Exhibition Information

2021 (출처= 공간사일삼) 38 x 50cm

2020 (출처= 공간사일삼) 160 x 210 cm

2021 (출처= 공간사일삼) 가변설치, 120 x 24 x 2.5 cm

2020 (출처= 공간사일삼) 115 x 160 cm

			'Tea leaf reading' is a divination practice that predicts a person's past, present, and future based on the obscure configurations of tea leaf residues inside a teacup after drinking tea. Awaiting its fortune-teller, Choi Youngjin and Mok Jiyoon's <Tea Leaf Reading> exhibition is riddled with works whose irregular traces of time remain undeciphered.

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Emptying their teacup, one repeats questions about their life over and over in their mind like a spell. Layering, scratching, and rubbing the surface of the paper, the two artists perform such repetitive gestures in attempts of excavating a clear image from the disorderly. What materializes on the surface, however, is not a wholly elucidated narrative but an overlapping of colors and shapes—much like the remnants of tea leaves lying at the bottom of the teacup.

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Deliberately roughening the surface of the paper for her drawing, Choi Youngjin sifts through images that flood the everyday and often focused on ambiguous shapes extracted from demolished spaces. The <Empty Night (Bin Bam)> series focuses in on a minute detail of a larger structure or a fleeting moment in the passing of time. Delineating a disparate segment from a whole, Choi visually renders abstracted emotions and laboriously translates the tactile surface of weathering walls upon the paper. In particular, the artist’s vigorous mark making in <Empty Horns, Three Reasons> culminates as a raw, blank space where viewers can project their own thoughts and experiences.

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Mok Jiyoon's series <Nameless Beginning_Seed> takes seeds—uncertain life forms that have yet to sprout and attain its final form—from within an entangled ecosystem as a motif. Mok dismantles pages of used books and layers together multiple pieces of paper together, erasing one by one the words and memories attached to the past. Upon the upheaved soil, Mok sows the seeds which will grow to become entities of their own, detached from its parent plant. Though it is impossible to see through the variegated seed formations cultivated from plaster bandages, white paper, white clay, and acrylic, what is made apparent is that the seeds are dense lumps packed with boundless potential.

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Through the close observation of amorphous tea leaves trailing from the upper brim to the very bottom of the teacup, tea leaf reading can only speculate the fate of a person. In other words, the shapes of the remaining tea leaves are never definitive; instead they are shapeshifters, ever transforming under the gaze of its interpreter. The traces left throughout the gallery space by Mok Jiyoon and Choi Youngjin similarly demonstrate a variability that can embrace a multitude of divergent readings. Concentrate on your intuition as you trace the remnants of time left protruding from the wall or sprawled across the floor by the two artists.

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Written by_Ryu Dayun