Ajeongkoo
26 August – 22 October 2017
Art Sonje Center
87 Yulgok-ro 3-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul
03062 Korea
Art Sonje Center presents Koo Jeong A’s solo exhibition entitled ajeongkoo from 26 August to 22 October, 2017.Koo Jeong A captures everyday sceneries, or uses commonplace objects in her work since the 1990s. However one can see that there are precise and intricate structures and elements in her seemingly ordinary photographs and installations. Koo allows things that may easily break or disappear exist as they are, to emphasize their poetic mundaneness. One may find more new aspects the closer one looks and can see that the internal elements are coexistent in an equal relationship, in correlation. Koo’s work reflects her contemplation on the human being’s perceptiveness. She intervenes in the form and context of a locale to install her work—from objets, photographs, and video, to sound, movement, and scent, which prompt the audience to contemplate the relationship between truth and fiction, the scope of man’s imagination, and the reality thereof. Ultimately, Koo urges the viewers to ponder upon how a human body perceives, in different ways. Her work and exhibition is therefore, an invitation to a perceptive exploration of the perilous universe by honing into objects and phenomenon.
The artist provides a key as part of the exploration: “Ousss”. It is a changeling that can be a word, prefix, a person and place which appears in Koo’s work since 1998. It can be a made up paradise, or fantasy world conjured up by the artist, a valid language, and country within the scope of her work, and at times reflects the real world in a way that appears virtual. Countless installations, and drawings are based off of “Ousss” however there are no clear representative images or texts of it.
The unknown locality of “Ousss” within the exhibition is connected to a virtual world that is as distant as can be from anywhere called ajeongkoo, which coincidentally is the name of the artist and the title of this exhibition. Also, “Ousss” is linked to the new 3D animations screened on the second floor titled MYSTERIOUSSS (2017) and CURIOUSSSA (2017). These two works of poems, or sound compositions are descriptions of the two natures of “Ousss”—mysteriousness, and curiousness. These two animations are also tied with a place called “Cohee du Lamentin”, a place which Koo and writer Edouard Glissant who co-published a book called Flammariousss shared common ideas on.
On the third floor, an installation piece which consists of a pink floor that saturates the space with a fluorescent pink hue titled Dr. Vogt (2010) is on display. 60 drawings are hung along the wall depicting people’s specific actions, and some depict isolated islands, rocks, and empty archipelagos, evoking peaceful, melancholy, delight, grave, meditative, and personal sentiments. The drawings, done on photographic paper with a blue pen, are diffracted by the combination of the pink floor and lighting which creates an unfamiliar visual perceptual experience brought about without any special equipment but with simple light, color and paper.
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