As Woo Euijung, a principal of METAA Architects & Associates (METAA), an architectural firm that co-organised the exhibition, stated, ‘REAL-Real City’ is ‘not an exhibition for Yi Jongho, but an exhibition that Yi might himself have done’. The title of the exhibition was also hinted at in the expression he used. REAL-Reality is not a concept of ‘hiding behind superficial reality’, but rather the notion of capturing something found that would be ‘flowing through the recesses of the city’.▼1 In an essay discussing the importance of the architect’s perception of reality, Yi also pointed out the following: ‘If we are [...] talking about reality, but not talking about “real” reality, and we’re not based on it, [...] then, it means we continue to produce our own “virtuality” in the name of “reality”’.▼2
The curators took over this critical mind. They found clues to the exhibition by tracking interest from daily life since the 2000s that was highlighted in the cultural and artistic scenes and pop culture as well as in the architectural world. Moreover, they tried to come up with a ‘real’ reality that has become more difficult to reach due to the myriad of today’s urban everyday lived realities.
Subsequent Questions from Yi Jongho
After completing his curriculum in Korea, Yi mastered practical work in the 1980s at Space Group led by Kim Swoo Geun. In the 1990s, he designed the Yuljeon Church (1993) and the Barunson Center (1994) with Yang Namchul. In the 2000s, he continued his work to the Park Soo Keun Museum (2002) and Nogunri Peace Museum (2010), while expanding his scope of activities to urban and public research, including the Gwangju Cultural City Research, Suncheon Cultural City Research, and Sewoon Sangga Area Recycling Project. This career left him a man ‘often standing at the inflexion point of the generation and of the agenda’.▼3 In other words, Yi Jongho wanted to discover the peculiar realities of our city as he witnessed the realistic architecture that the Korean architectural community was interested in or the attitude he wanted to find the problems of Korean architecture ‘now and here’ in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
The Archive Room on the first floor of the exhibition hall displayed traces of his agonising efforts to reach beyond the limits of architecture and records his attitude toward architecture and the city. From his laptop computer, the collection of the Korean National University of Arts and fellow architects, the METAA and the archives of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art were selected and sorted. He embraced various discourses and worked with fellow architects, scholars and students to create his ideals, in an attempt to apply his ideals to Korean cities. This also offered a background to his deep dive into reality. The Archive Room materials including his activities at the Seoul School of Architecture (SA) and his work as an educator with students at the Korea National University of Arts, which were instrumental in expanding the architectural problems of Korean architects into the urban realm, here present his efforts to discover the reality of the Korean city. Given that this practice was conducted with colleagues and students, the Archive Room is more than a place to pay tribute to individuals. On the other side of the Archive Room, questions about the role and public nature of architecture, both of which he wanted to explore, were spread once more between those who were his students or colleagues. Kim Sungwoo (principal, N.E.E.D. Architecture) showed his concerns about small residential areas, which are considered to have poor living conditions, and the architectural answer to them as A Retrospective Research on the Small Scale Housing Block in Seoul. This work is an extension of a series of studies he conducted with Yi Jongho. Jo Jinman (principal, Jo Jinman Architects) talked about how to promote public sector expansion, introducing projects that have intervened in separate urban organisations, like the spaces under the elevated road.
Woo Euijung, who has worked with Yi for 25 years, questioned the concept of shared and private ownership in The Time Shared with Architect Yi Jongho, and also created the Marronnier Pavilion at the entrance to the museum with Yi Sangjin (METAA). The pavilion, which is made of steel pipes and acrylics, was arranged in the form of a passage between the Arko Art Center and Marronnier Park, two public areas that are adjacent but have different management entities. It marks the attempt to visualise the city’s invisible borders while tying them together at the same time.
Movements Towards Urban Realities
In an interview in 2013, Yi Jongho described the ongoing changes in Seoul by using a concept of ‘succession’. It is a ecological term that refers to the phenomenon of cluster changes over time in one place, and Yi has drawn it into the architectural and urban context. And he interpreted the city as a kind of ecosystem that changes through the interaction of various factors, not as an object in which to stay still. He said, ‘succession happens drastically over a short period of time, with the cycle now taking place in Seoul about every five to six years. The phenomenon in Seoul is a consistent repetition of succession’.▼4
The artists who participated in the exhibition looked into the city with the concept of succession proposed by Yi Jongho. First of all, Kim Mooyoung, Kim Jaekyeong and Kim Taeheon recorded the city’s succession respectively through photos or videos. Kim Mooyoung’s Surveying Landscapes is a documentary that captures the old neighbourhood of Seoul at a slow pace, and the static neighbourhood scenery in the video indicates that it will soon disappear. Unlike Kim Mooyoung, who recorded the demolition or loss of the site, Kim Jaekyeong took pictures of places already erased from the city. Around 470 photos, relocated in the exhibition hall in a threechannel video format, show the narrative of exclusion taking place throughout the city, the following oblivion and the repetition of the phenomenon. Meanwhile, Kim Taeheon presented personally recorded writings and photos about Seongnam City under the title Writing Seongnam City. It is a work which reveals the possibility of private-level stories expressed as public-levels. Jung Jaeho’s painting District 4, and Oh Minwook’s video New Construction were revisits to areas covered by previous work. Through these revisitations, it captures the time in which urban space was being renewed and identifies the capital-driven changes in urban space as new ruins or debris.
If earlier works preferred to look into the succession of the city, Listen to the City and Hwang Jie-eun (professor, University of Seoul) tried to intervene in this process. Listen to the City’s Atlas of Cheonggyecheon is a video clip that captures the back of the ongoing redevelopment around Cheonggyecheon- Euljiro areas. They continue to visit the site and band together with those driven out by the redevelopment and raise questions about the direction of urban planning. Hwang Jie-eun brought about Sewoon Campus of the University of Seoul to the gallery. In the course of architectural education at Sewoon Campus, video footage showed the industrial ecology and community interacting with each other, and a study model produced in the process was installed on one side of the exhibition hall. Through this process, she tried to find the agreement between architectural education and the field by taking the long accumulation of experience and the hightech production Sewoon Plaza area into account.
Yi Jongho’s questions, which diagnosed urban phenomena under the concept of ‘succession’ six years ago, are still valid in 2019. The participants in the exhibition raised issues by showing the process of responding or adapting to the city’s succession in their own way. All of these processes contain a willingness to visualise a long-accumulated interest in our city and in its background.
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1. Kim Heon, Yi Jongho, Chung Guyon, Jo Seong Ryong, ‘REAL-Reality’, Mokpo, A City of Conversion, SA Summer Workshop, 2004.
2. Yi Jongho, ‘Uncertain Way to use of LanguageⅠ - Reality’, C3, Vol.1, 2015.
3. Kim Sung Hong, ‘Architect Yi Jongho and Seoul Grid’, Architect Yi Jongho, (SEOUL: Wooribook, 2016).
4. Yi Jongho, ‘The Community and an Architect as A Social Coordinator‘, Public Document 2: Who Makes Our
Neighbour, (Seoul: Mediabus, 2013).
