김영섭 작가의 작품은 보통 미술관에서만 볼 수 있었지만 갤러리JJ에서 처음으로 '상업공간'으로만 인식되어 왔던 갤러리에서 개인전을 열어 누구에게나 부담없이 들러서 볼 수 있다. 갤러리는 작가의 홍보, 마케팅, 판매, 평론, 글 작성, 아티스트토크 및 이벤트들, 다방면에서 미술문화의 저변을 넓히는 곳이다. 너무나 많은 곳이 상업적으로만 접근을 하였기에 대중에게 다소 인식이 안 좋았을 수도 있겠다는 생각은 들지만 좋은 글을 끊임없이 내놓는 강주연 대표님이 이끄는 갤러리JJ는 평가들, 평론가들 사이에서도 인정을 받고 있다. 오프닝 날의 뒷풀이에서 김영섭 작가의 지인들, 평론가들, 작가들의 대화에서도 그것을 느낄 수 있었다. (갤러리 오프닝 사진은 필자의 블로그 '갤러리'섹션에서 볼 수 있다.)
“Nothing looks the way it sounds. And nothing sounds the way it looks.”
Christina Kubisch
Auditory sources such as the sounds of rain, wind, bonfire, whisper, or caress can cause a response similar to synesthesia. Those everyday environmental sounds trigger our sensory experiences. Countless aural stimuli around us have no shapes but suddenly take us to an estranged domain as in ASMR that has gained much interest and popularity recently.
GalleryJJ is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Youngsup Kim, well-known for his installation that visualizes sound. This exhibition, Cable Ceramics and Sounds II, is a new venture for us in terms of it being the first sound installation at GalleryJJ, and considering Kim is a so-called museum-level artist who has only exhibited in museums thus far. Cable Ceramics and Sound series were introduced in 2006 in Germany, Paris, Vienna, Luxembourg, and Toronto, and in 2007 in Seoul. Compared to his previous work, this exhibition has more layers of sounds recorded by the latest equipment, and visually, the artificial smoothness evoked by objets’ rich colors and various shapes attracts our attention.
Kim pays attention to our aural surroundings we can barely notice. He studied audiovisual art in Germany under the supervision of first-generation sound artist Christina Kubisch where he continued to show interest in the comprehensive interrelationship of time, space, and materials through image, music, and noise. By collecting, arranging, and visualizing the sounds of daily life, his work is read conceptually in various ways in a socio-cultural context with conflicting reciprocity among images, sounds, and materials.
Looking at his past works, for instance, the noises that dominate cities in re-play (2013) construct an autocratic narrative, and the voice recording in Inter-view: Binding Dreams (2009) reveals the uniformity caused by social institutions and customs. New Memories of the Garden (2008) visualizes the sounds that govern daily life without perceivable forms; gulp! gulp! gulp! (2008) combines the desire of people today with the clicks of a mouse; Forest (2007) presents the babbling from ads and information. We can now picture the underlying thoughts in his work. They refer to how the excess noises subconsciously latent in modern urban society dictate the space and metaphorically denote the current ecology of our lives stereotyped within socio-cultural norms. His work delves into our cognitive system towards a conceptual realization with an expanded sense from the synergy between sight and hearing.
“My work questions how customs, institutions, and information unconsciously accepted in everyday life affect our perceptions and emotions. Those rules in modern society provide us comfort and familiarity, but on the flip side, some kind of arbitrary or other compulsions lurk. Especially, even the various sounds now that pass by or whose identity is unknown have a close relationship with them.”
- Artist’s Note
Kim balances sound art and visual art domains by a format that runs parallel with sound and installation, taxonomically speaking. Music and noise have already become a medium of art starting at the beginning of the last century, led by the Futurist Manifesto and Duchamp's conceptual sound work. Since then, it leaps forward with the rise of conceptualism, and in particular, sound visualization has been developed much in the field of media art. Sensibility in art is of theoretical senses, visual and aural, according to Hegel, and their combination is anticipated under this idealistic thinking where only the two can attain meanings. The rendezvous of art and technology is crucial in media art. However, it seems that Kim’s audiovisual work is more focused on giving new interpretation and meaning via inconsistency between the sound and visual images rather than technical glitz.
Image-Sound Objet_ at the junction of daily life and art
The noises that consistently resonate around us but not easily perceived are selectively collected and processed for the context in this exhibition to present them as tangible visual objects. Upon entering the space, visitors encounter several pottery-shaped objets where the sound originates. It becomes a minimalist landscape based on repetition and playback.
Cable ceramics are created by rolling up cables as a kind of sound-objet in this audiovisual environment. Several records of elusive noises from household goods are mixed and rearranged in these objets with an elongated beat of Ochaejilgut in Samulnori, a kind of Korean traditional percussion act. This mix is composed of a two-channel surround-sound to echo concurrently in the exhibition space. This exhibition also includes musical scores and drawings created by the artist expressing the image of the sound.
Our current sensibility accustomed to the finicky digital world gets lost in between the smooth eye-catching objets and the unknown analog sound with a consistently dawdling tempo. At the crossroads between seeing and listening, where do our perception, memory, time, and space move toward? We can then ask about the relationship among the image of ceramics, the mixed noises, cable as the material, and the happenings in this environment.
Cables are ordinary expendables used to transmit sound and charge electricity, but once the archetypal form of ceramics is granted, they become art objet. Likewise, the ceramics in this show as a representative image used to be handy domestic goods in the form of earthenware or crocks with twelve different functions such as storage, transportation, heating, and so on. However, the easy-to-use products with current technologies have replaced such functions, and ceramics have become objects of art or subject to stare in art galleries and museums.
The sound also can be discussed in this context. His sound is composed of the subtle noises coming out of those goods we use now in place of the old functions of ceramics, such as refrigerator, rice cooker, radiator, or washer. Ochaejilgut that he takes as the base rhythm, used to be popular music in everyday life, but now it has become stage music. Many things change their meaning according to the times and cultures, and we posit different perspectives. All components of his work - cables, representation of images, and sound – create an association with each other, crossing the boundary between daily life and art, and this unexpected harmony makes a transition and implication to new values.
Material, Manifestation
Cables are an important component in Kim’s work along with speakers and collected sounds. He does not hide cables but actively uses and reveal them physically and conceptually. In this exhibition, they are not only a medium with a practical function of transmitting sound but also a material of form-giving. They transform into articles with a reproducible character, such as bowls, vases, and earthenware that contain sound. These objets we see as ceramic objects are not actual ceramics, but only images that we perceive as ceramics in our notions.
This treachery of the image inevitably directs our attention to the colored cables placed before our eyes. Cables have gained more and more important recently as industry and communication development accelerate. The material of new ceramics as sound objets is not soil, but these cables. The color of the objets is also colorful and smooth, giving them a kitsch sense, and the physical properties of the material itself stand out, emphasizing synthetic resin and artificial plastic.
The transposition between soil and cables may be a sign of the reality that everyday spaces are ubiquitously occupied by objects made of plastic rather than elements of nature. The sound of cable-objet is not nature, but an artificial noise created and nurtured by humans. Consumables that are easily discarded after mass consumption generates tremendous artificial sounds. Once we trace those that he utilizes as sound sources, we encounter the excess materials left by Anthropocene such as plastic, concrete, and aluminum – the hyperobjects. This suggests critical thinking about the artificial remnants penetrating our senses and current problems on the flip side of technological advancement.
Manipulated sound environment
In sound work, the sources are selected and collected like matters in everyday life. With the collected raw sounds, Kim composes a new environment through subtle manipulations in the volume, flow, and pitch. His ability to compose, rearrange, and write music scores using Samulnori tempo comes from his experience in Pungmulnori over the past ten years. The score with his notation system depicts the image of sound as a structural sketch of the auditory dimension. As if it were a conventional composition, all sounds are precisely noted.
Making sheet music with such precision means that he plans and deploys sound thoroughly. Samulnori tempo is converted into a new sound by combining the noises of everyday products. The collected sounds contain the situation at the time of their occurrence, and concurrently, they interact with the form of ceramics within the present context which creates a strange dissonance. Through such an unfamiliar juxtaposition, he directs all devices and environments to intervene with each other, putting the viewers in a kind of absurd theatrical situation. This stage triggers unfamiliar experiences to our familiar senses. Countless noises floating in our everyday space, and the things in our latent cognition that could not attain definitions, come and go between memory and perception.
The exhibition awakens the sound environment in which we are unconsciously exposed and allows us to reflect on certain living conditions already given to us by society. The intricate combination of objects and sounds that fall into uniform and endless self-replication is nothing but a series of symptoms in contemporary society.
-Ju Yeon Kang
Director Gallery JJ
Translated by Brett D.H.Lee
Instagram: @brettdhlee
@galleryjjseoul
Biography
Kim, Youngsup (B.1972)
Meisterschueler-Prof. Christina Kubisch, Saar-University of the Arts, Germany
Diplom(Audio-visual), Saar-University of the Arts, Germany
MFA, Sejong University Painting Department, Seoul, Korea
BFA, Sejong University Painting Department, Seoul, Korea
Solo Exhibition (2004~)
2020 Cable Ceramics & Sounds Ⅱ, Gallery JJ, Seoul
2018 Ruhe Bitte ! – Metastase, CIAN Museum, Yeongcheon
2013 Re-play, Zaha Museum, Seoul
2009 Inter-view Binding Dreams, Gallery Jungmiso, Seoul
2009 Awash_ Let’s Grow Sound, Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwangju
2008 The New Memory of a Garden, Topo House, Seoul
2007 Delicious Meal, KunstDoc Gallery, Seoul
2006 Cable, Pottery and Sound(Koexistenz), HBK Saar, Saarbruecken, Germany
2004 Stopped Sound, Muenchhof, Hochspeyer, Germany
Group Exhibition (2008~)
2020 New Communion, Daegu Art Museum, Daegu
2019 VIBRANCY AND LIFE, Jeju Museum of Art, Jeju
Representation of Space-Time, Wooran Foundation, Seoul
2017 Sound Effects Seoul 2017 The Revolution Will Not Be Television, ARKO Art Center
2016 The Moon, Round Like a Little Plate, Daegu Art Factory, Daegu
2015 ‘Jung Gu Nan Bang’, Zaha Museum, Seoul
2014 Sound Sculpts the Space, Pohang Museum of Steel Art, Pohang
2013 A New Discovery of Modernity, Culture Station Seoul 284, Seoul
2012 12 Events for 12 Rooms, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
Busan Biennale 2012 Special Exhibition, Busan Cultural Center Exhibition Hall, Busan
2011 THE POWER OF ART_PEOPLE, Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Gwangju
2011 Cheongju International Craft Biennale Not the New, Just the Necessary, Cheongju
2010 Alive Gently, POSCO Art Museum, Seoul
Invitation to the Suspicious House, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul
2009 Public Space, Private Space, Gallery Jungmiso, Seoul
Awashawave, Blackwood Gallery, Toronto, Canada
2008 House and Memory, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul
Award and Residence
Daegu Art Factory Residency(2018), Artist-in-Residence, Wien, Austria(2014), MMCA Residency Goyang(2011), Youngeun Artist-in-Residency(2010), SeMA Young Artist(2008) SeMA NANJI Residency(2007)
Collections
Seoul Museum of Modern Art, Pohang Museum of Steel Art, Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art, Zaha Museum
Lecturer at Kyungpook National University College of Music and Visual Arts, Dongguk University Department of Fine Arts
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