Saturday 30 June 2007

Beads beads beads beads beads beads beads beads beads beads beads beads beads (and beer)

Sunjung Kim came to see us

today to the gallery. Jan, Power and Erland introduced our project from the start and what's going on...so glad that actually this project is getting much clearer and clearer although its still in the process of "chaos". she seemed very excited about our process. im sure she will come and see again. also she will lodge three of our posses in her office near Art sonje.

Kangnam and J.W. Marriott


J.W. Marriott bathtub.



J.W. Marriott building (we lived at 17th floor).


Kangnam is like Bladerunner...


J.W. Marriott bedroom.


J.W. Marriott television.


J.W. Marriott interior of our room.


J.W. Marriott and me.


Kangnam crossing at 24.00... Very busy.

Kosok Bus Terminal. This subway station is like a jungle.


And the street vendors just leave their stuff around.


More jungleshop.


ATM feels lonely.


Jungleshop in the morning.

Jungleshop has many little cactuses.

Leeum Flash Cube show big light box advertisement at Kangnam Station. Big international show opening next week which we are going to see.


Kangnam light box wall.


Kangnam chicken restaurant. Loved it.

Completely Flatten Structure


Erland is busy working on building trestles from IKEA.

Erlend, Power and Bjorn...

Developments and characters


New artists come to see us and become involved in the project all the time and every time we talk about the project the project evolves and changes slightly, although we are now kind of starting to say the same things all over again: "chaos", "interference", "unfinished", "new structure", "experiment", "letting go of the concept of a masterpiece", "creating something different", "letting go of hierarchies"... However, for some reasons the project seems to be appealing for the newbies (I've become a good seller of the project too by now, since I also feel enthusiasm about it) and we are constantly growing in different directions. It is exciting of course, but also a bit scary - where will we end? Will we manage to keep everyone involved happy and not disappointed in any way? There is responsibilities involved of course, and how will we be able to keep it up in this "powerless structure"?

Jan, aka Jack, came back to the gallery today after one day's rest from the project and retained stability for us here. I'm still curious who will turn into Sawyer to follow up on the "Lost-connotations". Erlend took on the role of carpenter today and I guess that turns him into the architect Michael or something? Myself, I'm eating a lot all the time and am not really contributing creatively but try to keep the social framework easy, and that kind of turns me into Hurley.

Busy busy Bjorn more net-working at Artists Run Cafe

Illogistics no more




Rejoice, gentle readers! After hitting some kind of comfortzone-low, spending the night sleeping on, respectively, the gallery floor and the roof, Bjørn and I have just booked ourselves into a hotel for the remaining nights before our Marriot booking later this week. This should mean that we will actually be energized in the mornings, and we should be able to focus more of that energy on, like, you know, the actual project.

Right now we are having a visit from Jun Ho Kwon who is being shown the blog by Jooyoung. He's going to be in the show, and you can all check his website here. Jun Ho went to school at Virginia Commonwealth and UCLA and is doing really nice work. Someone, perhaps someone whose gallery contains a weird diftong, might want to look into his work for a possible show.

Friday 29 June 2007

oriental constellation_simcity




Danginri power project with junglim Han(artist)+seungmo Seo(architect)+hwanho choi(Oncologist
Chemical-Physicist
Desitiny-Teller)

@ssamzie space


graphic by junglim Han

http://cafe.naver.com/aqlab.cafe?iframe_url=/ArticleRead.nhn%3Farticleid=3096 <-Mr. so-and-so's blog.. i'll show you a catalog tomorrow. this oriental constellation drawing is the initiative work of this project.

Round-up of my day

I've been at the gallery from 11 until now - 10 o'clock. I took a taxi over here directly from Jooyoung's. I've been trying to get work done (the Münster piece for Kunstkritikk) but have failed in so many ways. I've been reading some from the (great) catalogue though. And putting out some weird fires - that took some time. Now things are finally calming down and I could potentially get some work done, but now the day's beer reinforcements arrived and I will most likely give in. I'm not going to see much of Seoul with this pace...

Change = death

Random photos from sweatshop



































































































































































Fresh looking Bjørn


I suspect you get the remarks about looking tired just because you look so good most of the time, Bjørn - just like documented here.

Groundhog Day Seoul



It`s 0600 and I am waking up to see that nothing has changed from the morning before. Last night I went to sleep next to the aircondition robot, hoping to finally get some REM shut eye time. But no. like yesterday, the day before yesterday, and the day before the day before yesterday, I have again RESTED for some odd 5-6 hours. Today as I rolled over from left to right on my triple sandwich mat construction, I saw the in-house video-dj fumble some with some dvds over at the 30 m2 projection screen. The Korean madras establishment have all these fucked up ways of telling you that it`s time to get up, without using neither their throat muscles nor language abilities to say it to your face. I`m squeezing my toes around the wooden floor in a doomed to fail attempt to rip some of it off, just to get even, Steven. "Firewall" starring Harrison Ford was pumping on the stereo as I walked the two stairways up to the getyourselfwashedup floor with a hairdresser, in the shape of an old grumpy Korean who runs back and forth from his tiny shredding corner and the TV, which today showed a rather compelling show about fighting bulls in costumes. As I pass the mirror on the way out I notice that the blanket I wrapped my face in last night in an act of desperation to keep the stadium flood light out from the dorm floor, had made some rather ingenious imprints on my face during the wee hours of the night. I wonder if I won or lost that wrestle.
Why all this talk of recreational facilities, sleep and comfort in general you might ask ? Where is the art ? What can I say ? It is hard to focus on the art ( which by the way is indeed turning into a relational-survivor-big-brother-lost-in-translational- mumbo-what-did-you-mean-jumbo-let`s see where this is taking us we have nothing to lose we are the new frontier kind of work in progress ) when people around you constantly remarks on how shitty you look. Don`t take me wrong. I enjoy being a part of a work in progress, but with no sleep, which means no dreams and hope for tomorrow and the future, the days have turned into one long relational-Groundhog Day.

Library...








Jooyoung and I went to Seoul Museum of art Library to borrow an awesome catalogues to use for the show. With these catalogues we are trying to make moving library, and share informations with audiences who will visit Yeon-hee-Dong .
JooYoung asked librarian about catalogues title that contains word "Seoul". We found many catalogues that contains word "Seoul" and we picked those catalogues up from the book shelf.
These cataloguess will be provided to people who will visit the show and will be returned to the libraray after the show (hopefuly without any damages).
We borrowed about 24 catalogues and It was very heavy!

-Posted by eunhee:)

A link to a killer Korean work

A good friend of mine (Tanya Grassley) in Stockholm sent THIS LINK to some of her friends - she does not know I'm in Korea or what I am working on - and it is really good! Eventually, when the narrative ends, one ends up at the artist's webpage, her name is Young-Hae Chang. Go see it! She also made something in Swedish - check it out HERE.

Again with the powerless structures!

Okay, so here’s what’s going on with the project. From the start it was always slightly unclear exactly what it was we were going to do here. For example, the first I ever heard of there being an actual exhibition came a couple of weeks before we left when someone suddenly mentioned the need to create invitation cards for the opening. "Opening? I thought it was a workshop..." Then followed the information that there were local artists already involved, and that some of them wanted to work with the local context of the area of the gallery. Fair enough, but I thought we would just be researching artists here, for possible inclusion in the documentation of our workshop, the details of which would be developed on the flight from Frankfurt. As we touched down in Yeonhee-dong we began talking about how everyone should work together, and from the beginning the idea from Jan was to have a very flat structure, where everyone involved could give something of theirs and take something from somebody else, so that everyone would make something as a kind of a collaborative exhibition where it didn't matter if your an artist, a curator, an assistent or the friend of a friend who can hook us up with cheap nights at the Marriot. Then everyone would be credited equally, with mention of what their role had actually been. This appealed strongly to my already rapidly growing sense of radical socialdemocracy. Or something.

Power, however, I immediately sensed was always a bit skeptical of this idea. Both, I guess, because of believing strongly in the rights of artists to retain all rights to their own work so as to be in control of their own integrity. But also, and more importantly, because of a belief in the impossibility of actually truly achieving a flat structure. By coming here and inviting people to take part in our lovely flat structure, we are of course already involved in the establishment of a hierarchy. So the power is already distributed in an uneven way. Jan, however, would say that it was important to try to let go of this power, and anyway that artists need to be controlled and forced into perhaps not thinking about their work as "their" work. During a conversation we developed the idea that what we're aiming for is a situation where people approach creating their individiaul works with the mindset of it being collaborative work. I have a lot of sympathy for this idea and it was also seems to relate to a sort of ideal of mine of striving for a condition of total heterogeneity. Impossible of course, but interesting.

Nevertheless, the first few days had a feeling slightly similar to the first episode of Lost. Everybody is sort of just waiting around trying to discern who will take charge and become the leader, who will be Jack and who will be Sawyer. I guess Jan has been kind of a Jack by default. But who will be the junkie hobbit? Yesterday we all had different stuff to do. Jan and Bjørn started a wall painting, while Power, Jooyoung and I were out visiting galleries. At the moment Jan is with his girlfriend Lina who arrived from Berlin (via Tokyo!) last night. (This kind of puts us in that week of season 3 of Lost when Jack is trapped by the Others.) Bjørn is outside doing something or other, Power is doing her other work (I believe there will soon by a text on Münster at kunstkritikk.no) and I'm in research mode with the catalogue for the 4th Seoul International Media Art Biennale which took place last year, i.e. new one next year. Organized by Seoul Museum of Art, whose assistant curator Yoo-Jun Lee we met yesterday. Lars Morell just e-mailed us PDFs from the latest issue of Billedkunst; my review of the Norwegian MA-shows as well as an article in which Jan is interviewed about something. In a way it feels like a kind of calm has set upon the space, for the first time so far really. It is also unusually cool outside, only 23 degrees and quite breezy.

Seungwon Lee-Jung
















Seungwon Lee-Jung is the name of this artist that we found in the portfolios at INSA Art Space the other day. This work made out of post-it notes rocks! (if you look from a certain distance you can actually make out an image of for instance Marilyn Monroe to the right in the image)

Melikes

New artists join the project every day. Evolution. Clearifications. My "feel" for the project is getting better and better - I think this is getting more interesting by the hour. Good feeling! Even though the "residency" at Paik Hae Young Gallery ended. I'm back at Jooyoung's floor, but now on a real mattress! I had a wonderful night's sleep after some few drinks with Bjørn, Erlend and Jooyoung last night (slow night).

Ah, and yes, speaking of sleeping - me and Bjørn made a "pact" yesterday to not mention the word "jinjilbang" for the whole day and not to complain or to bicker about getting too little sleep. This because it takes too much energy from the project. I am sure that we use up like at least 3-4 hours a day just talking about how tired we are. We just about managed too keep the pact.

Thursday 28 June 2007

hihi











hello, I'm posting on here finally.


Everybody is working hard! Thanks for my friend and all of you guys.
oops, photo orders are muddled...
well, we are keep working.
go for it!
jung-lim.







Day out
















Erlend finds possiblities to blog everywhere...

I'm not as witty like Jan but I'll continue with the photo blogging today - about what Erlend, Jooyoung and I did while Bjørn and Jan were at the gallery starting to paint walls and stuff.





















Ju Hyun Cho of the Seoul Museum of Art. She is preparing a show that will open late August that will include our Yeonhee-Dong project. We visited her and had a look at the space of the Museum where the project will be installed.















Here it is - quite vast, with walls that is removable.




















Erlend tries to explain something...





















"Hmm, yeah, very interesting indeed! But what do you mean exactly?"
















"That there are people making the show and there is a blog and then there are people seeing the show and the process of the show via the blog out there you know...!"















We went to see a great show curated by John Armleder at the Mongin art Center with Francis Baudevin, Stéephane Dafflon, Philippe Decrauzat, Fabrice Gygi, Stéphane kropf, Balthazar Lovay, Olivier Mosset, Mai-Thu Perret, Michael Scott, Blair Thurman and John Tremblay.






























And then, upstairs, a solo show with John Armleder himself...


























































And then we hit the galleries... some Spanish art...




















Wherever in the world that you travel, there is no way of escaping either Julian Opie or Liam Gillick. They are like the Starbuck's of the art world.






























We never really figured out what a museum for "chicken art" is, or whatever chicken art consists of but... there is obviously a museum for it here...

























































This is a painting by Gina Park and the motive is actually our own Jooyoung Lee!! Exhibited at One and J. Gallery.




















And here is the cute gallery director Patrick Lee
















Work in progress painting the outside of the gallery