Exhibition Information

			Audio Visual Pavilion is hosting SMSM10 from October 10 to 30, 2019. SMSM is a project collective of artists Sasa[44] and MeeNa Park, and designers Choi Sulki and Choi Sung Min. They have produced various forms of collaborative work since its start in 2009. SMSM10 is a semi-retrospective commemorating their tenth anniversary. If the heterogeneous structures in reality and human errors are their raw materials, the four artists’ unique approach and accumulated execution skills are the manifesto and guidelines that inform their work. It’s interesting to watch the production of multi-directional, multidisciplinary, and multimedia “diagrammatic complex” of the real-life materials/conditions and SMSM’s process. They describe their work as “the notion of health and happiness for the subject matter; deliberate emphasis on the aspects of ‘applied art’ or practicalities for the nature of work.”
 
SMSM10 is a pseudo-retrospective. It represents their decade work only partially. There is no sense of chronology, and there are also individual artists’ work snuck in between the collective’s. Some works return in various forms to their original places in the Audio Visual Pavilion: “What Is This,” a motto that Sasa[44] presented to the opening Pavilion (a#26-81-v1, 2013); the contour lines of the Inwangsan Mountain that Sulki and Min drew for the same inaugural exhibition (Decorative Information, 2013); the AVP Laundry (2017) measured by Choi Sulki in her own voice; and Yellow Green Scream (2016) that MeeNa Park hung in the same space. There is a recording of MeeNa Park and Sasa[44] talking about exhibition materials and archives, which was originally presented in the exhibition Floor Plan Cabinet (2017).
 
Aside from the ten years of SMSM, the exhibition refers to other periods and durations that were invoked for other beginnings and commemorations. SMSM10 reflects on the notion of time with the big and small mottos of the era, from those of the Republic of Korea, Seoul, Gwangju, and the National Museum, to the break time to be protected for the health of a designer. The images of the white rice puff as the moon shown in the 30th anniversary exhibition of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Two Moons and Another Moon / Another Moon Is a TV, 2016) look beyond the numerically designated system, in that they refer to the moment of moon rising and the frequency of the television. “There seem to be more apparently shamanistic dimensions or sensibility to our work as SMSM,” they say, and their brutal attempt to collect the ready-made, bottled energy (Energy!, 2011) is bizarre as it shows problem-solving techniques and the absurdness of the problem itself at the same time. To borrow their way of phrasing, the problem is the problem.
 
SMSM have investigated the visual apparatuses, messages, forms, and structures from the reality of Korea, which displays a different input value each time. At the same time, something comes to the mind: is it possible that they are most interested in the simple clarity of “food, clothing, and shelter” among all the problem-solving techniques? What is the relationship between the living necessities and the three primary colors? Do energy drinks really enhance the energy efficiency? The solutions they find on the ideal-reality axis want to utilize technology in substance, and to help health and happiness in appearance. Their way forward is to be found in a self-pedagogy that makes use of the space and time of art, design, and their institutions in Korea.
 
There are many questions and answers in SMSM10. For example, You Are Here (In the Form of Dance) (2010) that has found a place on the green rooftop of the Pavilion after a long time, The Power of Color (2009/2019) that fills the white temporary wall put up by Donghee Kim standing for a door, and the Ideal Dining Table for the Designer Mr.K (2012), all suggest antidotes for strange phenomenon produced in the time and place of Korea between 2009 and 2019. And there is another reality that this exhibition is about: it marks the closing of the Audio Visual Pavilion’s digeut (ㄷ)- shaped exhibition space located at 5-5 Tongin-dong, which opened in November 2013. Thus, if the ten years of SMSM constitute one axis in the show’s configuration, then there is another axis of various past exhibitions in this Pavilion.
 
In this sense, SMSM10 also questions the way exhibitions exist, and how they narrativize and spatialize the time and space. Curators of Megastudy (2017), an AVP exhibition, asked SMSM about any memorable class mottos, and MeeNa Park replied: “An apple before a meal is gold, and an apple after a meal is silver.” Would it be possible to eat gold, a pre-meal apple, and silver, the one after, at the same time? Would it also be possible to draw a new chronological geography map by mixing up the fengh shui elements? There is a strongly manifesto-like aspect to the work of SMSM. Such a modernist and “shamanistic” attitude, which reflects the geomorphological forces working in Korea and informs the mottos of small and large communities there, also amounts to pedagogy for today’s “way of seeing.” The work of SMSM reminds of a note from an experiment or production process that one writes down while making beautiful and strange things. In her essay in Kitty Decadence, Inyong An writes about strangeness that battles beauty. She recalls how Yorozu Choho, a Japanese magazine, collected to publish “stories about beauty.”
 
“What is beauty? Through what, may I ask, do you readers feel the emotion that causes ‘Ah, so beautiful!’ in your heart? Is it landscape, artwork, beautiful women, music, or the recognition of the society, warriors, or the poor? I wish to ask your experiences to all of you in order to study beauty. I would like to ask you to submit your writings on your experiences titled ‘The actual experiences of when I felt beauty.’ You may choose any form of writing. One piece of writing should have less than 250 letters.” Yorozu Choho, 30 December 1908.
 
According to the summary by An, the submitted materials could be classified as following: sixteen stories on visual beauty; two on auditory beauty; seven on the complex beauty of sight and sound; and one on ethical beauty. Subjects of the stories on visual beauty included beautiful scenes such as the Mountain Fuji or the sight of sun and moon from the sea; human figures such as a baby sleeping in a cradle under the shade of a peach tree in a spring time; textures of objects magnified under a microscope; and burning carriages. Interestingly, while the call for submissions of stories about “beautiful things” was closed after six months, a series about “the actual experiences of when I felt strangeness” continued for over a year and a half. To An, “to exaggerate a little, beauty lost to strangeness.” Strangeness, naturally, defeated beauty. As she wrote, the submissions tried to convey a sense of beauty based on subjective feelings to the public. And a common factor here may be time, or place, or events. Now, let’s see the exhibition. You are free to choose whatever you want to see of the last ten years – and why you want to start and where you want to end it.