Relationships with Others (2015): Yeongdeungpo, Seoul

The year’s productions took place in the iron district of Seoul, 54 Mullae-dong 3-ga. The first project, Functional Dissonance (13 March 2015), involved a group of audience-participants who were led into the alley by a tour guide and who unexpectedly found themselves in the Mise-en-Scène of a movie and being directed by a script. Functional Dissonance (2015) consisted of 5 individual projects presented within one performative scenario.

1. Functional Dissonance, 2015

Film Script Serving Functional Dissonance [performative scenario]

Cast
Concept: Sunyoung Oh
Film Director: Sook Hyun Kim (actress performed an experimental film director and writer of the script)
Tour Guide: Lee Gyeyoung (actress performed a tour guide)
The audience, depending on the degree of their participation, became either supporting actors or extras (Figs. 8, 9). Within the cinematographic experience, the audience was encouraged to visualise the different elements that make a film: the predetermined movement of the camera lens, a confusing montage of edits, striking sound recordings, the inside and outside of the frame that defines the perspective of the viewer, the mise-en-scène created within the field of vision, and the weaving of different stories. For example, as the Director of the fictional movie, Sook Hyun Kim explained to them:

“Here’s the frame. However, the spaces that are not included in the frame, even the backspace of the camera, are called the off-screen space of the movie. It’s invisible to moviegoers, and now we imagine a substantial frame. Imagine that the surface of off-screen space extends beyond space, below the mantle in the Earth, and this is the internal space of the screen. (…) In the frame, we are a formal element along the way. It’s a systematized relationship. We’re building a Mise-en-Scène out there with our eyes. [The Director points to the road, making a square frame with her hands.] The definition of Mise-en-Scène is the staging of events. We will face the case together. The frame size of 3:4 is now expanded.” 74)

The script of the tour guide also included slang traditionally used by the ironworkers of the area, this made parts of the Guide’s dialogue incomprehensible to the participants: They became bewildered not only by the language the Tour Guide used but by the scene they faced and the difference between the art they expected to encounter and the reality of the streetscape. 

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74) Sook Hyun Kim. Film Script Serving Functional Dissonance. Performative Scenario (2015).

Uniforms Serving Functional Dissonance [Experimental Fashion Show]

Cast
Concept: Sunyoung Oh
Bespoke clothing: Park Hyesu
In one part of the alley, the Functional Dissonance audience encountered a group of six ironworkers from the Eojin factory wearing bespoke workwear designed by fashion designer Park Hyesu.75) When a designer measures people’s bodies their asymmetry is often revealed. While working people do not usually wear bespoke clothing, I questioned if custom-made clothes might not be suited to the body shapes of manual workers. (For example, the worker’s arms may be longer or thicker because they are more developed by physical labour.) This intervention, titled Uniforms Serving Functional Dissonance, explored the sensations that come from wearing made-to-order garments, ones perfectly fitted to the body; the workers spoke about what it felt like to be wearing such garments and told the audience about their everyday working lives (Figs. 10, 11, 12, 13)

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75) This element of Functional Dissonancewas originally conceived to be an extension of the Human for Garmentexhibition. However, due to other commitments Taewook Kimwas unable to realise the idea and instead Iasked Park Hyesu, a PhD researcher in Fashion, to make the customized workwear for the labourers in Mullae-dong.

Performance Serving Functional Dissonance [Experimental Music Performance]

Cast
Concept: Sunyoung Oh
Cellist: Nam Yumi, Percussionist: Cho Insuk
For the Functional Dissonance musical performance, the musicians improvised a composition based on their perceptions of the ambient sounds of Mullae-dong (Figs. 14, 15).

Deconstructed Defensive Measure [Exhibition]

For this Functional Dissonance project, I asked artist Son Jongjun to take apart a work titled Defensive Measure that he created for a previous project. We titled this re-production Deconstructed Defensive Measure. The title of the original work Defensive Measure (2014) referred to the name for the military actions that would be undertaken by the U.S. Marines, based in Okinawa, in case of an emergency situation on the Korean peninsula. The concept was that he would symbolically ‘disarm’ this work in the context of Functional Dissonance to represent the possibility of a peaceful co-existence with others. He explained his Defensive Measure work as follows:

“… stereotypes and individualism can represent modern society; aggression has become a way of expression to protect oneself; people show aggression towards another to secure their own safety; others develop defensive measures to protect their interests; however, they hurt themselves by expressing these defensive measures more than needed”.

He said he wanted to talk about the critical path of contemporary society in which humanity is replaced by material value. The dismantled individual elements were laid out across the gallery floor (Fig. 16).

Collision of Reveries [Exhibition]

A series of Collision of Reveries ink drawings on paper by Ryu Jieun, represented the artist’s repressed desires and described the complicated tangles of her inner self (Figs. 17, 18).

The hour-long alley tour of Functional Dissonance ended in the basement space where the artworks Deconstructed Defensive Measure and Collision of Reveries were installed. This space offered a refuge from the alley, and at the same time, it was a place where the artist and audience removed the personal shields, they erected to protect themselves. The various elements of the Functional Dissonance project challenged conventional audience expectations of where and how they would encounter art.

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The following conversation took place between two local residents and a visiting artist in the alley in March 2015:

Mr. Choi (company owner): Why are artists crawling into Mullae-dong?
An artist (visitor): Because the rent is cheap.
Mr. Park (resident and worker in the alley): Usually, the second and third floors of the Mullae-dong steel mills are vacant, but because artists are coming in, the landlords keep on raising the rent. So, it becomes tough for people like us to keep up with the rent.

I include this exchange to offer a sense of how local businesses and people held a generally negative perception of artists working in the area. This was the situation I faced as a curator working in Mullae-dong and one that I sought to improve.

2. Pollination – Seoyoung Bae [Residency, mural project, and exhibition, April – August, 2015]

After the Functional Dissonance project, I was looking for an artist who was willing to examine the relationship between art and local people and express their observations and understandings of the Mullae-dong iron district from their own perspectives, but with some insight into and sensitivity to the area. I invited emerging artist, Seoyoung Bae, to take up a four-month artists’ residency using the Project 7½ space as her studio so that she could observe the everyday life of the district and gain inspiration from the area for her work. The artist and I explored various ways to directly engage with the local community of Mullae-dong. Outcomes included a new signboard for the Daeryuk Steel Company and street murals (Fig. 19).

This was the artist’s perspective:

“This spring, I ran into the curator of Project 7½, Sunyoung Oh, and she asked me to join in as a participating artist for a part of the project. Under the fundamental theme of ‘senses’, the project comprised a series of exhibitions in the Mullae-dong iron district this year. It kicked off with Functional Dissonance, which explored the relational gap between the locals and incomers to the area. It was only natural that the first exhibition reflects symbiosis or coexistence as the following discussion point. I was delighted to be a part of this project. However, I had some hesitation in setting to work in view of the fact that I was a complete outsider who had not yet had a chance to gain an understanding of this regional culture. Meanwhile, the solution came from the curator, who suggested that I start working on a signboard and a mural painting for Daeryuk Steel Company located in the iron district. So, my small busy life in Mullae-dong began, and it led to new social interactions. I got to know several locals, including the owner of Daeryuk Steel Company and his close colleague Mr Manho. On top of that, more and more people approached me, such as the steel mill owner who asked me to paint roses on his building and Mr Dongjin, who likes to carry around a bottle of makgeolli all the time. These new interactions allowed me to get a glimpse of life in the iron district. Here, a symbiotic relationship was better than negative coexistence. No one was eager for utopia.

The locals of Mullae-dong may not consider their relationship with artists as being symbiotic. Artists may only prompt rapid urbanization while being settlers who receive support from the locals. I do not think it would have any validity if a settler brought the natives out of their solid and well-established culture to propose a new cultural framework. Like the blossom on an old tree, I hope that the grafting of artists onto the iron district will lead to organic creation”.

“My work in Mullae-dong developed quite differently in comparison to the way I previously worked. Interaction with the environment surrounding me was important, especially sharp contrasting views of streets of the area. Despite the streetscape being totally unfamiliar to me, in some sense, I had four pleasant month-long residencies including exhibition period in the place. A few of the ironworkers I encountered during my work on a mural painting on the street in front of the atelier became interested in what I was doing and talked to me with curiosity. A series of short conversations with them brought a stable friendly relationship. They sometimes came down to the basement, the atelier, to banter with me, saying jokingly “How on earth could this be art?”. At the same time, they were very appreciative of my artistic efforts to represent their lives in this harsh environment. The workers chatted to me in a friendly way and returned my waves of greeting with delightful welcoming smiles, even when hard at work. As time went by, I could feel some fellowship between myself and my ironworker-neighbours on the street. Yet again, ‘relations’ of life and matter of labour cause resonance in my mind while getting used to my daily life in the rugged and crazily roaring street.

It was pretty interesting but strange to find comments about Mullae-dong in internet space during my work there. Many essays and comments had titles such as ‘beautiful encounter of wage earners and arts’. However, most of the ironworkers in Mullae-dong are not ‘wage earners’ but more like self-employed businessmen who run their own ironworking factories. Distorted information floating in cyberspace often prevents people from having a clear vision of the whole entity, Mullae-dong, in this case, and the current dissonance may be a reflection of this understanding. Mass media has a strong influence on public awareness of certain objects and events. In fact, arts in Mullae-dong are media that provide a platform for people to commune with each other. However, there is some awkward impression of using the word ‘arts’ with ‘wage earner’ in the sense of flattening individuals as stereotypes. In this case, ‘arts’ may easily be misread in our perception as ‘a superior’ to ‘wage earner’”. 76)

3. Who in the World am I? – Sunyoung Oh (Director) [Event]

The original experimental film production, Functional Dissonance (2015), led to another performance: Who in the World am I? (6pm, 31 October 2015). Over the course of almost a year, the individual projects of individual participating artists accumulated, and I brought them all together in one outcome. An invited audience gathered at 1, Dorim-ro 128-gil, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, for an outdoor event that featured an experimental film, a play, a performance, and an exhibition (Fig. 20).

Here, I am…, 2015

Sunyoung Oh (Director); Sung Gook Ryu, Sunyoung Oh (Script); Sung Gook Ryu, Malgeum Kang, Hyun Soo Lee with Okuda Masashi, Yunjin Choi (Performers) [Play]
Artist HASC’s work ReNCODE functioned to spotlight the play and performance.
Jiyeon Lee’s Enter Nowhere: Down the Rabbit Hole (2015) served as the backdrop to Sook Hyun Kim’s film Who in the World am I? (2015).
Seoyoung Bae’s mural, Pollination (2015), served as the backdrop to the performance of choreographer Hong Seok Jang’s work Is That It (2015).

While working on Functional Dissonance, I had identified a theatrical element in the iron alley that I wanted to explore further.77) Who in the World am I? took inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to explore existential questions and it connected at certain points with the work of other artists involved with the project.78) The invited guests were requested to adopt a different attitude to view the different kinds of artworks, like role-playing in a game. The Wonderland within the rabbit hole in the film broadly reflected the journey in Lewis Carroll’s story. However, rather than an adult reading the words of a storybook, the journey was more like that of a child watching a fairy tale. The characters of this Wonderland expressed themselves through body language. They were ‘adults’ who assigned themselves to categories that they could no longer escape from; they imposed objectivity on others; they appeared discontented, isolated and in a state of absurdity (Figs. 21, 22, 23, 24). In this production, Alice, once a mere fictional character of film, video, performance, and animation, met real people from the real world. Given the fragmented elements of the event (e.g., time, space, narrative, image, physical performance, symbols) making sense of their relationships to a whole narrative was up to each viewer.

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76) Seoyoung Bae’s notes (August, 2015) published on the website Project 7.. Available at: www.sevennahalf.com. 

77) The whole alley nearby 54 Mullae-dong 3-ga was considered to be a stage when I started this project with Functional Dissonance.

78) Jiyeon Lee and Seoyoung Bae (visual art), HASC (multimedia art), Sung Gook Ryu, Malgeum Kang, and Hyun Soo Lee (Play actor and actress) and Hong Seok Jang (choreographer). 

In 2015 the Seoul Metropolitan Government provided a budget through the Seoul Museum of Art to provide funded opportunities for artists in Mullae-dong suffering from MERS. The initiative was designed to support artists in a difficult situation, but it actually only served to emphasize divisions in society and among the artists who took part and those who did not. In response to the situation, I created the final three Relationships with Others exhibitions in Mullae-dong with three artists who were not part of the government-funded project. Each of the three artists presented a critique of the ‘reality’ of Mullae-dong from their own personal perspective.

4. Hong Sanghyun, The Most Brilliant on the Border (November 18-25, 2015)

Hong Sanghyun captured the ironworks of Mullae-dong at sunset during August and September 2015. By leaving the shutter of his camera open he picked up the boundary between day and night, at sunset; this was the moment when the metal fragments of Mullae-dong alley also received the light. It led him to reconsider the ‘gelatine silver print’ that he had learned about when he first encountered the medium of photography and he sought to reproduce images of metal with metal. He had only thought of simple objects, such as a spoon, or a coin corresponding to the idea of metal when he first encountered photography a decade ago, but now he could feel the ‘direct’ experience of metal as a tangible substance (Figs. 29, 30).

5. Lee Roc Hyun, Sediment Box (November 28 – December 5, 2015) 

Lee Roc Hyun collected and recycled abandoned signboards to produce her artworks. The Seoul Metropolitan Government’s funding for artists whose livelihood was affected by MERS encouraged the replacement of the signboards of local businesses by ones created by artists. However, from her perspective, as a resident of Mullae-dong, this was a waste of time and money, as the old signboards were not an eyesore. She likened her use of the signage to the geological process of the accumulated depositions of sedimentary rocks. She explained: 

“(…) the title ‘Sediment Box’ (…) originated from the sight of the new signboards going up and the old ones being taken down in my neighbourhood; I rushed to think of why the works from different times are tied together. When the signboards were changed, I may have expected something to be dramatically different. But I got to know for sure that such signboards cannot do anything about the accumulated time. The time of the place, the time of the human (…) Of course, it isn’t easy to read the time from everything visible. While people reminisce on the traces of the time, it is more difficult to deal with the busy and painful minds that are not satisfied with the time being seen. Sometimes, when I visit the place where traces are gathered, they are stuffed with a band around them. I want to leave a few things and pass on the story”. (From the artist’s project notes.) (Figs. 31, 32, 33) 

6. Ha Sangcheol (aka. HASC), NaN (December 12-19, 2015) 

Ha Sangcheol made the space of Project 7½ in Mullae-dong function as a complete artwork, and not merely as an ‘exhibition gallery’. The ceiling of the space has a small hole, which connects to the entrance floor of a business called ‘Clover Metals.’ It looks like a device used to spy on the ground floor from an underground tunnel. The iron plate covering this hole seems intact during the business hours of ‘Clover Metals’, and when the store is closed, the bottom plate cannot be opened because the security shutter presses down on it. Only half of the uncovered plates are visible from the outside. Ha Sungcheol’s work made full use of the physical characteristics of the space, harnessing the electrical current of the underground space to strike the iron plates installed in the ceiling with beams of light. The Morse code signal ‘SOS’, generated by the installation, was transmitted not only to visitors to the underground space but also to people walking on the street. In this way, space was converted into an object that sent out repeated signals. The SOS message was created through alternating states of darkness and light, silence and sound. The audience was left to wonder who might be the intended recipient of the message? The exhibition title ‘nan’ is a combination of English letters ‘SOS (‘sos’ to be exact)’ typed on Korean keyboards; this combination of Korean letters pronounced as “nan” does not have a meaning in the Korean language (Fig. 34).