2024 Title Match: Hong Lee, Hyunsook vs. Ji Hye Yeom

“Whether it’s encountering religion or art, isn’t every meeting born from an intensely subjective, profound sense of contact?” —Hong Lee, Hyunsook

Hong Lee, Hyunsook and Ji Hye Yeom, who share an artistic approach of integrating physical and microscopic sensations with a consciousness of societal issues, come together in Fold the Time with the Ground. The artists closely observe a world shaped by the intersecting forces of climate issue, war, and technological rivalry. Sensitively attuned to the global crisis hurtling toward collapse, they develop material thinking that is processed through their own bodies. Through this, they present bold, large-scale new works that reveal a fresh approach to “response-ability,” maintaining a sense of responsibility toward the entangled relationship between the “self” and “all beings on Earth.”

The direct translation of the exhibition title is “Stone and Night.” The motifs of “stone” and “night” are not only central to each artist’s focus but also represent broader concepts: “night” represents a metaphor for disaster and “stone” embodies a perpetually transforming body and a sense of connection between oneself and other beings. The two artists weave these ideas together with remarkable sincerity and candor.

Hong Lee, Hyunsook expands on her recent exploration of the “stone” motif with Amidong Tombstone Village (2024), a video work that contemplates the possibility of solidarity beyond ethnicity, nationhood, life, and death amidst reactionary circumstances such as global conflicts and the rise of refugees. She also brings What you are touching now-Insubong (2024), a frottage installation resembling the skin of a boulder, into a towering ten-meter exhibition space to evoke the tactile reality of the climate crisis and relationships with non-human entities. By polishing gravestones and rocks, the artist metaphorically explores how our interwoven existence allows us to understand the “other” through the gesture of “self-touching.” Visitors can also view a series of eleven video works in Project Gallery 1, which are considered the foundation of these new creations.

Ji Hye Yeom draws on the motif of “night” to contemplate the rapid pace of the contemporary world, driven by the desire to reclaim lost time for growth during the pandemic. She questions whether this seamless, high-speed trajectory is ultimately heading toward calamity. In The Last Night (2024) and The Midday Symptoms (2024), Yeom captures visceral sensations of acceleration, exhaustion, foreboding signs, and helplessness. Departing from her earlier works, which often relied on montages and 3D imagery to evoke and metaphorize bodily sensations, she experiments with cinematic forms rooted in on-site shooting. Alongside Yeom’s video works, she introduces a book and paintings that expand on the narrative universe of the films, channeling energy away from rapidity and towards a shift in direction.

This exhibition also features a sound work created with the voices of both artists. Through an exchange of short texts rooted in their respective concerns, the artists dismantle the framework of confrontation, engage in dialogue, and explore the notion of performativity that fosters mutual transformation.

The English title of this exhibition is Fold the Time with the Ground. True to the title, Hong Lee, Hyunsook folds time and the ground, traversing like a wolf to embrace and stand beside the marginalized and excluded across the wide expanse of the world. Ji Hye Yeom folds and creases time and space to delay the moment rushing toward catastrophe, and envisions another possibility of metamorphosis, like a blue crayfish shedding its shell. Their journeys, which seem to embody both sensory exteriors and intuitive interiors, resonate through physical and material forms. As beings bound to the Earth, their works offer hope that we might each find strength to struggle, console, and persevere in our own ways amidst the crises we face.

“Good Luck, All of Us” —Ji Hye Yeom