Kwon Minho: Clouded Breath

The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA) Cheongju presents its inaugural MMCA Cheongju Project 2020, Kwon Minho: Clouded Breath. Various projects have been created to bring out the unique characteristics of each of the museum’s environmental premises, in Gwacheon, Deoksugung and Seoul. MMCA Cheongju Art Storage Center, which opened in December 2018, curates outdoor projects allowing the production of experimental works in an expansive outdoor space, supporting emerging and established Korean artists.

Kwon Minho (b. 1979), the first artist to feature in MMCA Cheongju project, uses pencil and charcoal to draw modern and contemporary Korean scenes on architectural drawings adding photo collages. Showing a particular interest in Korea’s age of industrialization, he elaborately layers symbols of this era, such as factories, machines and street signs. Kwon then adds animation and sound to his black and white sketches, finished in the absence of other colors, bestowing machines and people with movement. His works offer glimpses of Korea’s complex and dynamic modern and contemporary history in the form of a montage, just as architectural plans reveal the inner structures of buildings and machines.

For this project, Kwon has produced Clouded Breath (2020), in which he takes architectural drawings of MMCA Cheongju, a former tobacco factory, and fills them with stories of the factory. The title of Kwon’s work symbolizes several meanings, including smoke emanating from the tobacco factory chimney, tobacco smoke itself, and the breath of laborers toiling in the workplace. Referencing materials dating from the opening of the factory, in 1946, to its closure in 2004, Kwon adds his own imagination to create compressed symbols of tobacco processing machines and cigarette logos symbolizing the factory, and key events and symbols of Korea’s industrialization.

The tobacco factory in Clouded Breath recalls three works. In addition to the original drawings and video installation in the lobby, one work is installed 10 drawing panels in full size on the outer wall of the museum, creating a sense of realism. The most exceptional feature of this exhibition is Kwon’s introduction of augmented reality (AR)-based content. Viewers downloading the requisite app and pointing their mobile devices at the museum wall will discover Kwon’s flat drawings in 3D.

This project is both an unveiling of new works by Kwon, enhanced through the use of diverse media, and an experiment in search of new directions for contemporary art to develop together with science and technology. It is our hope that viewers synaesthetically experiencing Clouded Breath, expanded from architectural drawings to building walls and augmented reality, will recall and reflect upon the tobacco factory that has now disappeared into history.