In the past, art was occasionally likened to alchemy due to its magical imaginative powers. This had to do with the way it applies creative thinking beyond ordinary logic to achieve a deeper understanding that transcends the phenomenal level. Another similarity is the fact that both fields go beyond the merely material level to approach the spiritual, as well as the way that both of them demand insight in a profound sense. The symbols used in alchemy allowed practitioners to approach a spiritual realm transcending that of physical transformation. Art has a similar aim, in that it employs symbolic language to convey meaning and emotion, going beyond surface-level forms to induce deeper thinking or experiences. The two fields interact in terms of their imaginative powers and their common goal of spiritual exploration. This similarity in characteristics is fascinating and romantic, novel and illogical. If it comes across as somewhat naïve to hear artists’ magical properties being viewed in the same terms as alchemy, this suggests there is a need to place them on terra firma by relating them to actual lives.

Rather than alchemy, this exhibition attempts to situate art beside a kind of chemical catalysis phenomenon. This involves looking at the essential connecting structures between materials and form while examining the unexpected things that exist or intrude therein. These include things such as the narrative or temporal qualities inherent to sculpture as a suspended medium, the physicality inscribed in sculpture, and even the secondary movement beyond the sculptural form that is achieved through interaction with space. We may also include the complex interactions that occur among the artists, the artworks, and the viewers. Artists take ideas, feelings, experiences, and knowledge and project them onto or mix them into materials—which may be described as various “elements” that are enlisted to approach the work’s form. In that sense, the artwork may be seen as something like a chemical compound consisting of different components. Through color, substance, and other aspects, materials determine forms and textures, all of which shape the ultimate “molecule” of the work. Even more fascinating here is the way the work ushers us someplace beyond the represented image. In their interaction with it, the viewer experiences a chemical change, as moments of affect (emotional response) are triggered to create a compound of ideas. This catalysis is possible within a network of mutually exchanged influences. In this way, it possesses the variable properties of a (cultural) compound that gradually increases or decreases. Within this context, the exhibition does not posit art as something reliant on magical imagination, understanding it instead as the inevitable result of an artist’s attitude and perspective when contemplating the contemporary era between concept and form.

As an artist, Yongju Kwon has used combinations of assembled objects in individual units to explore the aesthetic aura associated with the “group.” He is proactive with his use of pigments in his sculptures. In his Casting series (2018–), he has used casting methods to decolorize assembled objects, employing more powerful uniting structures to maximize the sense of movement in the overall form. While his previous work focused on the aura possessed by the sculpture’s innate formative qualities as it minimized/decolorized the surface-level clues, his new work draws the gaze back to the surface to explore the hints of balance between the internal and external collisions and harmonies. Unlike dyes, pigments have the properties of undissolving crystals, so that they retain qualities of the original material. This signifies the (im)possibility of harmony with other materials (such as plaster) that mix with pigments; at times, colors emerge as an unexpected result of chemical reactions with other colors. When defined in terms of color as a linguistic unit, the surface should be viewed as a reaction between the intentional and the random. As innumerable layers build, the surface transforms to reach a final result, which is merely evidence of some unseen causality. Pigments also offer another fascinating clue in terms of a formal understanding of sculpture. The clarity possessed by color exhibits dramatic differences of light and darkness under the lights as it flows over the aesthetic structure, drawing the gaze inside to the previously unnoticed crumpled form in the sculpture’s interior. The result is that the shape transforms to give off a more organic impression, presenting the viewer with grotesque scenes. From another perspective, the traces of applied pigments form layers of what resemble stalactites through their repeated flowing and hardening, evoking the conditions of sculpture within reality rather than the imaginary realm. The application of layers—which has to be undertaken at a suitable viscosity—reflects the artist’s movements in the surface much like a painter’s strokes, and we can also see the transformation of physicality into temporality within the small sedimentary strata formed on the scaffold. We may also consider the industrial applications of pigments, expanding the narrative into one bearing associations with imperial history and laborer lives. Rather than relying on the meaning of particular colors, Yongju Kwon focuses on the properties of the pigments themselves. As the title of his recent solo exhibition Portal (2022, Amado Art Space) shows, his sculptures engage internal logic with external narrative, opening up different meanings as they operate as pathways mediating between the virtual and material and between real and fictional situations.

Images today appear sleekly tailored with high resolutions, recorded in clear ways that leave no room for anything to intrude beyond fixed phenomena and facts. Narratives outside the frame are cleanly excised, leaving only decontextualized information values. But in the work of Isaac Moon, the incompleteness of the record is what enables narrative, and the unfixed nature is what allows us to imagine what exists beyond defined form. Moon focuses on rivers—the Han River in particular—as settings that are constantly flowing and impossible to grasp. He varies his perspective, even while allowing for some optical error, in order to represent changing objects and places that take on vitality through the passage of time. To begin with, he might create a stand-in for the Han River as a location by producing boards with the sediment (soil) encountered in the places he visits, before coating them with a gaze made with floating matter such as wood or glass (Yunseul, 2023). As surfaces of different heights rest against each other, they permit different perspectives in a way that causes them to converge and bounce off repeatedly, while the sense of focus is disrupted further by the traces of burning and glaze on the surface that reflect or absorb light. The impression of the Han River is thus fragmented, deconstructed, and reassembled through surfaces with multiple perspectives, establishing their coordinates as they are placed at varying physical distances in the exhibition space. This induces movement on the viewer’s part, reconfiguring the time and space experienced by the artist into a present-moment narrative as three-dimensional layers and depths are created in each two-dimensional surface. In this, it resembles outdoor sketching, where the logic behind the shapes and canvas composition is both a representation of an object and a comment on the painter’s presence. At the same time, the artist also observes floating objects that are half-submerged in the river. He makes 3D scans from them—but because he cannot fully capture the surface information of objects that move about subtly with the flows of the water, or the surfaces that show above the water and the parts that are concealed, the outputs still necessarily bear traces of optical error on their exterior. In that sense, a work like Anchor–Buoy (2023) is less a sculpture than a photographic record as optical evidence. But because it recalls the fluid nature of water beyond the aesthetic surface of the object, it employs the language of photography, in the sense that it reveals a “way of being” rather than the external truth of the object. As this shows, Isaac Moon’s work is like a continuum of scenes acquired through a process of receiving, consuming, editing, and recreating images based on experience. The sense of place that the artist encounters is achieved through the layering of cinematic sequences, as he captures expressions from different angles and perspectives, compresses them into a single shape, and expands that shape in turn into space. He also inspires an awareness of the object’s nature by incorporating aspects that are not detected by the gaze into the realm of representation. Ultimately, Moon detects the possibility of creation and transformation in the space between the universal image of the Han River and the ways in which it is detected at a given place and moment, presenting a landscape that is motionless yet drives movement.

Between materials and shapes, different speculative conditions coexist with physical evidence. In art that is comparable to chemical reactions - formula, discoveries often lead to outcomes that exceed our predictions, and the relationship between the visible and invisible that surrounds the surface brings forth the multiple layers of potential that are present within the object as image. Rather than conveying objective truths, this approach explores the chain of connected meanings that arise near materials and shapes; at times, they represent something of a leap, proposing connections from a distance. By permitting imaginative recombinations and free connections with the fictional and virtual, it establishes a narrative relating to the artist’s presence and life. The two artists in this exhibition, Isaac Moon and Yongju Kwon, combine their attitude toward living with the collection of materials and application of their own aesthetic logic, introducing meaning through forms while ensuring that the horizons of contemplation are not constrained. The horizons of meaning that is distorted and newly opened on the path from material to shape lead us to perceive both fragments and totalities, operating across the realms of the conscious/unconscious, objective/subjective, necessary/random, and transparent/opaque as they realize desires for creation that had theretofore only existed as possibilities. Like chemical reactions, they progress through a process of responding, colliding, combining, and emerging.

Credit

Participating artists : KWON Yongju, MOON Isaac
Curated by KIM Sung woo
Text by KIM Sung woo
Design by GANG Moonsick
Installation technician : Mujindongsa
Photo by CJY ART STUDIO (CHO Junyong)