모래성쌓기: sandcastle building
2024 bass wood, vertical cement, sand, ceramic ball, contact mic, dimension variable
For many people, an object can be a symbol and medium of economic exchange, a sign of social culture, or a place to sustain emotion and memory. Objects can become an extension of our personality and how we present ourselves to the world. We can glimpse a person’s values by looking at the objects around them. As Bruno Latour writes, “Objects cannot exist independently without being imbued with human presence, and the more modern and complex they are, the more they are imbued with human activity.” Interpreting the objects around us is essential to understanding ourselves and how consumer society operates. When objects are removed from their usual places, rich cultural and historical dimensions can be revealed, and the objects become worth studying. Between the chopsticks and the fork, more than just the manner of eating looms. The things we touch, buy, and miss in our daily encounters guide us in subtle ways, and exploring our interactions with the objects around us is crucial to our understanding of our place in society.
Artist Hyoju Cheon, with performers Chaesong Kim and Ari LaMora, will present a performance at the opening of the exhibition. Around Cheon’s sculpture, their bodies rotate, fold, and dance in space, moving from regular traveling speeds to long, gentle, slow movements, then back to regular gestures, and so on. Hyoju Cheon’s sculpture is a metaphor for the objects and phenomena that are often ignored in our efficient daily lives. By touching the artwork, the performers can genuinely feel the texture of the sculpture as an object, which is contrary to the concept of the rarified art object protected behind glass. This tactile experience challenges the artwork’s commodity status and instead aligns it with the warmth and play of everyday objects and spaces. This slow interaction brings the viewer, the space, and the objects within it closer together and prompts deeper thinking about this intimacy. In the relentless stream of consumer goods in capitalist societies, our perception of objects becomes distorted. We constantly seek to fill our inner emptiness with one commodity after another, yet this pursuit causes us to overlook and miss out on grasping the true nature of objects. As explored by Jane Bennett in her book Vibrant Matter, “the sheer volume of commodities, and the hyper-consumptive necessity of junking them to make room for new ones, conceals the vitality of matter.” The performance resists the rapid change and ruthless efficiency of our meritocratic society. During the performance, time seems to slow down, even stand still. it practices the sense of “pause” proposed by Han in The Burnout Society: “Pure positive wisdom expands what is already there, and truly turning to the other requires a negatory pause.” In this positive society, excessive stimulation, fragmentation of information, and diminishing interpersonal relationships produce mental obstruction, causing us to lose our contemplative focus. In the performance, Cheon adds and emphasizes a playfulness of atmosphere and movement. Between fun and wit, the performance explores the attitude of breaking out of the established paradigm and finding self-balance in today’s doping society. From a carefree childhood to an atom in a compressed, homogenized society, the individual’s social experience and ideological transformation are worthy of profound reflection. Between the play and the chance to slow down, we can explore our bodies, memories, and spaces anew.
Han observes, “There is also contemplative concentration to interpret what is suspended, what is hidden or fleeting.” Cheon’s performance leads the audience away from triviality and complexity, even if only for a brief moment, encouraging us to find power in pausing and tranquility.
Writing by Yuxuan Jas Sun
Performance on April 18th at 5:30 PM and 7:30 PM at the Pfizer Building, Flushing Ave, Brooklyn