SPACE February 2025 (No. 687)
Installation view of Tak Young-jun’s Love at First Sight on Monday (2024) ©Kim Hyerin
Installation view of Choi Jangwon’s The Wanderer’s Pavilion: On Temporality and Lightness (2024) ©Kim Hyerin
On Dec. 17, 2024, ‘The 24th SONGEUN Art Award’ opened at Songeun Art Center. This exhibition features various works from 20 shortlisted artists (or teams) all featured as part of the SONGEUN Art Award. Among those outstanding competitors, Tak Young-jun won the grand prize on Jan. 7, 2025. Tak Young-jun based in both Berlin and Seoul, has consistently shown an interest in the intersection between queer identity, religious beliefs, and a unique sense of placeness and expressed the interest in various forms of visual media including video, sculpture, and two-dimensional forms. Love at First Sight on Monday (2024), the award-winning work, is the finale in his contemporary dance film trilogy, following his first film, Wish You a Lovely Sunday (2021), and the second, Love Your Clean Feet on Thursday (2023). The last film begins with two teenage girls dancing in front of a 12th-century Norwegian medieval church. Each of them interprets their parents’ love stories through choreography; here, verbal language is transformed into a physical form of expression. Later the background shifts to that of a large retired aircraft, and two queer male dancers take over their stage and continue their performance. The stories that were transmitted orally are visualised in their dance. Through these movements, the old church and airplane have been recontextualised and reborn as new spaces. The remaining yet to be visualised images are subsequently narrated by their offspring, by strangers, or by the act of filming. Finally, his work is inspired by Lars Mytting’s novel The Bell in the Lake (2019) as it undergoes reinterpretation by its audience. The organic structure of the storytelling creates a mulitiplicity of meaning within the choreographic context. The film audiences can appreciate the sister installation work, a bronze bell titled Dangling (2024) through the glass window of the exhibition space. Alongside Tak Young-jun’s work, other notable works by 20 shortlisted artists are also introduced across the exhibition. Interestingly, this year’s exhibition is a showcase of works that interrogate different advanced technologies. They reflect on how technology, including but not limited to artificial intelligence (AI), big data, augmented virtuality (AV), and holograms, have influenced contemporary art and those young ambitious artists. To be more specific, a fragmented installation work that materialises new software, and a sensuous artwork that depicts a vision of a futuristic imagination allows visitors to observe how contemporary artists digest their vision of the future. The exhibition also features work that touches on the reinterpretation of traditional genres, such as a geometric pavilion that blurs architectural grammar (Choi Jangwon, The Wanderer’s Pavilion: On Temporality and Lightness) or a folding screen that creates a contemporary reinterpretation of East Asian panting (Jin Minwook, A piece of spring). At the end of the exhibition, visitors will be able to reflect on how love might be reproduced or reinterpreted through technology, and, furthermore, what would be the consequence of this new vision of love. The exhibition leaves the door open to visitors until Feb. 24.
