SPACE July 2023 (No. 668)
Exhibition view of ‘The Recipe for Rawness’ ©Han Garam
In Daelim-dong, Seoul’s ‘little China’, LOSTON (2023) opened, which is markedly different from the surrounding buildings. The supporting slabs resemble boulders, and some of them protrude out of the glass curtain wall. To be precise, it is an artificial structure in the shape of a rock. What kind of story did Jeong Euiyeob (principal, AND) hope to tell through LOSTON?
Before designing LOSTON, during the pandemic, Jeong was working on his project MELTING HOUSE (2022) in Jeju Island. While walking on the beach, his gaze was drawn to the rocks, and he was fascinated by the way they were placed within the environment, how they interacted with passersby, and by their primal textures and colours. His interest in rocks appears in his paintings, but it doesn’t stop there, extending to his architectural works. The oil painting Melting Boundaries (2022) depicts something like a stone cave melting in the sunlight, blurring its boundaries, which is similar to a MELTING HOUSE, which blurs the boundaries between inside and outside with its porous walls and circulating space. The fascination with rocks continues into LOSTON, a café and gallery. The artificial rocks here are columns, furniture, planters, and sometimes rooms. Looking at the mossy models of rocks and the sketches of people sitting and resting on them, it is clear that Jeong wanted to awaken experiences and sensations with the natural landscape that we have lost in the city. Jeong’s paintings and architectural works that illustrate this ‘rawness’ architectural ‘recipe’ are on view in the gallery on the fourth floor of LOSTON until Sep. 3.
You can see more information on the SPACE No. 668 (July 2023).
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