Seoyoung Stephanie Bae

June 20 – July 18, 2015, / Every Saturday 1 – 5 pm

Opening Reception: June 20, 2015, 4 pm

Venue: 1, Dorim-ro 128ga-gil, Yeongdeungpo-gu, Seoul, Korea​

Pollination, the title of the second Project 7 1/2, represents the idea of a “mediator.” Its narrative takes on the form of documenting the events and experiences that link the first project, Functional Dissonance, to the second project, Pollination.

Sunyoung Oh (curator), March-May 2015, 54 Mullae-dong 3-ga a

I felt every bit of the sense of unease that everyone—from the participants to the ironworkers of the Mullae-dong area—experienced during the first tour organized on March 13 for the first project of 7 1/2, Functional Dissonance, and I must admit that it took me some time and effort to digest and get over that uncomfortable feeling.

As the title suggests, I knew in advance when I started planning for Functional Dissonance that various forms of dissonance and conflict could occur in the process of proceeding with the project. Since these were circumstances that were bound to happen in bringing different elements to function together, I told myself that I would play the role of mediator and embrace the uneasy situations as they occurred. I explained the nature of the project to the participating artists. Although the compromises we made were less than perfect, we were more or less able to reach a middle ground, and it was not too painful for everyone to adapt to the new conditions. I think that what we experienced was a form of dissonance that was still at an acceptable level, although offensive or uncomfortable to a certain degree. However, the unforeseen intervention of the ironworkers during the tour and staging of the film script on March 13 was a dramatic turn of events that maximized the project’s functional Dissonance. The climax of the tour, as well as the film, was provided by the ironworkers.

Following the incident, I could not bring myself to go back to Mullae-dong. Many thoughts ran through my mind, from whether I would be able to carry out the projects that I had planned in this neighbourhood to whether I had made the right decision in choosing Mullae-dong as the site of Project 7 1/2 this year, to begin with. I felt a bit sceptical and helpless. As a solution, I decided that I would open my exhibition to the general audience every Saturday afternoon from 1 to 5 pm. I would only come to Mullae-dong during these hours for observation. One such Saturday, as usual, I was down in the exhibition room. Experimental film director Kim Sook-Hyun and assistant producer Yoon Joo-young were with me. The cold inside being unbearable, we decided to go out for some sunlight. With my two colleagues at my tail, I was going up the narrow stairs when I ran into Mr. Manho from the second floor. We exchanged hearty greetings, and Mr. Manho invited me to join him outside for a mini barbecue. I hesitated because, to be honest, the thought of a barbecue with total strangers, not to mention in the middle of a dusty alley between steel mills, was not very tempting. However, it was a chance to talk with people from the neighbourhood, and I accepted his kind gesture. The three of us followed Mr. Manho to where the other ironworkers were gathered. Mr. Manho introduced me as the young lady in her 20’s who had just moved into the basement floor. (Ha-ha.) It was a good decision to join Mr. Manho because, since that day, I have gotten to know my neighbours better. Since introducing myself officially to the ironworkers, we have grown more comfortable with each other. Anyway, going back to the mini barbecue, we were talking about this and that when the owner of Daeryuk Steel Company mentioned that he wanted to change his signboard and asked me if we also did such things. I accepted on the spot without giving it a second thought, and that is how this year’s second 7 1/2 project in Mullae-dong began.

I was looking for an artist who could express his or her observations and understandings of the Mullae-dong iron district from a “pure” point of view. By “pure,” I mean without any prejudice about the Mullae-dong iron district due to a lack of prior knowledge or experience of the area. During that time, I got to know artist Bae Seo-young by chance. We talked about her work, and I spontaneously asked her if she would not be interested in using the Mullae-dong exhibition space as her studio and observe and get inspiration from the area for her work. (I always enjoy these kinds of spontaneous adventures!) More concretely, I suggested that she could start with the Daeryuk Steel Company signboard and mural painting. And so Daeryuk and Project 7 1/2 came together under the common link of artist Bae. Or, from another point of view, we could say that Project 7 1/2 and Bae came together with the Mullae-dong iron district through Daeryuk. Through Bae, I came to study and experience how the people coexisting in the Mullae-dong iron district communicated with each other. At least during the project, there was laughter around us, and everyone seemed happy. I definitely felt that our surroundings were changing since our intervention in the area.

Mr. Choi (company owner): Why are artists crawling into Mullae-dong?

Artist Yeom: The rent is cheap.

Mr. Park: 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.

Seoyoung Stephanie Bae (artist), May – June 2015, 54 Mullae-dong 3-ga 

I happened to visit Mullae-dong for an exhibition in the winter of 2013. It was kind of a strange location for someone like me who had been away for years to study in the U.S. and did not have a lot of exposure to the Korean art scene. However, even at a first glimpse, it was easy to see that mundane traces of ironwork had settled down as a regional culture in the district. I could also sense by the occasional exhibition posters hanging above iron gates or the ginnels’ mural paintings that immigrants were coexisting in the iron district.

This spring, I ran into the curator of Project 7 1/2, 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 holds a relay 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 the immigrants. 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 had a chance at understanding 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 tried to approach 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 Mullae-dong iron district will lead to organic creation.

Seoyoung Stephanie Bae believes that arts may well be the media to immunize the human sensory system’s numbness. In terms of the subordination to electronic technology, the modern world has been civilized away from life’s intrinsic sensibility. Her perspective focuses on a holistic, organic structure of society while she contemplates the morphosis of life.

Seoyoung Stephanie Bae received a B.F.A. from New York University in 2013. In the recent past, she was selected as a resident artist of the Young Eun Artist in Residence Program at Youngeun Museum of Contemporary Art (Gwangju, 2015). She had a solo exhibition Reboot Everything during the residency program at Gyeonggi Creation Center (Ansan, 2014). She has participated in various group exhibitions, including Spotted (Art Center Pplus, Seoul, 2014), Harboring a Superfluid (Commons Gallery, NY, 2013), Between Signs and Symbols (NYU Barney, NY, 2012), 7 people 7 colours (Korea National University of the Arts, Seoul, 2010), Invisible City (TheUniversity of the Arts, PA, 2009). She also had curatorial experiences such as Mural Project (Children of Promise, NY, 2012) and Gong: Zaq (共:作) (Gyeonggi Creation Center, Ansan, 2013).

Seoyoung Stephanie Bae wrote artist Note​ in August 2015

The damp basement where I had been working in Mullae-dong in old western Seoul was poorly ventilated. It was located in a narrow, lousy, and noisy street lining with many ironworking small factories. Whenever I was walking on the street surrounded by high rising very modern apartments from Mullae subway station’s exit to my temporary atelier, a thought suddenly came up in my mind that every relationship in one’s life is originated and built up under the influence of matter of labour.

My work in Mullae-dong had been developed quite differently, compared to the procedure that I used to do. Interaction with the environment surrounding me was important, especially sharp contrasting views of streets of the region. Despite the landscape that I had never been used to, in some sense, I had been pleasant during a month-long period of my work in the place. A few ironworkers I encountered during my working of a mural painting on the street in front of the atelier became interested in what I was doing and talked to me with curiosity. Series of short conversations with them brought a stable friendly relationship. They sometimes came down to the basement, the atelier, and nagged like a slight banter at me with saying jokingly “What on earth could this be art?”. At the same time, they were very appreciative of the artist’s efforts representing their lives in this harsh town. When I showed up late than usual, they kibitzed me that in their way of greeting to friends and showed a delightful welcoming smile on my greetings of waving hands even in the middle of their workings. As time went by, I could feel some fellowship between myself and my ironworkers’ 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 weird to find comments about Mullae-dong in internet space during my work there. Many essays and comments were under titles meaning ‘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. 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 by defining to render symbolic purpose. In this case, ‘arts’ may easily be misread in our perception as ‘a superior’ to ‘wage earner.’

As the electric internet system as mass media has been developed greatly, they expanded to our perception of things more and more. Sometimes, I feel as if all my sensory systems are depending on electric media. This gives me awful not just because of causing an unpleasant feeling but of being in fear of losing humanity. This is the reason why I have consistently thought of defending myself against all these electric media rather than adopting this dreadful electric civilization. Consequently, I am a smartphone user but don’t manipulate it smartly. I am very uncomfortable to see that electric media often provide distorted image and information far from the reality of community and individual life. It is painful to observe that distorted image and information consolidated by mass media remains as unavoidable hurdle leaving a wide distance between reality and our social perception. Some voices are worrying about the ill function of mass media that distort artists’ goodwill to keep the regional culture in Mullae-dong in our present World.

Iron sheet commonly used at iron factories in this street was selected for my work because it represents well such dissonance circumstances. The solidity of the iron sheet may represent a rigid line between personal life and community. In contrast, iron can be easily oxidized by moisture in the damp basement and become swollen by corrosion, compared to living creatures. Solid but growing, due to its nature, the iron sheet was thought the best material to represent my understanding of people’s perception in the modern world of mass media, dull but changing hopefully. I had to spend a long time skin off iron sheet by grinding with a machine for shining surface, while ironworkers welded pieces together. Unexpectedly, these contradictory movements of working between ironworkers and me spun off such kind dissonance in my mind. Ironically, for some reason, however, a harmonious balance between the neighbouring ironworkers and me bloomed despite the dissonance of working behaviours. Those opposite concentrations were crossing to make a junction in the process of our works.

The painting collage work, <54, Mullae 3rd street>, was made out of cutting a huge long iron sheet into pieces and combining by welding. Corrosion work was applied to the ground surface to replicate my movement and its time relations. The iron sheet’s surface was swollen like ground flowers, and tiny pieces fell on the floor from the exhibition’s rusty surface. The solidity of iron had been changed to a living creature, at least in my mind.

Due to the nature of iron, material required professional skills in the process of manipulation. Eventually, I needed ironworkers’ special skills to proceed with my works even to the last moment to nail it on the wall at the basement hall. My artwork could not be completed without collaboration with ironworkers. Different working objectives and processes resulted in artistic work. Specially, Mr. Choi, the Daeryuk Industry owner co. had contributed greatly to all my works in Mullae-dong throughout the project, not only practical processes but also inspiration. This experience has given me to find a deeper side of relations of life and things. The project was set off for pondering what relevant and harmonious ways of regional coexistence would be like. However, a month-long journey allowed me to understand how to embrace and live with other lives rather than struggle to fulfil my duty as a participating artist. Just like pollination, I was moved to Mullae-dong, and even with a short period of time, I had done very pleasurable labour by permeating myself through experiencing regional culture and life. I wish my work in the coming days would still exist in society as a ‘dissonance’ to embrace relations of life for the harmonic balance.