Artists Statement

Theme: Pacific Rim. Venue: Container Culture: Seoul Container. Venue: South Hall. Curator: Soh Yeong Roh

The container, previously viewed as a vehicle for dissemination of commercial products in the chain of production and consumption in the industrial era, is transformed into a platform for sharing and integration of the cultural information and urban experience of differing geographies. As a transitory docking station, Container Seoul: S54-2 connects people from different back-grounds through works that are rooted in Korean media culture. These works highlight the relational aspect of new information technology, in that the art becomes a catalyst for creating new relations among people.
As one of the most fast-tracked megacities in the globe, Seoul has its own unique urban environment — a constant shifting of spaces through urban development, on- and off-line collective movement and instant rap-port among people enhanced and emboldened by new-media technologies. At the center of these experiences is the person as a focal point of diverse human relations. This person, or, shall we say, the end-user, is no longer a solitary individual in the Western traditional sense; rather, she is viewed as an inter-subject, or “in-between-people-ness” in old Chinese. Container_Seoul: SS4-2 stresses physical and emotional contact among people as the instigator of intersubjectivity. The artists create situations where such relations,
induced by contacts and interpersonal exchange, engender some collective resonance among the participants.
One of the contemporary urban conditions is the emerging nomadism through the interplay of mobility, information networks and the human body. Sound emanating from street vendors and flashing lights from LEDs, for example, has changed the urban environment, while some “temporary private zones” have been established by the ever-increasing use of mobile phones and wireless networks. Taeyoon Choi’s Movable Types and Instant Spaces starts as research into nomadic architectures of Korea and progresses into architectural installations and workshops, and finally, a performative parade engaging the public in the city of San Jose, California. Performers and the public wear a sculptural construction that resembles movable type architectures while trespassing the boundaries of public and private experiences. They wander around the city of San Jose and eventually find a temporary settlement in that structure. Each suite makes computer-generated and sampled sounds from the original locations of movable-type architecture in Korea. The Movable Types and Instant Spaces project is based on research into nomadic structures in urban spaces – temporary architectures, such as vendors, tents and advertisements that are manifestations of human perception of local space.
The other component of Container Seoul: SS4-2 is Delivery, by Love Virus, an ongoing art project by 21 participating artists who created ad hoc networks of people based on empathy and affinities in Korea. The challenge for Love Virus in San Jose would be to create a rapport that could sustain meaningful connections across differing cultures and backgrounds. Among the Love Virus artists, Kim Joon and Jang Woosuk hail from Korea and deliver the “Love Newspaper” and “Iron Box” to the audiences. Iron Box, referring to a box for the special delivery of Korea, will be used as a miniature of a container containing various cultural items, including the artists’ works. When people call a certain number, the Box will be delivered as the medium or creative artistic instrument for free and imaginative human communication and interaction. Also, the audiences will be invited to leave their love stories in San Jose on- and off-line with different perspectives and distinctive flare. The stories will be published as the Love Newspaper, with a “Love Map,” and delivered to their homes.
These projects will reclaim the natural human spirit of San Jose by recovering and celebrating the individual as a unique storyteller and creator. The artists here are thus exploring the overlapping area between representation and practice, a la De Certeau. The aestheticism lies in engaging the public so as to create new relations among art, everyday life, artists and their audience.
Soh Yeong Roh, Curator

• Taeyoon Choi creates performance and media projects using the human body in relation to moving image, site and time. He presented a series of controversial hap-penings about culture and violence in both public and gallery settings in collaboration with Jangseung, an artist group formed in Chicago. Collaborators include Cheon Pyo Lee, a multimedia artist, who is interested in the notion of space working toward inter-active sound installation and performance. Tellef Tellefson is a new-media artist and designer. He has participated in Burning Man numerous times with different methods of living and playing including a Viking ship, which he built on an old truck. Tellefson will be in charge of constructing the float and architectures in Movable Types and Instant Spaces. Lee and Tellefson live and work in Chicago and Santa Barbara in the U.S.A. Choi’s recent experimentations with locative media and wearable computer components deal with issues of locality and objects of desire. He has developed an urban game project using the camera phone, Shoot Me If You Can, and a psycho-geographic experiment, Sell Your Morning Walk. His most recent performance, Object of Desire, was about camera-phone users as everyday tourists and their desire to photograph using wearable computer components with multiple web cams triggered by a heartbeat. Human perception of space, cognitive mapping and glocal issues are inspiration for his locative media projects. He currently lives and works in Seoul, Korea.
• The on-line project Love Virus is one of the “paper-zines” of the blog-inspired, popular mini-homepage service in Korea called Cyworld. Love Virus was started in August 2004 with eight artists from various artistic disciplines, such as photography, moving image, interactive art, performance and even painting. Love Virus is run not only as a popular art-blog site but also as art organization for young artists and their fans to meet through various fun-filled off-line events. The first off-line event, Pochang-macha, was held in a tent bar in Seoul in December 2004; the second event, called GoGo virus, was organized in August 2005 with the transformation of a basement parking lot into a social playground. Their focus is to create unique human relations through media and art. Among 21 artists participating in Love Virus, Kim Joon and Jang Woosuk will perform the art project Delivery. Kim Joon has had many solo exhibitions in Korea, and has won several art prizes. His most recent solo exhibition was Tattoo You (2005), which commented on underground tattoo and luxury brands as social conflict. Jang Woosuk is a performative artist who has held solo exhibitions, including I Don’t Know Anything Except Love, which brought a mix-and-match of urban locality and love into focus. He also became a love messenger between participants in his “love me sweet” bus project, an artistic tour event for singles.
• Soh Yeong Roh‘s interest has remained in the intersection of art, science/ technology and culture ever since her involvement as the chief of the planning team of Art and Technology Exhibition at the 1993 Dae Jeon World Expo. Schooled in diverse disciplines such as engineering, economics, education and environmental sciences, she does not limit her artistic scope to the traditional art-historical field. Her main concern is the overarching dynamic of art, human creativity and technology, that is, our material condition. Roh founded the Art Center Nabi in 2000, transforming a contemporary art center into a new-media art center, where art, technology, humanities and industry came together to create new art and cultural artifacts. As the main center for new-media arts in Korea, Art Center Nabi promotes creative talents from diverse backgrounds, turning ideas into practices. Apart from directing Nabi, she gives lectures around the world and is currently a professor at Ching-wha University in China. Although not an academic, she is deeply interested in current intellectual issues and thus has founded Nabi Press, which publishes books and magazines related to new-media arts and culture. She is also a member of the board of the Korean Association of Private Museums.