Exhibition Information

			Form refers to the formality of recognition or consciousness, in addition to the formative meaning of shape and configuration. Artist’s attempts to reason and break through the existing structure and present a new direction in form have continued from the past to the present. Cognizing can not be completely free from past experiences, and the embracing of the process is also fluid. 《Form/less》 speculates the transformation process, and the path of the work through observation of form revealed in the works of Hejum Bä and Sascha Pohle. 

Hejum Bä approaches the traditional concept and medium of abstract painting with an alternative system of reflection. The artist combines motility, strong color relationships, and elements of language with abstract behavior in her work. In order to reveal ‘mobile image’ in painting, the artist starts by deconstructing scenes from her self-produced videos and reorganizing them as paintings, then transforming into observing motility with properties and elements within the canvas. In the painter’s solo show 《Teeth on Tail》 (2018, OCI Museum, Seoul), an abstract landscape appeared in which torn and folded colored paper moved. Rather than the substance of paper, the artist focused on the allegorical implication of how the colored surfaces can move structurally and be mobile through the confrontation of color.

In recent works in the exhibition, Bä reflected on the enigmatic elements of abstract painting comparing it to language. She associated the sounds that humans make to refer to the objects we see for the first time before learning a language with abstract reasoning. Self duplicating act of her work is evident in <Innerside Terro>, <Saga of the Unwritten>. Through this process, the artist questions if vague images can correlate or partake mobility through only brushstrokes and clashes of color. After all, if the concept of abstraction is a result of a continuous thought process, the artist’s contemplation could be inferred with clues placed within the work.

Sascha Pohle speculates on the process of modification and transformation of context as technology and culture migrate. His work is mostly site-specific and includes performance in composition. Recently, Pohle takes an interest in how the plants, and objects that have traveled through regions and countries, interact with the local people.

 began with the artist’s project from a residency in Beijing, 2016. It contemplates the consequential after the definition of a “gift” as a story about a relationship in which human, object, plant, and visual forms intertwine due to cultural transitions. In his residency exhibition, 《Given Time》 presented bamboo craftwork, fans collected from all over china, video, and photographs, in response to the 『The Gift』(1925), Marcel Mauss‘s theory on gifts and reciprocality, and the Chinese tradition of gifting flowers at business openings. The word “after” is associated with the performance that gifts fans to the viewers. Fan acts as a transcendent concept of relation entangled with plants, wind, and gift, while bamboo baskets existed as a result of the transfer of technology and culture. 

The bamboo crafts installed in the exhibition refer to photographs from Karl Blossfeldt’s  『Urformen der Kunst』(1928), 『Wundergarten der Natur』(1932),  which discovers patterns and structures in nature. Pohle showed Blossfeldt’s photographs to bamboo artisans in China and requested its production. These bamboo artifacts are newly installed with the latest works produced in the same way. He also set up a vibraphone and artist book with various information, including the complete source of the work, the date of the photograph’s publication, the year of its production, artisans, artists, and countries. Through his work, Pohle’s implies that cultural heritage, which appears to be academically classified, is redefined continuously under the context of each era.

Looking at exotic species that have rooted as if they were indigenous plants that surround us, one wonders what local identity means in a time of frequent migration between countries. Furthermore, how unintentionally displacing origin and genealogy through traveling and accepting mutated cultural forms will affect us in the future. The audience will look at Sascha Pohle’s work as tracking the path of relics in a museum to conceive its signification.