Publication was made possible with the support of the Nguyen Art Foundation

In Ran Dian’s continuing series on going on a walk, we join artist Thinh Nguyen on his current journey across America from Los Angeles to New York, though it involves more driving than walking. We will follow Thinh as he continues on his journey.

all images courtesy the artist

Slab City, California

Moved out of my studio, needing some solitude to work on my addiction, emotional and mental health. Been traveling to see the earthworks that I’ve been wanting to see. So far my journey led me to Slab City Library, an anarchist library with free books for all, founded by the late “Rosalie” now managed by Cornelius Vango – where I came across this insightful book, “Steal Like An Artist” by Austin Kleon. It affirms/confirms my practice, I didn’t know I was/am doing all along…

Michael Heizer, Double Negative, Nevada (near Las Vegas)

Perhaps a Double Negative can make a positive. Such monumental gestures. Yet, this is just one little scratch into the surface of the earth. I feel small and insignificant when I look out into the gandure of the landscape. I am but a single spec of dust in this vastness. I belong to nature, my body belong to nature, nature is nurturing, me. From dust, I will return to dust.

Nancy Holt, Sun Tunnels, Utah

I was lost and couldn’t find them at with the stupid GPS. I just follow my instinct and found it. Was setting up to crash in the Sun Tunnel for the night until I heard coyotes howling, and the freezing howling wind was unbearable. Packed everything and left in pitch dark. Got lost driving around and about in circle. Finally, back to the main highway just in time before the gas ran out…it was magical nevertheless!

Robert Smithson, Spiral Jetty, Utah

I witnessed a miracle today. The sun came out. I asked, I believed, it would come out upon my arrival at my destination and that it’d be shining on my way. It would be a miracle if it does, I said. It did, it did just that. It glowed and glimmered through the stormy sky, brought me warmth and comfort in the snowy landscape.

Approach to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, constructed 1970

“From your end of the table it’s a 6, for others it’s a 9. But when we come to understanding together, it’s a whole new symbol.” Thinh Nguyen, Turning Table, 2020, Acrylic on found dinning table.

Lunar New Year, LA to NYC

I’m yet again on the road. Heading east bound once more, scheming up new projects while pretending everything is normal…nothing is…

Thinh Nguyễn, Dark Moon, 2021

Thinh Nguyen, “Your Glory Days Are Over”, 2021

Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum

I am ever so inspired by Noah Purifoy Outdoor Desert Art Museum. I felt like I am a part of this lineage of art history that uses the everyday, the mundane, to be meaningful (is it art or is it trash? That’s not my job to decide), dating back to ancient Chinese art to Duchamp, Rosenberg [Q. Thinh, do you mean Rauschenberg?], Warhol, Betty Saars (b.1926, Los Angeles), David Hammons (b.1943, Springfield, Illinois), to Danh Võ (b.1975, Vũng Tàu), and numerous more…my choice is not only conceptual but economical ( ‘cus I’m cheap and broke) and environmental (not that I’m saving the environment, there’s just too much stuff already).

Thinh Nguyen

Born in 1984 in Bao An, Vietnam, Thinh Nguyen is an artist, educator, curator, cultural critic, whose works investigate the intersections of cultural values. Utilizing various media, they explores and exposes oppressive sociopolitical power structures within those values. Nguyen has performed and exhibited internationally, most recently at The Mistake Room, The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, and Contemporary Irish Art Center Los Angeles. Their work has been written about in Artforum, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Magazine, LA Weekly, Hyperallergic and Artillery Magazine.

Thinh Nguyễn

by Wang Zhibo

It has been just over a year since we moved to Berlin. Yuan Yuan has finally made his first solo show “Irregular Pearl” (at Edouard Malingue Gallery in Hong Kong) after moving his studio here, and I have been busy preparing our dual exhibition project, which was intended for this year’s Frieze London, now delayed of course.

Like everyone, we’re going through a tough time. Even the toughness is unpredictable. Just like I have a fear of the sea, the ups and downs of the CoVid19 Virus pandemic gives me a feeling of sinking in the middle of the unfathomable ocean.

I relocated from Hangzhou to Berlin in August 2019 but before that, Yuan Yuan has been living here with our daughter, renovating our studio and arranging our new home. I don’t know how they managed to make it, but our six-year old daughter can take care of herself very well. She learned long before to wash her clothes. We originally planned to make a return trip to Hangzhou to visit our parents and where our new studio there is now completed.

All these years we’ve always had a very tight time-budget in our work. We’re skilled at compressing our life into a ball. In 2018 we moved both our home and studio twice. Another reason we needed to get back to Hangzhou is that our studio had been flooded in an accident two months after we left. It turned out that the master valve was a shoddy one. We didn’t know how long it’d been leaking, but until my relative found out, the studio had already become a 1.5m deep swimming pool.

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柏林工作室里进行中的作品，2020 Work in progress in the Berlin studio 2020

杭州工作室，2019, Hangzhou studio, 2019

Fortunately, the paintings survived, because I moved them carefully upstairs before I left. But nearly all of our painting materials and gears were completely damaged, including our air pump, Festool machines, expensive photographic equipment, and those painting knives Yuan Yuan had been collecting for years.

New neighbors

擦洗干净刚刚铺好的瓷砖地面，工作室明亮了许多，2019. New floor tiles make the studio much brighter, 2019.

Our Berlin neighbor, Florian, one of the owners of Chert Lüdde gallery, is interesting. He said he moved to Wilmersdorf  because he wanted to live away from art, but unfortunately, here there happen to be two medium-sized artist studios, a collector, and an important senior figure in the contemporary Chinese art scene. The building we are in was designed by a sculptor about a century ago.

袁远在柏林工作室准备6月初在香港马凌画廊的 “Irregular Pearl” 展览，2020. Yuan Yuan preparing for his show at Edouard Malingue Gallery, early June, 2020

工作室一角1，2020, studio view, 2020

工作室一角2，2020, studio view 2020.

Outside the studio

柏林地铁一角 ，袁远拍摄，2017. A corner of the Berlin metro system, 2017 (Photo Yuan Yuan)

A few years ago, every time we traveled to Europe, we always spent time lingering in second hand book stores and museum book stores, indulging ourselves in voluminous books and documents. But we could not take home too many because of the weight limit, so gradually the idea of having a studio. We wanted to have a library and data bank of our own.

佩加蒙博物馆的伊斯兰手稿插图，2020. Islamic manuscript, Pergamon Museum, 2020.

The mysterious Encyclopedia of Al-Qazwini, on display in the Pergamon Museum, documents the rich and varied insights of the world collected by the scholar Al-Qazwini between 1260 and 1280.

柏林新博物馆的柱子，2020, pillars of the Neues Museum, Berlin, 2020.

This is a pillar of Neues Museum Berlin, which embodies all the historical details. The whole structure is imbued with details of stories. [The damage is from gunfire during the final days of the second world war in Europe as Russian troops took over the city, descending on Hitler’s bunker.]

Carsten Nicolai 的《Moire Index》， p124，2019

Before the pandemic, when I was in the library of UDK [Universität der Kunst], I came across the book “Moire Index” edited by Carsten Nicolai, who is a musician and visual artist. The book is a visual lexicon of patterns and grid systems. Although such interference patterns are mostly considered to be unwanted side effects, they are actually extremely interesting from an aesthetic perspective. This idea shares the same starting point of my work in recent years.

But we are different. While Carsten Nicolai intends to  program music in order to study visual aesthetics, my approach is quite the opposite: to study visually psychological suggestion through a mathematical model, such as network and code. For example, the feeling music brings about to me is a kind of warm  and sensual experience, while its abstraction can be the object of logic reasoning. My question is, whether this sensual experience can, through mathematical modeling,  be applied to backward simulation and inquisition. And how much of this pure reasoning disciplined by algorithm can dialogue with the crude, obscure, even sordid portions in my paintings.

《DAS ENDE DES 20. JAHRHUNDERTS》，1982-1983，约瑟夫·博伊斯，Marx 收藏与国家美术馆藏品展，2020. “The End of the 20th Century”, 1982-1983, Joseph Beuys, Marx Collection, Nationalgalerie exhibition, 2020.

In February, the serious state of the epidemic made me extremely gloomy. In this mood, I visited the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum, and ran into a very therapeutic exhibition, ‘Time for Fragments Works from the Marx Collection and the Collection of the Nationalgalerie”’, in which the religious redemption of art was enlarged by the disaster. I believe Beuys’s work would not have left me in tears before the pandemic. This exhibition lasted until September, 2020. [Joseph Beuys, 1921-1986; Erich Marx , 1921-2020]

Time Flow

I was stunned by the so many ways timber is processed and classified in Berlin’s market, and the way a product is subdivided. Nearly every piece of wood is finely treated. Here in Berlin the degree of precision in craftsmanship is far different from the rough and thriftless way of working in China.

柏林的木材连锁市场Holz possling里面的切割服务区 2019. Cutting service area in Holz Possling, Berlin’s timber market chain.

Yuan Yuan is, without hesitation, throwing himself into his new career. The real reason he moved away from China was he could not put up with the time view most people have there. But I’ve got lost in the two very different time streams…

柏林的春天, 2020. Spring in Berlin, 2020.

Before the school closed in March, our daughter had already been going to the kindergarten for 6 months. The first book I brought back home from the kindergarten was a book of botanical illustrations. We studied these new vocabularies with a dictionary. During the lockdown, we were delighted to find these “new friends” sprouting in our neighbor’s garden. In my memory in Hangzhou, my botanical knowledge was just limited to Cantonese Michelia alba on the school campus in Spring and lotus in the West Lake in Summer. It was beyond my expectation that the first lesson we had here was about more than a hundred plants and their attributes. In Hangzhou’s Summer, the streets are well decorated with all kinds of flowers, they either pop up  or disappear overnight. They are usually piled up on the landscape zones by sanitation men, but we have no time to figure out their kinds.

In China, people are obsessed with arriving at the future right away. It is just for the sake of this “right away” that all details can be put away, all rules can be altered, principles can be ignored, as long as one can stand side by side with the future in the next second. So as we entered this new time sphere, the changed has left us unprepared, especially with a day of suspension every seven days [Sunday]: we have come back to the present from the future.

2017年4月袁远摄于柏林Mauer 公园. April 2017, Mauerpark in Berlin (photo Yuan Yuan)

In fact, we are enjoying ourselves shuttling back and forth between these two cultural camps, whether or not there has been such a disaster as the ‘oxidizer’. Working together with the ‘oxidizer’, there are endless layers and perspectives of virtual life and political stance, and a sense of dizziness seems to be inevitable. At the moment one stands on the cusp of the surge. The adaptability of humankind may be worth our attention, just like the endless joy one gets from observing the reactions of some individuals in this ever-changing world.

A note on moons

An important festival for Chinese people is thee “mid-autumn festival” or “moon festival” and it is happening this week. “Moon” in China is a meaningful symbol. When people miss their families and their loved ones, or when they wish each other good things, they use the term “Moon”. When people are homesick and are nostalgic, they use this term too. But for us, there are “two moons”—two realities. We are Missing one and watching another one at the same time, even if they are reflecting the same heat from the sun.

Eller projects himself into the frame in a visually and aurally layered palimpsest. The artist re-duplicates himself, again and again, with each of his copies reciting the complete genetic code of one of the first strains of the SARS-CoV2 virus identified in Wuhan, where the COVID-19 outbreak began. But the copies are not perfect. The duplicates vary. Eller makes mistakes in the code, scrambling the RNA sequence here, dropping a nucleotide there….

For Video: https://vimeo.com/411067412
Website: https://www.momentumworldwide.org/collection/thomas-eller/

More copies of genetic code, more small mistakes here and there – Thomas Eller has translated into visual language an approximation of how the virus replicates itself, spreading its genetic information through multiplication, and through mistakes from copy to copy, mutating to create new strains. Ceaselessly copying itself, undergoing mutations along the way, the virus has generated more than two hundred different strains, so far, from this original genetic sequence. Scientists have not yet made sense of the variations between the strains. They are as random as the mistakes the artist invariably makes while reeling off dense lines of genetic code.

Amongst the duplicates on the screen, a digitally altered copy of the artist enters the frame; an Eller in pixels, with a computer’s robotic voice reciting the sequence of nucleotides. Technology is racing to overtake the virus, but when will it catch up? We are still waiting, and hoping, for a viable vaccine, for a treatment, for a cure. Until then, we hide from the virus, and from each other. We distance, socially, and wait for a scientific breakthrough, hoping that science will win this race against nature. We should be so lucky if the virus simply stops, as Eller does, and goes away.

[Rachel Rits-Volloch]

Continuing our series on going for a walk, this week we visit La Palma, home of two collectors who have lived in America, Germany and Spain but now live on the Canary Islands off the north west coast of Africa. La Palma was a regular holiday destination for numerous members of the German Neo Expressionists, such as the Oehlen brothers, Meuser, Rückriem and Kippenberger. This was how one of the collectors came to know the islands, discovering his love for art on the island partly through meeting the artists here.

The garden of their house, which overlooks the Atlantic Ocean, is home to numerous, often site-specific sculptures and installations.

Outdoors
Selected works from
the r/e collection

Man and nature. Squares and circles. Paths and staircases, sticks and stones. Flowers and trees, birds and bees. Earth, grass, steel, concrete. The sky, and clouds. Sun and rain. Wind! Light and shadow. Nature and man.

A Kassen / Enrique Asensi / José Dávila / Aleksandar Duravcevic / Elmgreen and Dragset / Laura Ford / Gonzalo González / Jeppe Hein / Alicja Kwade / Richard Long / Juan López Salvador / Navid Nuur / Alberto Peral / George Rickey / Bernardi Roig / Ulrich Rückriem / Michael Sailstorfer / Tim Scott / Franz Erhard Walther / Christoph Weber

Bernard Roig

Elmgreen & Dragset

Richard Long

Alberto Peral

Laura Ford

A Kassen

Michael Sailstorfer

David Nuur

Juan López Salvador

Enrique Asensi

Aleksandar Duravcevic

Gonzalo González

Alicja Kwade

Jeppe Hein

Enrique Asensi

George Rickey

Ulrich Rückriem

Tim Scott

Ulrich Rückriem

José Dávila

Christoph Weber

Franz Erhard Walther

Bernard Roig

Venue｜TKG⁺ B1, No. 15, Ln. 548, Ruiguang Rd., Neihu Dist., Taipei, Taiwan 114

Reception｜2018/10/27 (六) 4:30 p.m.

Over the years, TKG+ has been undertaking the mission to promote influential Asian artists with great potential to the public. Having been working with many well-known artists worldwide, this time, TKG+ collaborates with Thai artist Mit Jai Inn, who overwhelmingly drew international attention in Biennale of Sydney, with his first ever large-scale solo exhibition in Taiwan, “Light, Dark, Other.”

Mit Jai Inn’s world-famous abstract spatial art pieces come in rough and organic oil pigment clumps condensed upon the huge untrimmed linen canvas, which usually give off a sense of wildness and freshness as well as the vibrant and saturated shades characteristic of the tropical rainforests to the audience. His art work display can be diverse: sometimes the pieces are hung from the wall in the exhibition space, suspended in midair, swaying to and fro with the turbulence of air flow following the audience’s traversing in between the scrolls; sometimes his pieces are spread flat on the cement ground of the exhibition hall, allowing the audience to walk on his work and appreciate its contour from underneath their shoes. Through his unconventional application of painting media, Mit Jai Inn creates a different visual approach to art, in which the cultural concept of color is involved, and leaves his audience to ponder and reflect upon the politics of space with respect to aesthetic, social and political histories.

A sense of space is an indispensable trademark in Mit Jai Inn’s creation, and this iconic feature can be traced back to his life as a student in Vienna when he worked as a creation assistant for famous artist Franz West. Awarded a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of Venice Biennale, Franz West is known for his art work series in various forms from sculptures, abstract painting to design. His works are always highly interactive and defy the conventional art forms. Heavily influenced and enlightened by West’s discourse philosophy and artistic approach, Mit Jai Inn started to delve into the possibility of art intervention into the society and environment. This manifestation takes toner, pigment and canvas as the fundamental element of painting, and weaves cultural codes into the metaphor for sociopolitical context through the combination of color blending as well as media texture, so as to illustrate the viewing aspect in the space of abstract paintings and further build up an immersive field for painting viewing.

Returning from Europe, Mit Jai Inn further transformes art intervention into a political social creation and becomes a pioneering figure in the development of contemporary art in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

In 1992, together with other world-renowned artists such as Navin Rawanchaikul, Kosit Juntaratip and Uthit Atimana, Mit Jai Inn took up the leading role and called for scholars and social activists of all fields to form an artistic group, Chiang Mai Social Installation (CMSI), which marked as a revolutionary event in the history of contemporary art development in Thailand. The members of CMSI devote themselves to the daily scenes of all walks of life and manage to transform, challenge and rebuild the politics of space in different fields through art vocabulary of all forms. At the same time, they actively perform diverse action art, showing up randomly in various daily scenes in the urban space to make themselves heard, grow their community and exert their social influence as well.

Mit Jai Inn takes this belief into his creation in the form of rigorous and repetitive laboring process: when he is painting, he repetitively mingles, covers and applies oil pigment to the canvas and pushes this process to the extreme, with the intention to represent what is on his mind and in his sight along with his physical movement in time and space during his creation. The temporal and spatial gaps between the creation process and the viewing process can be linked and bridged together, providing a unique yet exquisite viewpoint to interpret art.

In his solo exhibition, Light, Dark, Other, Mit Jai Inn composes a rhythmic melody for spatial reading with light and dark zones in the exhibition space, providing the viewers with a different viewpoint to interpret colors under the transition in lighting. The thick and plump oil pigments on the canvas illustrate the exquisite and long-standing references to color in the rich tradition of Thailand, reflecting the nation’s ever-changing cultural political outcomes through various patches and juxtaposition of different hues. He adopts the aesthetic vocabulary in western abstract art to translate his painting installation into a spatial medium, materializing light, color and space, the three strands of intangible sources of energy in the exhibition hall to compare and contrast the discrepancies between Eastern and Western cultures in color reading, which in turn activates the politics of color beneath the cultural identity. This chromatic space from Chiang Mai seems to encompass the vibration and spectrum of the sun, and recounts the traditional Thai aesthetic awareness together with the mutual cultural history of East Asia through intensely hued, well-arranged colors. In the space constructed through the perception of colors, the ambiguous temporal concept along with the reference to cultural variation seems to communicate in an approachable language specific to Thai context, converting the “viewing” experience in art into an engaging one, inviting the viewers to join this silent dialogue of light, color and space, encouraging them to further explore the “otherness” in aesthetic awareness and cultural perception through their physical engagement in art.

Game Synopsis

Direct contact battles between two contestants occur in triangular spaces. Physical triangulations reflect the opponent’s respective states of ‘desire’, ‘reality’ and ‘expectation’ within the binary law of domination and subjugation that maintains them, reflecting a global system of desire and fate continuously moving and consuming each-other.

As a primal tension structure, a triangulation indicates our existence as products of desire (mother-father-child), as natural bodies integrated in a social space of com-promise (political fate), to consume and satisfy production (economic fate), to deal with a contentious existence in an occupied space, subject to personal and external beliefs.

The competition strive for difference where difference is not allowed to occur. Competitors wear neutral white outfits and abstract “landscape” masks. Referencing classical Greek tragedy, the masks eliminate identity and transform the contenders into anonymous territories, each competing to conquer the opponent. The structure conforms to a territorial battleground where the actions, through infinite repetition, direct towards a sterilization of the external image, where cultural judgment is deprived of its absolute force.

Video from the performance that took place in Tokyo (26052018).  Recorded in 4k.  Duration 00:17:50:00 (rough cut).

1st Match: HEAD-SHAVING-BATTLE [ June 2018 - Tokyo]

What is desired is manifest: a struggle for difference or a violent acceptance of equality

Scenario

Armed with electric hair clippers, two contenders battled against each other. To neutralize individual status, contenders wore white overalls and a white abstract mask. Competitors battled to overpower each other, attacking and shaving the head of the other, able only to shave a small amount of hair before their roles were overturned, dominance and subjugation. Eventually, neither contender had any hair left to cut. Bald, they returned to their resting positions.

Outcome

Hair eliminated and not allowed to grow back. The body is controlled by force, restricting its capacity for difference. Denied its production, hair is hindered from protection or image production (individuality). Through cycles of domination and sub-mission, the action is inconclusive: no one wins, and individual signs are neutralized. Bodies are rendered non-productive, left in a perennial symbiotic tension.

2nd Match: Berlin. Register now!

With product demonstrations and new beauty techniques, participants will be introduced to the revolutionary future of beauty.

‘Spa & Beauty Berlin’ Demonstrations will take place on June 28, July 5, 12 and 19 at 7:30 pm. Please register under info@klemms-berlin.com

Geumhyung Jeong ‘Spa & Beauty Berlin’
KLEMM’S (Prinzessinnenstrasße 29, 10969 Berlin) 22 June – 4 August, 2018
klemms-berlin.com

Geumhyung Jeong’s Spa & Beauty Berlin
Trained in the multiple disciplines of acting and choreography, puppetry and animation, Korean artist Geumhyung Jeong has created strikingly unique performances over the last decade that transform and challenge the distinctions between body and object.

Her work ’7ways’ (2009) for example, was shown most recently at TateLive at Tate Modern in 2017. During this 75-minute durational performance, Jeong took the audience through a series of mesmerising duets with various objects. Through her performance, Jeong turns these objects into ‘collaborators’ – she does not only use the object as props, she enlivens them, gives them agency to control her; she is both subject and object in the work.

With physical dexterity and control, she becomes both the puppeteer and the puppet as the characters she has created are first invited into an intimate, often erotically charged interaction with her, only to find that they come to life, take control. The artists and her ‘collaborators’ slip between human and machine, animate and inanimate, passive and active, each to constantly shifting back and forth with a disconcerting fluidity.

Expanding from her previous focus on performing on stage, Jeong’s recent gallery installations have shown her collections of objects in new ways. Her ‘Private Collection: Unperformed Objects’ first show at the Ateliers Hermes in Seoul and more recently at Delfina Foundation in London includes a broader selection of items than those used in the performances. Jeong describes shopping as an important part of her practice – each object is carefully chosen and has both a specific potentiality and personality and the installation format allows us to see that Jeong has built up a vast collection of objects ranging from the domestic and everyday such remote controls for televisions, ladders and vacuum cleaners; to the scientific such as mannequins, prosthetics, plastic eyeballs and models of brains; the erotic: sex toys, inflatable sex dolls; the medical; zimmer frames, underwear, socks, tweezers, pumps…

The artist is a collector. As with many collectors, the impulse is taxonomical – traceable and deliberate. Here the logic is certainly one of bodily exploration, and perhaps even fetishistic; these objects care for, are applied to, beautify, do the job of and for, they interact, pleasure, extend and replace the human.

Displayed clinically, on white pedestals and under strip lighting, Jeong’s installations take on a forensic and meticulous air; ‘unperformed’ the objects are imbued with functions both intrinsic and beyond, their intended use, their possible ‘mis-use’ and their symbolic meanings which shift and slide.

This malleability of use and meaning is highlighted in the installation by accompanying videos. In particular, Jeong plays with a movement from the medical to the erotic – we see objects seemingly invented for very specific physical or therapeutic purpose being used by Jeong in ways that emphases an erotic and personal relationship between the human and object. Jeong falls in love with a human-shaped boxing bag, rolling around the floor with ‘him’; locked in a physical tussle both sexual and violent. Elsewhere, she turns an instructional video for harnesses to re-learn how to walk into something else – innuendo-filled and humorous – and in doing so confronts us with both the gendered ploys of marketing and our own anxious preconceptions of an increasing reliance on machines.

In her most recent installation ‘Spa & Beauty,’ Jeong focuses in on the ubiquitous industry of beauty and body care products – brushes and sponges, lotions and potions – anything offering a more beautiful and healthier body – and explores them as objects in relation to their users. Here, the artist juxtaposes the objects themselves with videos featuring their use and advertisements alongside hand-cut and pasted images, videos showing their creation and her own newly made hybrids created from existing products. In each of these manoeuvres, we see the knife edge of the erotic and violent, the humorous and uncanny, the point where the performer becomes performed that we all must negotiate. In the age of the digital and virtual, Jeong’s use of the synthetic, the plastic and mechanical directly intervening in her own body, of materials colliding, speaks of a complex set of interrelations manifestly situated in reality, in the physical.

Together these interactions and images of use, fantasy and promise, form a series of narratives that orientate the viewer around perspectives not only of the personal, but a fundamentally changing societal relationship between viewer and viewed, agent and consumer, human and object.

– Rose Lejeune, 2018

Geumhyung Jeong (*1980 in Seoul) studied drama at Hoseo University as well as dance and performance at the Korean National University of Arts and the Korean Academy of Film Arts. Her performances and works were in Tate Modern, London; in the Atelier Hermès, Seoul; in the Delfina Foundation, London; at the New Museum Triennial, New York; at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel, Zurich; at the Malta Festival, Posnan; in the Württembergische Kunstverein, Stuttgart; in the PACT Zollverein, Essen; at the Name June Paik Art Center, Yongin and the SPIEL ART Festival, Munich.

‘Spa & Beauty’ was commissioned for The South Tank, Tate Modern in London, as part of ‘Tate Live: Geumhyung Jeong’ (October 2-8, 2017) and reconstituted at SongEun Art Space in Seoul as solo exhibition ‘Spa & Beauty Seoul’ (March 9-May 26, 2018).

Somehow eliciting dark humour and empathy against what I imagine to be a surreal ritual from a JG Ballard novel or a Kubrickian film scene where the elite enjoy an evening with gold umbilical cords attached to Tate Modern baptised with delicious champagne while a gigantic tortured puppet dances in chains, perpetually a falling angel and cursed Phoenix. Under the stress of an endless performance it climatically snapped! Uncertain at first whether this was part of the work and almost wishing it was a choreographed cathartic relief it really was broken in half, a profound sign to retire as the Tate security ushered me away from the carnage….and Pinocchio.

Jordon Wolfson (b.1980) lives and works in Los Angeles and New York. ”Colored Sculpture” is showing at Tate Modern, London until August 26, 2018

https://www.tate.org.uk/visit/tate-modern/display/tanks/jordan-wolfson

Gordon Cheung is an artist based in London. He is currently showing in ’Doubting Thomas’ at Duddell’s London, Curated by Ying Kwok, until 24 Sept 2018. Gordon will have a solo show at Galerie Huit, Hong Kong in November.