Minibus, Oort Cloud, Fluttering Pages

Minibus, Oort Cloud, Fluttering Pages, organized by three collaborative curators and featuring 28 artists, aspires to glance over the cultural legacy left by Insa Art Space (IAS) over its 25 years of existence. IAS, a space that the Arts Council Korea (ARKO) had provided as a means of supporting emerging artists, was indeed a subsidiary of ARKO, but it also had noninstitutional and alternative characteristics that gave it the singular position of being extra-institutional, yet within the institutional framework. Since its foundation in 2000, IAS has organized more than 350 exhibitions and projects and supported artists’ studio practices, art education, art journal publication, video media distribution, and residencies.

Among these diverse IAS initiatives, this exhibition is specifically focused on the following three: support for emerging artists, promotion of video media, and publishing of visual arts journals. Three curators who have come through ARKO’s new curator development programs have drawn upon their own research and activities to organize three sub-exhibitions that each channel these three initiatives directly, indirectly, or abstractly. Each exhibition, respectively, “sets disappearance as a condition to reconsider the identity assigned to IAS and the method of historical narration” (Minibus, curated by Hyukgue Kwon), “contemplates the site of moving images through adjacent technological supports while taking into account the impossibility of operating a media archive within today’s technological environment” (Oort Cloud, curated by Shinjae Kim), and “showcases a publication that employs the vibrations and microhistories between art, space, and people to newly interweave the last days of IAS” (Fluttering Pages, curated by Dohee Kim).

First, Minibus on the first floor of the exhibition hall reconsiders the methods and attitudes of the historical approach and asks what kind of space and disappearance of the exhibition can be transported to the present time and space. Instead of obsessing about the time that has disappeared or will disappear, the past, or the future, it focuses on the state of undecidedness and summons different present times to the exhibition hall. The participating artists (Kang Seok Ho, Gwon Osang, Kim Sollee, Rho Eunjoo, Moon Isaac, Park Gwangsoo, Yagwang) reconstruct and recontextualize the works and working methods presented in Insa Art Space, overlapping IAS’s past and present time. In doing so, the exhibition proposes individual now(s) without simplifying IAS's identity or explaining it in a series of unified logics.

Connecting the first and second floors of the exhibition hall, Fluttering Pages examines the traces left by IAS through an exhibition of books and related objects. Centering on the first special edition of the experimentalist art journal, the exhibition examines the artistic flow of the space through texts and interviews with artists (Koh Jaewook, Kwon Sea Jung, Kim Yongkwan, Moon Isaac, Shin Je Hyun, Shin Ji-sun, Jo Seub, Cho Youngjoo, Cho Eunji), curators (Lee Seang-gang, Lim Sung Yon, Chung Hee Young, Choi Soyeon), researchers (Masil Collective, Park Haeyun), and journalists (Cho Sang In). In addition, the book is composed of interviews with neighbors of IAS, interviews with people who worked at IAS, the artists' micro-experiences of IAS, and fiction with humor. In particular, the research notes of the other curators, Hyukgue Kwon and Shinjae Kim, connect the exhibition not only in form but also in content. In this way, the exhibition provides an opportunity to reflect on the meaning of goodbye, which is a dual meaning of closing an era of a space but also glimpsing new possibilities.

Oort Cloud on the second floor begins with the interrupted history of IAS’s media archive-based distribution program and the gap left by the archive, and then looks at contemporary media as an environment and infrastructure, reexamining the relationship of images to physical reality, light, matter, and time. The participating artists (Kim Kyulim, Yi Minji, Han Uri, Hong Jin-hwon, Hwang Hyo Duck) transcend the dichotomies of old and new, nature and technology, and analog and digital to reveal the materiality and visual infrastructure of the image, pay attention to the agency and generative power of light and particles, and explore other possibilities in the process of summoning the legacy of the past through archival footage, low-tech and analog techniques.

First opened in Insa-dong, Jongno-gu, and thereafter known by the name, Insa Art Space (IAS), this space operated by the ARKO Art Center long maintained its uniqueness as a space that welcomed diverse activities from young artists. The Wonseo-dong era of IAS ends this June, and while there are no plans for its next location, the legacy of IAS will continue to be summoned and gain new contexts through various future exhibitions and projects, just as in this exhibition. Spaces that function as a creative outlet, lounge, and salon for the emerging artists of an era will always come and go, responding to the specific demands and trends of their time. This exhibition is expected to start from the memory of IAS and serve as an attempt to connect the traces it has left in the contemporary art world to the present and future.

Hosted by Arts Council Korea. 

Collaborative curators and participating artists

Minibus, curated by Hyukgue Kwon
Kang Seok Ho, Gwon Osang, Kim Sollee, Rho Eunjoo, Moon Isaac, Park Gwangsoo, Yagwang

Oort Cloud, curated by Shinjae Kim
Kim Kyulim, Yi Minji, Han Uri, Hong Jin-hwon, Hwang Hyo Duck

Fluttering Pages, curated by Dohee Kim
Koh Jaewook, Kwon Sea Jung, Kim Yongkwan, Masil Collective, Moon Isaac, Park Haeyun, Shin Je Hyun, Shin Ji-sun, Lee Seang-gang, Lim Sung Yon, Chung Hee Young, Cho Sang In, Jo Seub, Cho Youngjoo, Cho Eunji, Choi Soyeon