Penetrating our everyday lives, it seems nearly impossible to imagine the world these days without delivery. The spread of high-speed internet services and the growth of single households, along with the advancement of the delivery system, has helped free such services of limitations and make available myriad items and accessible the remotest of places. The competition between service brands, including promises such as one-day delivery, before- sunrise-delivery, and express-delivery, are higher and more in demand than ever. One artist is attempting to capture this social phenomenon, transferring it into their interrogative art pieces. Her name is Koo Donghee, an installation artist. The exhibition, ‘Delivery’, which will be held from July 20 July to Sep. 1 at Art Sonje Center, will be Koo’s first solo exhibition in five years after her inclusion in the ‘A Way of Replay’ exhibition, after winning the artist of the year in 2014 at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Entering the exhibition space, there is a video clip playing and projected onto the wall. From this video, the audience can experience the entire route of delivery on the way to the customer, before the exhibition. Linear and non-linear structures are placed in a single flow while props from artist’s personal collection and creative works are laid here and there.
Art pieces such as steps covered with the actual images of pizza slices or a bunch of flyers with little coupons at the bottom, or disposable items in a hole in the middle of the structure that cross the centre of the exhibition hall, are laid throughout the exhibition hall without captions. The design of the exhibition hall and all the installation works correspond with each other. Koo weighs in the delivery as a social phenomenon without providing additional criticism or social analysis. She only pays attention to the entirety of delivery process, consisting of movement, direction and perspective expressed in three-dimensional exhibition spaces. Visitors make their own experiences while wandering on and about the exhibition space in the absence of instructions or an order. As such, the artist catches extraordinary elements in our routine lives, to be interpreted in installations and images in space. The artist has materialised an invisible element of reality. Delivery will offer an opportunity to think about this social phenomenon, the enormity and significance of delivery systems ? the most familiar yet also the network under the greatest degree of dramatic change in the modern world - as seen through an artist’s lens.
Images courtesy of Art Sonje Center