15 Jan 2009 — 21 Feb 2009

Random Tasks

Participating artists including Kim young-zeen, Lee Eui-ju, Jackson Hong, Choi Byoung-il, and W & Whale show a distinct difference in their exhibition experience, special area of expertise, and scope for movement. Virtually unlimited freedom allowing them to pursue anything they want is given and they congregate again with works for display. This art show to provide them with an opportunity to unfold their ideas freely will be a fresh, interesting experience for them, moving beyond any external variables such as their own artistic career, demand from art lovers, and market trends.

As is well-known, a gallery is an empty space with no color and smell and remains optimized to intensively appreciate works of art. It is also the space where art history, customs, and institutions are stacked.

In terms of typology, it is akin to a church. This gallery space may be a dwelling place of art, the Absolute, the private property of those admiring art, or an empty cultural site decorated in a distinctive style. It is probably more proper to see the gallery space as a market place in today’s mundane world. This is a place for exchanges without common language and standard and a confusing place where people compete for their best purchase. It is also a worldly place where thief, peddlers, ghosts, swindlers, and even mentors congregate, but is still a space where an ascending movement goes on, transcending worldly daily space-time. In this sense, the gallery space is empty and thus simultaneously encapsulate all as an open space.

Random Tasks is a chronicle of drifting across this weird space. All participating artists interpret space-time in their own way and leave its results. Choi Byoung-il brings about a variation on space as an extension of his existing work transforming a physical space into a medium of his work. Lee Eui-ju embodies his own fantasy for ‘pretty suicide machines’, regarding a gallery space as an extraterritorial zone where no market logic and vocational ethics are applied. Kim Young-zeen who puts a project to teach a computer disco into practice conducts simulation of some part of his work in a real gallery space he rented.

Jackson Hong installs a hanging board to remind designers of their serous vocational consciousness in the same context of his established work which makes viewers feel unfamiliar by overlapping gallery space and showcases. W & Whale presents the process of producing ‘ideal’ music, disregarding the realistic restrictions of work for making popular music.

Taking a step backward to see the works on display, the venue scene looks like a psychograph. At a glance, it seems like a commemorative photograph but its foreground is suddenly replaced with its background in the moment something unbelievable to be there vaguely appear among subjects for photography. That is the gallery space printed and seen from five different visual angles. Of course, viewers may see what they want in the exhibition. We wonder how they respond to this Random Tasks exhibition. 
Byoungil Choi, Sound Train, mixed media, dimensions variable, 2009