Category: Works

This was shown at the Old Police Station (the former Deptford Police Station, London). Although the old Edwardian building itself is a grade 2 listed English heritage site, only the four individual cell spaces show any apparent evidence of their original function as the police station. Without any information about the site, the cells are hard to discover and rather difficult to access because of their hidden location and lack of public awareness about the site. The abandoned cell spaces might be defined as an example of urban ruins or, in Solnit’s vocabulary, the unconscious city. The project, thus, explores a way of ‘situating’ an artistic event in the location to arouse the unconsciousness of the cell space.

In the project, Chung raises the question of how the cell space might act as a commemorative or even monumental space where various events have taken place and been forgotten. Musil points out the contradictory features of monuments: conspicuously inconspicuous, erected for public attention while eluding popular perception. Chung considers the historical monument of the cell space as a dead site sleeping in the sea of oblivion.

In <Century>, Chung made hundreds of rectangular shaped cement tablets and piled them up from the floor of the prison cell. Each cement tablet, like an opening plaque for a building, functions as a commemorative unit of the events in the cell, which has made its own history both as a real prison and as a venue for cultural events. Even though in 2012 the site celebrated its one hundred year anniversary, the site escapes public attention. Chung’s repetitive and continuous actions of making and accumulating tablets without any inscription invites curiosity about the tomb-like space. The number of tablets placed in the cell allude to accumulating layers of past time. The single upright tablet lit by vague light implies the present situation and the current artistic action. Among the tablets inside the cell, the upright tablet plays a role as an intriguing clue for the public to recognize the cell as a monumental space in the local community.

Jay Jungin Hwang (independent curator)

This work is based on my own experience when I attempted to adapt myself to a new environment during a residency program in 2011. Undergoing psychological transitions as a result of processes of conforming, negotiating, and avoiding were inevitable in adapting to a new environment and working side by side with other artists. In the new studio, which used to be a former anglican church, I felt an unknown oppressive burden and tried to get rid of that feeling by making cement blocks. As the cement blocks piled up, the ground level became  higher and higher and the desk kept moving from one location to another. This continuous process not only seemed to be an unwitnessed performance, but alludes to processes of change, labour, work, handcraft and mass production.

Legend has it that words Nec Plus Ultra were inscribed on the Pillars of Hercules, warning sailors to ‘go no futher’. The work explores the obscure future of the site as the building was going to be demolished, with the building becoming a tomb and the pillars gravestones. An ornamental fence around the pillar suggests a futile attempt to preserve the building by transforming the pillar from a functional to an aesthetic object. The text connects us to Plymouth’s past of new world adventure and discovery, thereby collapsing notions of present, past and future into one another.

The image of the object originally comes from a sixteenth century French decorative calendar and here implies status rather than functionality. I adapted the idea of something being excessively decorative into a contemporary object: the table of exchange rates. The table represents the fluctuating and unpredictable value of contemporary art in the global art market as the numbers on the chart do not make any sense in the real world in which values are often shifting or weightless. The broken frame could be understood more literally as a comment upon financial deregulation and recent economic uncertainty.

This work was made for an exhibition entitled “A Report about the Great Wall of China”. The exhibition featured seven artists who offered interpretations of The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka. I sanded the surface of the pillar in the exhibition space and installed a fence around the pillar. A video shows a hand sanding the pillar, played slower than real time. This repeated movement explores ideas of origin and erasure and our relationship with the present and the past.

Howick Place is close to Victoria Station in London’s Westminster. During the day the public uses it as a short cut, or during a break from work, while every evening homeless people congregate on the street to get a free meal at the soup kitchen. I focused on this time to see if there was any discernable shift in the flow of human traffic and whether the presence of homeless people caused passers-by to temporarily alter their course. I held a sign with the text ‘on diversion’ written on it, a text which is routinely used for the city’s problematic bus service when people are “redirected from their normal route”. However, it was not until I spoke to some of the homeless people that I realised that for some of them it signified that they are ‘on diversion’ from life.

US flags are more commonly seen hanging from people’s houses than anywhere else I have been in the world, regardless of whether it is a public or national holiday. With respect to everyday goods, products are mostly made abroad, such as in Southeast Asia and East Asian countries. The relationship between the US and these countries depends largely on imports from these countries and is financed by an  increasingly, and potentially  unsustainable, budget deficit. Different national flags were flown everyday of the countries from which these products were imported.

During the artist in residence programme in Graz, Austria, I explored the idea and use of communal space within the purpose-built Rondo Atelier complex, which was designed to foster aspects of private and communal living. I removed the table tennis table from the private AVL* common room in order to change the function of the room into an exhibition space. A light shines to indicate the former presence of the table. This space could be seen by passers by who were excluded from the exhibition space which was attended by artists, local dignitaries and invited media.

*AVL is the privately owned company for development, simulation for passenger cars in Graz, Austria
Insatallation, dimensions variable, ETC source four lighting, dimmer, 2010
Common room of AVL, the corner of Weißeneggergasse and Mühlgasse, Graz

During the artist in residence programme in Graz, Austria, I explored the idea and use of communal space within the purpose-built Rondo Atelier complex, which was designed to foster aspects of private and communal living. I removed the table tennis table from the private AVL* common room in order to change the function of the room into an exhibition space. A light shines to indicate the former presence of the table. This space could be seen by passers by who were excluded from the exhibition space which was attended by artists, local dignitaries and invited media.

*AVL is the privately owned company for development, simulation for passenger cars in Graz, Austria
Insatallation, dimensions variable, ETC source four lighting, dimmer, 2010
Common room of AVL, the corner of Weißeneggergasse and Mühlgasse, Graz

This work is a text-based work shown in two physical spaces: a public park and an exhibition space. The love letters in large scale digital print were shown in Hyde Park in May 2009 and reveal one side of a private correspondence between the artist and her lover. The work in the exhibition space continues the story and explains why the artist showed the love letters in Hyde Park, hence, the boundary between fiction and non-fiction is displaced. The work is part confessional and part narrative and blurs the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction, public and private spheres, emotional transparency and narcissism.