2 Sep 2010 — 3 Oct 2010

 KDK(Kim Dokyun)'s page
KDK(Kim Dokyun)
LINE UP

Gallery 2 is pleased to present KDK’s solo exhibition, Line Up. KDK has processed the architectural space that he experienced in person, from its outer atmosphere to its skin and inner void, to conjure up a strange scene looking like a sci-fi film. This exhibition features about 20 new works of KDK.

His new works are a series of spatial compositions of cargo containers. The landscape of harbor, the geometric beauty of the huge mass of containers arranged in an unknown order, attracted him to work with them. The container terminal at harbor is in fact highly systematized and operated by a definite program. The movement of containers, which one is coming to which pier and then transferred to which ship, is totally automatic according to the data fed to the main controller. The gigantic cranes silently take up a container here and down there. In front of the scene, he experienced a virtual space where only containers and machines existed and they redefined the given space in a whole new way.

While KDK’s previous works are created in a static way to present the scene in which the artist experience the real space without further manipulation, these new works are more dynamic. He combines the physical action, through which the artist selects and processes the subject, with the contingency, which appears when the repetitive copy-and-paste process of the container-images suddenly stops in the computer program. Here the containers are used as a unit for spatial reconstruction; these cubic units are endlessly repeated and rearranged to vitalize themselves.

< lu.ssd > is somehow similar to the previous works in that what is at stake is to discover and select a scene in the given form. Although it is merely a heap of same boxes, they look lonesome or remind of a dense urban-scape according to views, color combinations, quantities, and stacking methods. Sometimes the scene even looks like a miniaturized land built with Lego blocks.

Actually KDK already attempts to use the given space in an arbitrary way in < lu.ssd > and this tendency is more apparent in < lu.bl-01 >. Taking the idea from a game titled Line Up on the iPhone, he composes the container-units on the black background as he pleases. Whenever he stops clicking on the screen, the units stop moving and show a new space. Some are almost empty and others are suffocatingly dense. The audience can have different image from the scenes, whether they are reminded of the skyscrapers, the concrete buildings of collective residence, or the game-over scene with full of blocks on the screen. Likewise, < lu.ssdall-01 > looks like a combination of color bands but is actually a cross section of units endlessly repeated and accumulated. These works are finished only when the mysterious ‘that’s-it’ moment comes.

Unlike the previous works from the SF series processing the real architecture into a virtual space and the New SF series flattening the subject in the extreme black-and-white contrast to the W series experimenting spatial inflation and deflation through points, lines, and planes of ordinary architectural space these new works in the Line Up series take a step further and more aggressively reconstruct a space. Here the role of the artist is not only to capture and process the subject but also to reduce the subject to a unit and construct a new space with them. KDK shows a kaleidoscopic scene that numerous boxes differently ‘line up’ in white-cube. 
Installation view