. At Us Against You, the audience will see the changing world and diverse entities in it, and the ways of collaboration they bring to the world through the participating artists’s eyes and voices. The exhibition will be not only the very picture of the daily lives of us and you but also a world to produce coincidences, actions and interdependent relationships.