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November 28, 2023 – Review
12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale, “THIS TOO, IS A MAP”
Jason Waite
“THIS TOO, IS A MAP” questions the conventional relationship of map to territory, looking “to model multi-spatial and multi-subjective histories and knowledge.” Directed by Rachael Rakes with associate curator Sofia Dourron, the show features works by sixty-five artists chosen not as representatives of particular nations but for their embrace of transnational approaches. The diasporic bent of this list reflects an expansion of (and alternative approach to) cartography to articulate myriad overlapping personal roots and routes.
One example is Tibetan-American artist Tenzin Phuntsog, whose video Pure Land (2022) attempts to trace landscapes across the American West that look similar to images of a homeland he’s never visited. In the film, he messages these images to his mother to comment on or verify their similitude. In the construction of these unknown nostalgic landscapes, the images Phuntsog takes are uncannily similar to their Tibetan counterparts. The comparison highlights the possibility that any space can be made into a home. At the same time, it floats subtle questions of what defines any given place.
What lies underneath a landscape was the focus of one of the more unique venues of the biennale: an emergency bunker built for the former military dictator Park Chung …
July 25, 2014 – Review
Hong Seung-Hye’s “Reminiscence”
Tyler Coburn
Hong Seung Hye’s sixth solo exhibition at Kukje Gallery is a retrospective, after a fashion. Arrayed around K2—one of the Seoul gallery’s spaces—are prints, sculptures, and furniture that co-opt the titles and forms of her earlier works. The stainless steel structure in On & Off (all works 2014), for example, matches a previous sculpture made with red lacquer on wood; both create portraits of teetering, pixilated homes. Color has also drained from Debris, a set of dollhouse-like boxes that break rank with their 2008 forebears, preferring the floor to the wall, and steel to lacquered wood. It would seem that history—at least in Hong’s case—is best viewed in grayscale.
Entitled “Reminiscence,” Hong’s show is not a mere exercise in citation. While acknowledging that “the past is fixed,” the Korean artist also has an interest in evolutionary processes, leaving open how earlier artworks may be entailed in future ones. This interest dates as far back as 1997, when Hong began her ongoing “Organic Geometry” series, which explores the permutations of primary digital structures. Echoing the modernists, the artist started by working with the grid, though hers is not a site of transcendental abstraction, but a laboratory for formal experimentation, where pixels …