Exhibition Information

			Exhibition Contents

He liked the slope.
"Frantz Kafka loved the slopes, and he was fascinated by all sorts of slopes. He also liked to look at the house standing in the middle of the steep slope. He sat on the street and stared at the house for hours. I don't get bitten. I tilt my head and stand up straight. He was a bit of a freak. Haruki Murakami, "Killing the Knight Commander."

The exhibition is titled after "Frantz Kafka liked the slope" by Haruki Murakami, the chaperone of the novel "Killing the Knight Commander". Last summer, when I was very busy, I was fascinated by the contents of this book because I couldn't fall asleep due to various worries, and I remember reading it all night and going to work. This book became a hot topic when it was published, providing a heated discussion of Haruki's historical consciousness, but it was understood to me as an elaborately formalized narrative that aggregates ideas about the relationship between art and reality. It is a story about the change in the main character's life as the main character who left the art college and lived in portraits for a living found a perfect picture in the studio of a senior artist, and the character in the painting became real and appeared in reality.

In the context of the story, which emphasizes that the artwork is not just a reflection of the visible physical world, but a representation of the truth, "Kafka, who likes the slope," can be said to be an Allegory, meaning where the artist stands. Taking this into consideration, the exhibition introduced the location of the artists who participated in the exhibition as a "slope road." As a planner, I myself would also be a companion to this slope. In this exhibition, which is also the exhibition of the results of the sixth generation of artists living in Cheonan Creative Village, "The Slope Road" also means an uphill road at 174 Gwangdeok-ri, where the creative village is located. This exhibition is a set of eight artists who climb the slope and take it on the long time they spent in the studio.

We are always asked by society to be realistic people, but the "reality" dictated by social convention is equated with a very material and economic foundation aimed at production efficiency and capital acquisition. The fluid world, which is impossible to even verbalize, such as the mental power, dreams, memories, and emotions that exist in humans, is all "unrealistic" and does not receive a decent place. However, artists are people who stand outside of conventional wisdoms that are socially structured and institutionalized, giving form and materializing to another world they believe in. They create another spot that floats lightly on physical objects with their eyes, mind, and hands. It is a place for the more spiritual, flexible and free things in us. Writers work alone in the studio today to reveal that the vulnerable but beautiful spot, which is unclear and ambiguous, is clearly realistic, which is hard to see on the side of the road where everyone goes. Starting the introduction of this exhibition with sources, notes, and drawings, which are the source of the artist's work, was the result of the time that the artwork eventually thought and worked in the studio, and it was to create another place of reality in the visual landscape, still life, society.

The works of Kang In-soo, Kim Gun-il, Bum Jin-yong, Jang Jae-min, Cho Ga-yeon, and Jang Eun-ui, which deal with still life based on the landscape, show how artists internalize external physical objects and transform them into projections of another reality. Kang In-soo intentionally emphasizes the unfamiliarity he suddenly felt in the surrounding landscape, drawing as if he were tracking the identity of the uncomfortable stranger. Bum Jin-yong creates another nature full of pictorial vitality by transferring the tangledness of the weeds around the studio to the brush strokes where the energy of the strong medicine is crossed. Jang Jae-min sensibly captures the reality, such as a lump without boundaries, using an unclear state where the perception of the object and the viewer is mixed as the starting point of the work. In addition, Jo Ga-yeon draws on a landscape in which movements and emotions are involved and felt as dynamic as a creature by accepting the timeliness involved in the act of looking at an object.

On the other hand, Kim Gun-il visualizes the ecosystem of delusional and fluid memories that cannot be completely consistent with the physical target world into the forest, implementing images of forests liquefying or swaying as they melt. In the case of Janginui, which uses the motif of everyday still life, the relationship between fruits, bowls, and light is elaborately coordinated, filmed, and redrawn to visualize the high-purity ideal balance crystals.

The work of Park Hye-soo and Jeon Ga-bin, who expand into more social areas, intervenes new eyes by cracking blind collective conventional wisdom. Park Hye-soo makes viewers reflect on the "ordinary" standard of fiction that society creates to disseminate governance values, and suggests a loose relationship distance that enables public sharing while preserving individual psychological domains or poetic worlds. Jeon Ga-bin establishes collective values blindly followed by the media as idols and constructs them into monumental cement structures, noting the dangers of these idols through easily ruptured and corroded surfaces.

As such, the exhibition artists create a reality that is at a different level while having a ubiquitous and physical relationship with the world. If viewers find something vivid and alive in these works, they will feel that the world that writers create in their studios is not an unproductive fantasy, but rather a more specific reality. Through their gaze from the physical world, a little far away from the slope, they can see the return of things that actually exist but are not given a seat.

Lee Eunjoo (Independent planner, art historian)