Sadang B

The Korea Artist Prize is an award system and one of SBS Foundation’s integral social contribution projects established to promote the arts field in partnership with MMCA, Korea. The Korea Artist Prize selects a maximum of four artists (or teams of artists) as ‘SBS Foundation sponsored Artists’ with latent potential and then selects an overall winner. Four artists were selected for Korea Artist Prize 2019 - Ayoung Kim, Hyesoo Park, Jewyo Rhii, and Young In Hong.

Young In Hong's exhibition Sadang B included three new works from 2019 - To Paint the Portrait of a Bird (an installation), The White Mask, (a music performance) and Un-Splitting, (a performance).

To Paint the Portrait of a Bird
(a steel/wood cage with embroidered carpet, handmade lighting, wall art and sound projected through 10 speakers)

This installation invites the audience to enter the ‘inside’ of a cage where artworks are displayed, while the ‘outside’ of the cage is not accessible to the audience, it is only possible to look at this surrounding space through the mesh walls. This binary structuring of the space throws open the hierarchical positioning of humans and birds. The inside of the cage is reminiscent of a ceremonial space where eastern and western motifs and symbols meet (such as the Confucian ceremonial space, Confucian painting, coats of arms, Japanese colonial buildings, the House of Parliament in London, textile hand craft skills and the mimicking of art nouveau style, all used in a hybrid manner). Images found on the carpet design shows an imagined critical perspective of the birds towards the humans, created based on the poem, ‘To Paint the Portrait of a Bird’ by Jacques Prévert. The wall piece is indirectly reflecting the Confucian sadang in Kam Mo Yo Je Do (감모여재도), but here the middle of the sadang that is supposed to be empty is full of bird images. Outside the cage is a non-symbolic space, viewed as a natural space for domesticated birds. Recorded sound tracks of birds are played throughout the installation space projecting in and out of the cage.

The White Mask
(three 65-inch monitors and two speakers)

This music performance is a collaboration between the artist and Club Inégales, London, who discussed and tested a series of intense questions about ‘becoming animal’ through music making. The process naturally evolved to become seven pieces (Tarantula Territory, Wolf and Buffalo - Being Together, A Hare Being Threatened by a Hawk, The Order of Woodpeckers, Flocking, Collective Swim, Praying Mantis) for a music ensemble. While testing ‘becoming animal’, the musicians considered themselves as embodying different animals, through sound. As it isn’t fully possible to transform into an animal, the musicians got to look for an in-between space of being neither entirely human nor fully animal.

Un-Splitting
(performance for 15 participants invited through open call with no restriction of gender, age and art experience, performeded unannounced at various times throughout the event)

This performance is a collaboration with Stephanie Scheubeck. It addresses splitting as a case of exclusivity and extreme objectification towards ‘otherness’ as being rooted in symptoms of illness in society. It sees history as a subconsciously formed collective memory; a ‘virtual’ state that can be changed or re-interpreted. This performance focused on the female body-pose found in photo archives that reflect the inferiority of women’s labour in domestic space as well as in factories and the socially formed conception of young women as being non-political subjects. Participants in the performance posed as subjects from the past found in selected archival photographs of South Korean women. Different female body poses were then combined with patterns from the irregular movement of birds, to develop a unique choreography.

• http://koreaartistprize.org/en/project/2...
• https://www.mmca.go.kr/exhibitions/exhib...
• https://www.e-flux.com/announcements/294...
• http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=2...
• https://vimeo.com/325606047