Joong Yong Kim

Collaboration: Mijin Hyun.
Residency period: March-April 2021
Website 

March 2019

Realised with the help of Mijin Hyun, Joong Yong’s work in Blanca begins with his playful attitude. He arrived in Blanca with the idea to work with wine, an important element of the culture of art events in western Europe. He was interested in provoking the parallels between how we consume and value wine, and how we consume and value art. In the first work presented, three wines, with pretty different prices, are presented as stains on paper, pushing our appreciation of these wines further into the realm of subjectivity. What is the role of expertise and what is the role of subjectivity in deciding how valuable something is?

In the second piece, he has brought with him from Berlin nameplates that were originally created for other artworks, and transplanted them as nameplates attached to his installations of objects and items taken from around Blanca, considering how elements of an exhibition such as these act as signifiers, shaping our understanding and guiding our attention.

Presented in the context of an open studios event, these works question notions of value and perception through disrupting usual patterns of observation, presentation and context, providing new speculative framings of situations which trouble the idea of objectivity.

April 2019

In the second month of his residency Joong Yong has explored the spatial context in which artwork is produced and presented. He bought some sticky yellow flypaper, to which insects stick, become trapped and die. This utilitarian household material is defamiliarised, presented in a white frame which demands our contemplation of the fly paper’s aesthetic qualities. In the larger piece, an ignored or maligned guest of the open studios is elevated, presented as the artwork, which changes over time with the movement of the population of insects in the air in the space. In the second piece, the sheets of fly paper were given to other residents of Blanca, who left them in their homes and then brought them back to the studio to be presented.

Far from Joong Yong making the image, or even an artist that we would define as such from an anthropocentric point of view, it is the flies which enact the creative decision making through their unfortunate choice of direction. The context provokes us to find aesthetic value in the patterns of the dead bodies, which begs us to question our anthropocentric valuation. By inserting an artwork into a space, the space is changed, a similar change of perception occurs when we perceive the same space as both studio and habitat for flies.