Text of Sensibility of Urban Space
Through his works, artist Kim Jung-mo pays attention to a particular sense under the reality of a kind of jamais vu, where a person feels something familiar turns suddenly into a strange one, which is derived from his experience of dynamically changing modern urban space, and it makes especially him get a sense of loss with the comparison of such urban places built on artificial construction with the very nature that relatively seems to have tendency of slowness. All of that matters to him. The change of existing landscapes accustomed to the artist such as buildings, structures, bus stops or trails provokes enough the feeling of something lost, even often shakes mind of ordinary, unexpectedly alienating him from such familiarity. From the view of an artist, he puts those experiences on the works and chooses the method of ‘Good bye’ a particular text selected by the artist, which is transformed into a type of billboard, one of the characteristics urban space has at dawn being thought to most heighten sensibility. The artist builds this as a form of photograph and spaces selected by him appear to make spectators feel a sense of difference as if they are montage photographs by the text of ‘Good bye.’ This text has the form of billboard but brings us to a delicate atmosphere that cannot be found at commercial billboards in the normal urban space when considering its location and surroundings.
The artist intends to adopt the text of ‘Good bye’ as a tool to break up daily monotony felt with the landscape of urban space. It could be perhaps understood that urban space accepts 'liquidity' and 'mobility', two pillars of urbanity, goes through familiarity and then is destined to dailiness. His combination of ‘Good bye’ and such sensibility, stuck in a rut by the speed of urban dailiness, however, could be the act of pushing a 'stop' button to that habitual sense of routine. Besides, what is interesting is that he himself visits all the places and installs billboards and takes the picture of them instead of using more convenient way like computer graphics technology to get synthetic montage-pictures which need only landscape photos of urban space and transforms his experiences into a conceptual text and again into a photographic reality, resulting in having the audience feel sensual experiences for the reality and the subsequent reason from their multi-layered construction. It seems that the text, as a character that proclaims the stop of sense or of connection of urban space interfered by artificial structures, continues to change image-text indicating urban space and its symbolic relations, which after all plays the role of strengthening its meaning.
In particular, the use of scenes that seem like something fiction of montage but expresses reality might be a formative way to intensify the awakening of the reality of urbanity which is felt as a fiction by him.
Having often felt some embarrassment with urban space that is fundamentally built on unpredictability, he tries to have opportunities for stopping or disconnecting from the urban reality and leave sensibility accumulated in daily life and find points he can independently have the sense of reality in his works, and in that sense, it is notable that the artist starts with his own visual sensibility of urban space and invites people to think comprehensibly relations between the images of urban space and the text that implies the artistic concept.
Lee, Seung Hoon
curator of Cyart space
July 29th 2013
Artist statement
I was born and raised in
Seoul, which is one of the largest metropolitan cities in the world. It is a
city where its traditions have rapidly been alienated along a series of tragic historical
events. It is one of the fastest changing cities. The area I grew up is still
in the map, but there is not a trace of the former neighborhood left in the
area. The changes are so widespread and so common-place that everyone living in
the city probably has experienced them.
I believe that the vague,
but clearly present, sense of loss I feel comes from this experience of living
in the city. I am particularly interested in inter-personal relations, and in
the relationship between people and place. I believe that while people’s lives are
becoming more complex than ever, and their scope of activities broader than
ever, their relationship with people and objects around them is becoming
weaker. Through my own experience, I realized that such relationships break up
easily, and I came to take interest in the sense of loss that one feels from
trivial matters in everyday life.
I like to observe what
is around me and to collect visual signs that are universally understood. This
habit of observation allows me to have a distance from my own everyday affairs.
A particular moment in everyday life prompts in what is universal a sense that
it is very particular. I focus on scenes that surround such an instance, and on
the feelings people show through behaviours that are universal. Using objects from everyday life, I create devices that
evoke particularly strong feelings I experience in my everyday life and bring
them back to the spaces of everyday life.
I want my works to be
seen in everyday landscape. For that reason, I prefer materials that can be
easily found in everyday life. I have performed a kind of ritual of delivering
a message on pedestrian streets that I pass through every day; I have used the
door to my studio as part of my work, trying to experience the every-day door
in a different way; and I have installed in the studio a number of works that
can be found through everyday activities.
Jung Mo Kim
Jan 21st 2014