Booth F34
珗宇
Sun Woo
통로
Portals
公众日 Public Opening:
2024.10.11-12 11:00–19:00
2024.10.13 11:00–18:00
地点 Location：
摄政公园，伦敦
The Regent's Park, London
关于展位
About the Project
存在于珗宇创作中的物件以不同的形式悬置在多层现实和表象之中，影射人体、社会和自然彼此交错的过渡空间。工作和生活辗转于加拿大和韩国，她的作品展现了不断在亲临的当下和被遗弃的过去不断迁移的状态。同时，这些作品记录了技术对身体和记忆的影响和情感位移。她从社交媒体账号上保留的记录、图像和他者的个人数据中汲取灵感，通过类数字化的处理和编辑方式，将这些迥然不同的残留遗迹融合在一起，进而在画布上呈现数字编程的界面。她采用的传统媒介——绘画和雕塑——使人们得以与这些转瞬即逝的档案进行切实的互动，阐释着幻象与实体交织的悖论体感。与这份悖反修辞等价的是她对细节的微观捕捉，使得她在平面绘画得以逾越写实的完美，犹如Photoshop图像软件的真挚。通过这种技法与技术的同步，珗宇开辟了一个可以承载双重体验的阈限空间，触发了对内在和物理错位的细致反思。
在她的大幅绘画作品中，珗宇刻意混淆身体碎片与地质构造如海蚀洞和针叶林、复古和现代的旧藏，形成令人目眩神迷的视觉反差。《天籁合声》（2024）精细地描绘了搁浅于岩洞中的一组键盘与管弦乐器，唤起人类文明与自然、内部与外部、熟悉与陌生之间的错置感。这些物体还被进一步嵌入了拟人化特征：三角钢琴上长出的头发、长笛中吐出的烟雾以及小号中像体液般排出的水。虽然此种细节很容易让人联想到自己的身体，混杂的整体与亲密相悖，滋生出一种与死亡、腐朽和生命易逝相连的焦虑。
与此同时，珗宇的作品中有着对身体暗涌而萦绕的暴力。《颤栗》(2024）中干草堆被树枝揭开的缝隙暗指了女性身体或者开放伤口的结构，在极尽精密的特写中被机器制雪机猛烈吹击着。这种灾异感（catastrophism）在其他作品中也反复出现，如在《休憩》（2024）中，岩石的巨重将支撑蹦床的辫子濒于绷断；在《母与子》（2024）中，一台古董天秤衡量着分属于一位母亲和她的后代的两缕头发。在这三件作品中，珗宇通过逐渐加码、直至压倒女性肢体，以触发对个体记忆、历史和身份的沉思，并利用这种错位来反映女性身份在社会、历史中的位置。
在破碎身体探索超验的作品中，珗宇的雕塑以女性身体为题强调了构造和角色从属之间的关系。她将个人对身体的支配，让渡并错置于富含历史叙事的情境之中，从而开展身为亚裔女性身份、经历的深究。在本次展览的核心作品《引》（2024）中，她将一个韩国古董水桶与现代预制材料如木砖、合成毛发与3D打印技术相结合，重建了一口传统水井。在这个结构的底部放置着艺术家的肖像，她的脸近在咫尺，肤色惨白，淹没在水中。从结构上看，这件作品暗指东西方传说中水井的两极分化的象征含义。通过将自己限制在井中、再从观看的对视中将自身异化成被旁观的他者，珗宇揭示了一个被不可控因素重塑的自我。同样，在《回声》（2024）中，艺术家将自我形象铸造在一组韩国传统编钟上，其极致的重量和哑声的钟鸣讽喻了对个人身份的压制，以及身体与集体历史环境之间的约束规范。这两件雕塑作品是身体、雕塑和历史物的交融，将观者置于与女性在历史文化语境中的处境和对立话语的体系中。
珗宇精细刻画的奇观低鳴着囚禁于表象之下危机四伏的压迫和脆弱。这些景象如同连通身体的脐带，重新引导观者向四处观察那些滋养万触动肺腑的感受，进而触发身体与外部世界的联系。最终，作品揭示了个体与意识，在人类所创造的技术和信念如何再次地被塑造和制约着而无处遁形。
Gallery Vacancy is pleased to present Portals, a solo project by Korean Canadian artist Sun Woo, at Frieze London Focus section 2024, booth F34. As an artist of the information age, Sun Woo’s practice endeavors to materialize one’s encounter with the flux of virtual realms through the anthropomorphism of objects, landscapes and technology. Showcasing a series of paintings and sculptures made of bronze, engraved wooden bricks, sourced neglected objects and other miscellaneous materials, this presentation continues on the artist’s ongoing engagement to address the proliferation of such hybrid phenomena and obscuration of boundaries with a particular focus on personal experience related to cultural and geographical migration. The immersive fabricated scenery within the booth–composed of anonymous wilderness and obscure devices from ancient civilization–highlights the proximity that lingers between fiction and history, transcending the limitations of the body to evoke a sense of nostalgia in relation to sensory memories.
For this exhibition, the conceived works allude to transitional spaces that interconnect the human body, society and nature amid different forms floating in multifaceted realities and textures. Influenced by her time spent living and working in Canada and South Korea, Sun Woo’s work illustrates the constant migratory state between the physical now and the abandoned before. At the same time, they register the feeling and affect of technology on bodies and memories. Often sourcing personal memories, physical images and personal data of others freely available on social media platforms, Sun Woo merges these disparate remnants together through digital-like process of alterations and edit, to create a mediated interface on her canvas. Her traditional modes of presentation–painting and sculpture–not only make tangible one’s interaction with these archives of fleeting and transient nature, but also account for the paradoxical experience between the illusionary and the physical. Yet akin to an oxymoron, it is also her microscopic precision of detail that obfuscates the “realness” of her canvas paintings to that of a Photoshop artifice. Through this synchroneity between technique and technology, Sun Woo opens a liminal space where the experience of duality is possible, sparking a nuanced reflection on both internal and physical dislocation.
In her large-scale paintings, Sun Woo merges bodily fragments with geological formations like sea caves, coniferous forests and objects, both vintage and modern, to form mesmerizing visual paradoxes that defy conventional logic. The Chorus (2024), which details orchestra instruments shipwrecked in a sea cave, evokes a feeling of displacement between civilization and nature, the interior and the exterior, the familiar and the strange. These objects are further embedded with anthropomorphic features: hair growing from the grand piano, smoke exhaled through the flute, and water expelled like bodily fluid from the horn. While such detail encourages one to relate to one’s own body, the overall hybridity breeds a sense of anxiety related to death, decay and human transience instead of intimacy.
At the same time, there is an undercurrent of violence toward the body that repeatedly haunts her works. The effect appears most pronounced in Shivers (2024); the slit within the haystacks of which bears an uncanny resemblance to the female orifice or an open wound, is brutally attacked by twigs and robotic snow blowers in extreme closeups. Such catastrophism reappears in her other works, as seen in Rest (2024), the rocks’ colossal weight tensions a supporting braid from the trampoline bed to the brink of snapping; and in Mother and Child (2024), a vintage scale weighs between two portions of hair which, as implied by its title, belong to a mother and her offspring. In all three cases, Sun Woo weighs down and overwhelms components of the female body to elicit a mediated condition of one’s memory, history and identity, playing on such mismatch in order to reflect the politics of female sexuality.
Amongst these works which interrogate the concept of the constrained body in states of transcendence, Sun Woo’s sculptures underscore such tension between the construction and subordination of the female body. Here, the artist subjects her own body to physical objects and structures imbued with historical narrative, evoking a sense of dislocation beyond individual control that is freight with subject matter related to the Asian female identity and experience. In the presentation’s central piece, Portal (2024), she incorporates a vintage Korean bucket with modern prefabricated materials, wooden bricks, synthetic hair and 3-D printing technology to reconstruct a traditional well. At the bed of the structure rests a portrait of the artist, her face emerging from within, skin anemic and half buried in the water. Structurally, the work alludes to the polarizing symbolism of wells between Eastern and Western folklore. By confining herself inside the well and then twisted through the water surface to our display, Sun Woo reveals the abjectness of the self, existing neither as subject nor object, but as a permeable entity reflecting whatever stands opposite the portal. Similarly, with Echo (2024), where the artist casts her own self-image onto the string of traditional Korean bronze bells, its extreme weight and forced silence allegorise the suppression of female identity, and the body’s forced integration with its collective history surrounds. Both sculptures stand as a convergence of body, sculpture and historical artifact, situating the viewer within opposing discourses relating to the representation and treatment of women historically and culturally.
Altogether, Sun Woo’s works appear grandiose and composed on the surface. Yet intuitively, they evoke a sense of danger, entrapment, and vulnerability, displacing the viewer into a state of otherness. Her works function as an umbilical cord, reorienting the viewer toward visceral feelings that nourish and cherish within all things, thereby reflecting the body’s relationship with external worlds. Ultimately, they reveals how individuals and consciousness are once again shaped and restricted by the technologies and beliefs created by humans, with no way to escape.
Frieze London Online Viewing Room
伦敦弗里兹艺术博览会线上展厅将于2024年10月2日（周三）至2024年10月18日（周五）向公众开放。
https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-viewing-room
Frieze London Viewing Room will be accessible to the VIPs and the public from Wednesday, October 2 to Friday, October 18, 2024.
Please copy the link below to your browser or click on Read More for Liste Showtime Online:
https://www.frieze.com/fairs/frieze-viewing-room
关于艺术家
珗宇，1994年出生于韩国首尔，现工作、生活于首尔。她于2017年在哥伦比亚大学取得视觉艺术的学士学位。从加拿大移民和数字原住民的经历出发，珗宇将这些跨越地理和文化界限的经验与她的艺术实践交织到一起，在虚拟与真实的世界中探讨归属感、民俗传说以及集体记忆等概念。珗宇的绘画和雕塑作品往往摆脱了现实的束缚，构建出充满险象和类人机械躯体的场景；以诙谐的方式融合了梦境、痛苦和共生等主题的同时，作品探究了在超连接时代下肉身体验渐渐消融瓦解的过程。通过艺术家超写实的绘画技法，作品传递了气味、温度和湿度所承载感官记忆，在网络时代逐渐异化的肉体经验中触发了跨越空间与地域的亲密性。在珗宇的实践中，她不断地将极致的感官细节融入到画面中，试图唤起发自内心的感受，亦将禁锢于痛苦中的宿命转化为一场主观性的无形奇观。
Sun Woo, born in Seoul, South Korea, now lives and works in Seoul. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2017. As an immigrant to Canada and a digital native, the artist interweaves migrating experiences across geographical and cultural boundaries to explore the concept of belonging within the real and virtual space, addressing the collective memory of folklore and mythology. Moving beyond realistic inference, Sun Woo fabricates extreme perils and animated mechanical objects in her paintings and sculptures, wittily wielding together themes of dream, pain, and symbiosis while investigating the gradually disintegrating physical body in the age of hyperconnectivity. Through smell, temperature, and humidity provoked by her photorealist approach, these sensory perceptions activate a shared familiarity and intimacy, both at present and from afar, within the disassociated bodily contexts. Sun Woo’s works relentlessly insert heightened perceptual nuances to propose a possibility which summons and amalgamates the dislocated senses across time and within the corporeality created by the artist, evoking visceral feelings that turn the suffering of one’s immurement to the spectacle of disembodiment subjectivities.
Recent solo exhibitions include: Portals, Gallery Vacancy at Frieze London, 2024; Swamps and Ashes, Make Room, Los Angeles, 2023. Recent group exhibitions include: Nova Libertatia, The Orange Garden at Forum Studios, Rome, 2024; Cities in the Room, Seoul Museum of Art, Seoul, 2023; Materi-delia, Ulsan Art Museum, Ulsan, 2023; Wetting Your Whistles, Art Sonje Center, Seoul, 2023; Second Life, Lyles & King, New York, 2023; Myths of Our Time, Thaddaeus Ropac, Seoul, 2023. Her works are in the collections of The Perimeter, London and Museu Inimá da Paula, Belo Horizonte. As the co-founder of artist-duo Dadboyclub, Sun Woo is the recipient of Seoul Foundation for Arts and Culture in 2023 and Art Change Up from the Arts Council Korea and Ministry of Culture in 2021.
V A C A N C Y
周二–周六
Tuesday to Saturday | 10:00–18:00
200021 上海市黄浦区云南南路261号6楼
6F, No.261 S. Yunnan Rd., Shanghai 200021
+86-(0)21-62411239
info@galleryvacancy.com
www.galleryvacancy.com
