One of the reasons I’m currently in Korea is that I can take advantage of the excellent guidance as Sojung Kwon, seen at right in the above stitched panorama (see giant size here)of her installation Planning a Year: Mondays at Gallery Dam. In March of 2010, Sojung will be exhibiting the whole of her year long performance project at Angels Gate, in our main gallery. So consider this a bit of a preview for that exhibition.
Gallery Dam is located in Bukchon, north of Insadong, where most of the galleries are located. Basically, Bukchon is where the larger and more established galleries are located and many of the spaces in Insadong are small or rental galleries. Bukchon is also where the National Museum of Contemporary Art is building its new facility. It’s apparently quite normal here for artists to start exhibiting their work in a rental gallery, and shows in many of the smaller galleries are quite brief, sometimes only lasting a week or two. Regardless of which side of the street you’re on, I’ve never seen such a concentration of galleries in my whole life. Things are fast and busy in Seoul.
This exhibition consists of the documentation from about 9 months of the Mondays from Sojung’s daily performances. For a year, Sojung sent out a daily Email indicating the performance she would do exactly one year from that day, and she’s currently performing all of those actions and documenting them. By the time of her show at Angels Gate, she will have completed all of the actions laid out by her a year before. Because she didn’t know where she would be or what she would be doing on the day of the actual performance, the actions have both a rigidly planned feel and an improvised feel at the same time. Many of the performances demand the interaction of others, sometimes strangers, as in one piece where she must go to stores and find a person named John.
Here is a detail of one of the performances. This part is actually in the narrow staircase to the 2nd floor of the building, as the piece wraps around the whole space and ascends the stairs. Sojungs performance for this day was to draw the chair she sat on for dinner. Sometimes the schedule requires her to do something recognizably like art making, sometimes not.
On Thursday, a Finnish documentary crew came to the gallery to film Sojung talking with Sugu (sp?) a Korean artist with a big career in Finland, whom is the subject of their documentary. Chang Kye Hyun, the Director of Gallery Dam and Sugu stood on one side of an imaginary wall made by the steel pillar in the gallery and Sojung stood on the other, having a conversation through the invisible wall. It was a crazy scene, with three languages going back and forth. Gallery Dam always seems to be busy, with visitors coming and going all the time, curators stopping by, etc… which seems to be the norm for galleries here, definitely not a sleepy scene.
Planning A Year will be open at Gallery Dam until December 10, if you happen to be in Seoul.
