We will take part in the exhibition titled Imaginary Asia at the Nam June Paik Art Center in Giheung-gu, Korea with our 5-channel installation of Allegoria Sacra.
Period: 9 March, 2017 – 2 July, 2017
Venue: Nam June Paik Art Center 2 F, Gallery 2
Opening: 5 pm 9 March, 2017
Curated by Jinsuk Suh (Director, Nam June Paik Art Center), Hyun-Suk Seo (Graduate School of Communication and Arts Yonsei University)
Artists: AES+F, Ahmad Ghossein, Aida Makoto, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Dinh Q. Lê, Harun Farocki, Hayoun Kwon, Ho Tzu Nyen, Ji Hye Yeom, Meiro Koizumi, Moon Kyungwon & Jeon Joonho, Muntean & Rosenblum, Nalini Malani, Song Dong, Wael Shawky, Xu Bing, Yang Fudong
Nam June Paik Art Center (Director, Jinsuk Suh) introduces its special exhibition Imaginary Asia from March 9 to July 2, 2017. On 9th March at 3 pm, Hyun-Suk Seo will host the Artist Talk program of Song Dong in conjunction to the exhibition. Imaginary Asia, comprising 23 pieces in the moving image genre by seventeen artists from various regions of Asia who subjectively imagine different historical experiences shared across the continent, aiming to engage in a new form of self-embodied history making as an emergent trend in contemporary art. Neither conforming to the official ‘History’ nor falling back on literary speculation, their works recognize the limits of authoritarian historicism. The exhibition is an open–ended, far from complete or comprehensive, archiving of distantly connected layers of histories.
The exhibition presents two categories of artistic imagination, the first of which consists of pieces that revolve around stories that hail from various regions in Asia, from past to present. The works in this category are mainly by East Asian artists, expressing the historical identities of their own countries. The second category comprises works that feature varied perspectives toward Asia’s present and future. Coming from countries that straddle the border between Asia and West, they explore the harmony of and conflict between the two cultural hemispheres. The exhibition will be the first occasion in Korea to present Vietnamese artist Din Q Le’s Everything is A Re-Enactment and WTC in Four Moments, which both explore the theme of war, as well as Chinese artist Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground Pop-up Book (Day) and Book from the Ground Pop-up Book (Night). The exhibition will also host the global debut of Song Dong’s new work Beginning End (2017).
This exhibition presents works by seventeen artists who have dealt with aspects of Asian experiences through moving images. These artists propose dialogic and imaginative history–making instead of adhering to conventional forms of historiography as a way of documenting and explicating Asia’s past and present. Often challenging the boundaries between fact and construction, their works amount to sketches of multimodal realities.
Video Art, initially conceived by Nam June Paik, has been expanded to encompass all moving images with the advances in digital technology in the twenty first century. Across all kinds of media including video, film, and animation, the differentiation between visual genres is now becoming obsolete. Photographs and videos no longer represent reality. The moving image has acquired a most flexible and expandable potential, allowing for the coexistence of fact and fiction, and dissolving the boundary between private and public thought.
Link to exhibition