2019 Title Match: Gimhongsok vs. SEO Hyun-Suk—Incomplete Ruins

2019 Title Match: Gimhongsok vs. SEO Hyun-Suk—Incomplete Ruins presents newly commissioned works by Gimhongsok and SEO Hyun-Suk. Gimhongsok has been reinterpreting concepts and ideas that are embedded in different phenomena that occur in and around art, disrupting the conventional perception of art. In the meantime, SEO Hyun-Suk has been examining the meaning of theatricality and architecture by connecting different places and locations under the context of modernity. For 2019 Title Match, the two artists created new works that investigate the conditions of validity for today’s art that exist in a world where absolute values are vanished and our senses are captivated by the capital and its spectacles.

Gimhongsok presents works that reveal discomfort incurred by “incompleteness” and “imperfection.” The works deal with the suspicion towards “completeness,” “perfection,” and “order” under the title Human Order. The project reconsiders the order and structure created through social consensus, such as the conventional concepts of beauty and artwork. The artist also puts himself under self-censorship through which he discloses his own suspicion and caution towards what he has been accepting as activities that fall under different categories of art activities.

SEO Hyun-Suk invites viewers to look at the alternative reality in which Buk Seoul Museum of Art turned into “ruins” in his Theater of dusts. Created in the form of virtual reality, the work overviews a situation where the ideal of the avant-garde, which dreamed of utopia and believed that art could change the world, has been collapsed. In addition, the viewers are asked to become performers of the artist’s site-specific performance and roam through the museum’s gallery and different spaces inside and outside the museum building, sensing emotional stir through a variety of artistic devices staged by the artist.

In 2019 Title Match, Gimhongsok’s “incompleteness” and SEO Hyun-Suk’s “ruins” are working as concepts that are employed by the artists to make candid confessions about the confusing state of being artists in the era of no absolute values and reveal a process of thought towards art activities. The ways through which the two artists create their works seem to point to disparate directions that cannot be matched under the frame of “title match.” However, the different elements employed by the two artists generate meanings in a certain structure. Presented together within the framework of Title Match, Gimhongsok and SEO Hyun-Suk’s works build multi-dimensional collaboration.