SPACE December 2024 (No. 685)
Installation view of Midday’s Exploded Corner (2024) ©Hong Cheolki
While activities exploring the possibilities of the present era’s virtual spaces are taking place both inside and outside the art world, ‘Kaleido’, an exhibition that critically reflects on virtual space, is on display at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) Gallery MUN until Dec. 8. Yun Hojin’s MAC OS Mojave Day Screensaver (2024) captures how the actual Mojave Desert has been considered a virtual space since it became the default screensaver on MacBooks, while Ki Seulgi’s Black Light (2022/2024) focuses on black, the colour that reveals the materiality of a monitor’s screen. Hong Soohyun’s installation, in-between (2024), which can be read in conjunction with the DDP space, portrays a similar circulation to that of the exhibition space, but uses roughly textured wood to create an unsettling visual experience. In terms of architects, Midday (co-principals, Oh Yeonjoo, Jeong Haewook) are participating with Exploded Corner (2024). In this project, Midday, who have been developing their thinking on the ‘order and aesthetics behind the architectural skin’, focus on the tile as a finish material, arguing that most finishes in physical real space are a trick. Typically, thin tiles designed to look like stone run the risk of revealing their thickness when they reach the corners of a building, and so, to hide this, the edges of the tiles are cut at an angle and those surfaces are glued together. They subvert this convention by reversing the front surfaces of the tiles, which are supposed to suggest the appearance of stone, and making the 45-degree corners visible from the front. To look at their work is to question the true reality of architecture, yet in Architecture as Fabulated Reality (2020), the book they co-authored, Midday have already come to the bold conclusion that architecture is virtual to begin with. This exhibition is a group show arranged by independent curator Kim Malgeum as part of the DDP Open Curating Project, which has been discovering emerging curators and designers since 2015.
