Ji Kwon

Situated Residencial Program | May 2019

In the first month of her residency in Blanca, Ji has begun a project which explores the relationship and parallels between meticulously planned behaviours and primitive behaviours that escape such careful planning. She uses her personal OCD rituals as a point from which to begin her practice.

Beginning with sleeping, drinking water, eating, cleaning the body, and recording as primitive behaviours for which rituals are both a necessity and something constructed, Ji has created garments. These garments become specific to these behaviours through incorporating details which simultaneously create new possibilities of behaving and engaging with the immediate environment while restricting the wearer to these behaviours.

In this month’s Open Studio she presents detailed prototypes and sketches of the final garments, alongside a recording of her voice reading careful and exact instructions that ritualise these five behaviours. The garments are organised in their presentation in a way that reflects how her practice questions and reshapes differentiations between daily behaviour and artistic behaviour.

“The first garment is about sleeping. In western culture stripes were used for pyjamas and bed linen to protect the sleeping body. The second garment is for drinking water, incorporating structures from the garments of zen buddhist monks who practice the complex rituals of tea culture. White  dining napkins and tablecloths are the reference for the garment for eating. I personally have used waterproof fabric which I find more relieving since the stains are easily removable even during eating. Cleaning is a very personal behavior, thus this garment completely covers the body. The material is going to be made from towel-like absorbent fabric and the color light yellow. The color is a reminder of the tiredness that lies within all these rituals. I repeat the actions to protect something, to reach somewhere perfect, or to completely remove something dirty or evil away from myself.”

BIO 

Having majored in industrial design at Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and studied in the fashion department at Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, Ji Kwon now lives and works in the place of her birth: the northern district of Nowon in Seoul. From last year she began to making garments and videos which are hard to define as design or fashion pieces. She explores the designed and undesigned, planned and unplanned world. The garments she makes are objects that can be worn on the body and kept close, becoming a medium that conveys a system (planned world). She records the movements of people in these garments through video.