Seoyoung Bae, Hyunji Lee

Duration: April 10 – 30, 2016

Opening: Saturday April 9, 2016

Venue: 15 Jongno 22-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea

Opening hours: Monday to Saturday between 11am and 5pm. (Closed on Sundays, but visitors may view the artworks through the window of the Project 7 1/2 space.)

Supported by Seoul Metropolitan Government, Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture

Artist Seoyoung Bae has continued her exploration of iron plates since first being introduced to the material last year for her collaboration with Project 7 1/2 in the Mullae-dong steel district. Bae experiments with iron plates in various ways: she sprays chemicals on them to study how they react; she mixes and stacks them up with other materials; she repeatedly beats, grinds or polishes them. For the first edition of Project 7 1/2, she questioned the difference between art and non-art by displaying incomplete works in progress. Through her collaboration with 7 1/2, a project that explores how art and artists function within communities and society, as well as her experimentation with the materiality of iron plates, Bae investigates the themes of “relationship” and “labor.” She also reflects on the life of artists, which by nature is unstable both financially and professionally. To secure the resources to continue her work as an artist, she joins the studio of a famous artist where she works not as an equal, but as staff. As she supplies her labor to produce the work of the famous artist, and sees the work being exhibited as the sole creation of the famous artist and sold for millions of won, she finds herself once again on the borderline between art and non-art. For the Project 7 1/2 exhibition in Jongno 3-ga, Bae applies the production methods that she learned at the studio of the famous artist, and proposes the resulting artwork, this time, as her own.

For this exhibition, artist Hyunji Lee observes then condenses into her work, the sensations she felt when walking the alleys of Jongno 3-ga where Project 7 1/2 is taking place this year. She focuses on the traces and vestiges of the area—traces and vestiges of those who have intervened in the area to carry out their goals or functions. They remind Lee of people growing plants to decorate their space or get consolation. The traces found in Jongno 3-ga may be more practical and crude than aesthetic, but the artist nonetheless discovers many imprints of lives accumulated over a long period of time, and attempts to express the hard work and effort that they contain through her work—plant pots made of ceramic—which in turn coexists in the everyday life of the area now. Lee’s plant pots intervene in the Project 7 1/2 space where they function as works of art during the exhibition period. However, for passers-by of Jongno 3-ga, they may just be perceived as discarded objects in the street. Whether her work will be read as the work of an artist or go unnoticed needs to be seen. Through her work, viewers are led to question what kind of values art can create and its role in everyday life.