Easy and Essential knowledge of Exhibition, Korea Artist Prize 2016

Korea Artist Prize 2016

 "Korea Artist Prize" is made up of works by four artists, four are candidates for the grant, and one of them is the winner. ‘Kim Eull', The artist depicts the artist through drawing, ‘Ham Kyungah’, the survival of the North Korean defectors, ‘Back Seung Woo, reprints the reality through photography and interprets the image, and ‘mixrice (Cho Ji Eun, Yang Chul Mo), talking about migration through media. I would like to talk about ‘mixrice,’ which was selected in the "Korea Artist Prize", although the characteristics of each artist and the media they use are different and the topics they want to talk about are also different. Through this work of Mix Rice, people can face our society itself and the problems of society which was seen from the viewpoint from urban engineering, but into approach from the new artistic perspective.

Kim Eull 

Back Seung Woo

  The topic of 2015 and 2016 is a story about immigration. First, there were demonstrations of people protesting the refugees. The Brexit decision is a reaction to foreigners who have already moved, and the most recent issue, President Trump of the United States, wants to prevent migration by building a wall in Mexico' s borders. After the Industrial Revolution, the history of migration, which has been stopped since the start of agriculture and settled life due to the development of communication and traffic, has begun again. Over the past 100 years, voluntary migration has become possible through international agreements, and various issues are now being raised, mainly against the opposition.

 In the Korean art world, artists who have a nomadic tendency such as ‘Kim Sooja’ and ‘Haegue Yang’ have been performing their works. In addition, several artists like ‘Do-ho Suh’ have focused on their lives as migrants. Rather than showing the society and the city of their lives, their lives are centred on the lives of the migrants and expressed through various media and methods. On the other hand, the work of ‘mixrice’, which was selected in the "Korea Artist Prize" of the year, shows the shape of the society that changes with forced external pressure, Asking questions about human memory. It also shows various social and environmental problems beyond human life.

mixrice 

 Housing is life itself. Bill Bryson, author of "The History of Almost Everything," said that the history of housing tells the history of humankind. Those who lose their homes are refugees even if they are in their own country. Voluntary migration is named, but the reasons for employment, schooling and retirement are only different names of forced migration. For this reason, those who have lost their space and lost their way have lost their roots like plants that have been removed. The artist showed this through the graffiti on the wall. They used graffiti to reveal the ruined cities, expressing the ruins of plants and humans over the city, and the ruined lives of themselves. The traces of plants that became black and white graffiti behind the colours of blue plants remained idle and came to memories of loneliness. Eventually, the remains of the remaining plants will be erased at the same time as the exhibition ends. Urban citizens who are losing their place to settle are also left in the memory of someone.

mixrice

 The structure of a city should follow the shape of life, not the logic of capital. But modern cities follow capital. The city thus created is forced to become a human for a city, not a city for a human being. The redevelopment industry in Korea is a representative example. Houses made of concrete with an architectural life span of more than 100 years are, by the simple logic of capital, as soon as after 30 years, they become old and dangerous buildings, pushing people out and rapidly changing into a new space of life. The 'soil' brought here forms a model house of the past and enters the exhibition hall as an art. The land that offered a standardized and industrialized life now erases those memories and presents new forms of life to the city's settlers along with capital. In such a society, people lose their "hometown". When I return to the land where I live, the only thing remaining is the soil in the place and the scene in my memory. However, the changed environment blurs the memories, loses the past, and moves individuals out from the old city. In the end, individuals lose their roots and are forced to become refugees in urban areas.

 In the images that follow the migration of the plants, we could come to a new perspective. For us, the existing migration was only the movement of the human movement. The migration of plants was only a secondary outcome following that. However, the video recorded the root of the plant and trace the life of the plant which was forced to relocate to a place entirely different from the existing space, shows another image left by human migration. In the reality of the plants that migrated with the traces of the life behind, the artist makes the viewer reflect on the difference between their selves and the rooted plants, whether we live with our own memories.

 The works of 'mixrice', which was selected as 'Korea Artist Prize', exceeded the contemporary art that accuses social problems. In this work, it shows the injured city which borrows human gaze and the gaze of plants, and shows how the dangerous state of our history, which is forcibly transformed by capital.