Exhibition Information

Modern Pony + Hen
2019 Variable installation, charcoal, pencil photo collage, digital animation

Modern Atlantic Barron+Baby Pig
2019 Variable installation, charcoal, pencil photo collage, digital animation

			Oil Tank Culture Park and its working group ‘Visual Art Cloud’ have selected Kwon Minho and his work for this solo exhibition. Kwon has worked with blueprints of industrial facilities and shapes of different structures as his thematic materials. This exhibition presents new artworks which combine drawings with animation and new media. Collaborating with media artist Ingeun Kim and interactive designer Jaeok Lee, Kwon attempts to create an extensive atmosphere for this exhibition in which the footsteps and sounds from the audience interact with lighting and other sounds. The five large-scale installation pieces invoke memory and nostalgia of the 1970-80s, the industrial development era of Korea. The artist recalls that the transformation of this oil depot, a relic of the industrial 70s, into a 'culture depot(Oil Tank Culture Park)' bizarrely reminded him of a cold, stiff safe which belonged to his middle school friend's father. When his friend opened the safe, he recollects seeing a basketful of colorful goodies that, interestingly enough, the friend's father (a wounded warrior of the Vietnam War) saved as an emergency food source in case of a war. The memory reminded the artist of a desolate defense facility, oil fuel, and images of the industrial development. It, however, simultaneously aroused him to become preoccupied with the intersection between the cultural benefits of this era and the by-products of oil-based production, and with the painful nostalgia that is the collective memory of his youth and of the generation.


"His drawings capture the images of industrial development in the overall outline, on which other images that internalize and/or suggest them are summoned to be overlapped. This is perhaps to image the complexity of Korean industrialization and its internal contradictions." - Bum Choi, design art critic


"When one considers the fact that an industry cannot by nature develop indefinitely and that it draws a cycle that begins with a growth which declines once it reached a peak, the Korean industries of today are simply standing on a point of this enormous nature-like cycle. Kwon Minho's work came at an opportune moment to offer clues that help us reflect on what such industries have achieved. South Korea in the 1970-80s seemed unstoppable. The 21st century, nonetheless, illuminated that the linear growth is no longer feasible. Possibly, that's the reasons behind Kwon's tracing of anachronic images - the bear, the hog, and the ancient cog wheels - on his drawings. Such iconographies seem to imply that what awaits at the end of developmental history is not the brilliant future but a return of a long gone past.

- Youngjun Lee, mechanical art critic