Path of Contact

Artists: Kiwon Park × Jinhyung Lee, SUH Yongsun × YEO Songjoo × KIM Minwoo, SHIN Hak Chul × Kira Kim, Yongbaek Lee × Kijong Zin, JUNG Jung Yeob × Jang Pa, Sook Jin Jo × Heejoon Lee, CHE Wo Seung × CHOE Sooryeon, CHOI Gene Uk × PARK Yumi, HONG Myung Seop × KIM Hee Ra, KONG Sunghun (1965–2021), Tchah Sup Kim (1942–2022), CHO Sungmook( 1940–2016)

ARKO Art Center of the Arts Council Korea will be hosting a special exhibition, Path of Contact, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its opening in 2024. This special exhibition will consist of an art exhibition in the main building of the Center, together with an archive section. The archive section features approximately 200 self-curated archival materials, including brochures, pamphlets, photos, and videos that document the Center’s history. In addition, ARKO Art Center is preparing to display video clips documenting significant periods of change and their distinctive characteristics with interviews with officials inside and outside of the Center, and a chronology of its past exhibitions, providing insights into the footsteps of the past and helping to envision its future direction.

This exhibition is the result of the participating artists’ collaboration as such, exploring issues of the contemporary art scene, arising from  the encounter between artists of different generations, the point of differentiation between works that end up being either collaborative or individual, and ways of interacting and contacting. It also provides an opportunity for reflection on the methodology of creating art in the process of expanding and exchanging relationships, while recalling the role of the museums in discovering and rediscovering artists and offering a creative space of experimentation, which has been their main function. The nine teams participating in this exhibition present different results of their forms of interaction: some expose the theme through differences in media properties, others take visual connections of the final product, common themes of joint projects, or differences in each other’s creative work as material for their own. Focusing on each artist’s current projects, the themes also reveal different formal and substantive aspects of contemporary art, engaging with the art form itself, exploring community and historical events, or projecting a dystopian future. Meanwhile, the exhibition will feature the posthumous published and unpublished works of three late artists who have made significant contributions to the Center’s exhibition history, providing an opportunity to further explore the work of the artists whom the Center has highlighted.

The Korean title of the exhibition, Path of Contact is a quotation from The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (1988) by Gilles Deleuze. It is applied in the broad sense that the fold, which has the property of a multiplicity, as the interweaving of different traces and contacts as the weft and warp lines, creates the present of the historical product made of multifarious traces imprinted in the Center and opens the door for future contacts. That is, our present is the result of the trajectory and path of contacts, and the exhibition focuses on the kind of contacts that will shape the future of the Center. In addition, the exchanges revealed in the main exhibition can be seen as an extension of the result of the trajectory of contact between the paired artists. In this way, the exhibition aims to depart from the familiar methodology of commemorative exhibitions, explore ways of making connections through exhibitions, preserve the legacies of senior artists while transcending their original temporality, and create a multi-layered art form, language, and art experience in which the traces and memories of relationships that passed through the Center as a contact zone are reconstructed on another terrain.