Princess diva's sleep and unease

Princess divapower finally got a good night's sleep in a queen size bed in a room of her own. Not that she minded staying at Jooyoung's, not at all - she actually really miss the nightly talks - but she really enjoys to sleep in a real bed with a mattress. Now that she has slept well and feel really good, she also experience another feeling: mega guilt.

I'm beginning to see the "strategies" of Jan over here even more clearly. Yesterday I was joking with him that he should have started the "breaking down of my diva princess attitude" and sense of individuality more lightly instead of pushing me into the completely, totally, democratic bath-house-sleep-arrangement from day one; I meant that if he had arranged a slow downfall in arrangements from the early beginning with a "five class hotel day one, a four star hotel day two, three star day three" etc towards the Jimjilbang which of course is not a hotel at all I would have had a smoother transition and maybe had more time to adjust which would have made things easier to handle. He, on the other side, laughingly replied that he thought it was so much better to change from the Jinjilbang to a five class arrangement so that I really would appreciate the luxury so much more.

The result?

I'm most likely turning into a full blown Marxist-communist.

Erlend is in the same boat as myself since he is in the other room in this resort. He's talking about time-share of his room unlike me. I'm far more egoistical and would like to keep the bed the few nights I have it for my disposal (so I'm not yet full blown communist) but I am however more than willing to share the huge bed with Jan or Bjørn, or hell, even both if they would wish (for the record, I am now talking about sharing the bed, not anything else). I'm afraid that the guys are too tactful and won't take up on the offer though, so here I am, in a beautiful house and a wonderful big bed, alone in a room, wirelessly connected and with a magnificent view plus a huge balcony facing the view - this is something I would have loved normally and would have enjoyed totally and felt like it was completely something I "deserved" (think L'oreal) but - now, all I can feel is guilt.














But like I told you, I am not yet able to deal with the consequences of being a convinced commy all the way and therefore not yet ready to move back into the pink uniform shorts-jinjilbang, but I cannot but to be amazed about the smartness of Jan's strategy. He is in a way building a "powerless structure" (no pun intended with myself, pun intended about Elmdrags') in this project. Who has the power in the project? Not the artists participating. Not the curators. There is no gallery owner wanting to sell works, no inherent structure in the space in itself, no curator's strategy or concept, no money involved... I'm always advocating that there are no powerless structures and trying to invent such a situation has a power hierarchy inherent in itself (why I am digesting Lefebvre at the moment) etc, but by placing me and Erlend in this beautiful home while staying himself together with the other artist in this project in the white uniform-shorts at the jinjilbang Jan has made somewhat a decision about the two of us being in another position to be able to go into this residency, why we are not in a "higher rank" or anything of course, but it is a clear decision and choice of distribution of means and funds. I guess the booming economy of Seoul's with its history and closeness to North Korea is a great spot to be considering these things. Especially since I have the Swedish passport representing the land of "lagom" or "witheld sufficiency" which could translate to flat (in both aspects) social democratic boringness.

I am partly exaggerating and am deliberately pushing things to its limit here of course, bear that in mind while reading my qualms. But still. I'm chewing on this, but not yet ready to swallow. I'm not easy about things, not at all, not even when I'm rewarded a bed of my own. A bitchy princess on peas.















The project space's wall behind Bjørn's desk















Excerpt from the wall with Jan's preliminary poster for the project to the right, and another poster about the so called "middle way" of Sweden to the left

I want your Aura
I want your Aura
I want your Aura
I want your Aura
I want your Aura

Paik Hae Young Gallery

Power and Erlend will stay for some days at this excellent residency courtesy of Paik Hae Young Gallery in Itaewon. The house is a beautiful building that holds gallery, offices, guest rooms and an apartment.

Jooyoung, Jan, Erlend, Ms Paik Hae Young and Power.

Gallery view/cityscape

Garden

John Tremblay exhibition

Random photos

We are cutting corners... from now on only one dish of food for the entire group per day.

Haejun Park is the landlord of the gallery and runs the Sum Bar in Hongdae.

Bjørn's mind speaks for itself...

.olleH

Maybe I should think about sh.., um, theory now?

I should most probably be full of thoughts and theory about all this that we are doing in Seoul. That's most likely why I was invited in the first place. I think I am thinking about all of this, and I may only have a grand constipation, or something? Coz my shit is not coming out loose and lightly. Thoughts about Henri Lefebvre's oeuvre simmer together with thoughts on political standpoints about Venezuela and have to become a soup pretty soon. I need not only to chew on it but also to digest after which I can finally, hopefully if I'm lucky enough, take a dump and create one of those fuming bear shits that Charles Bukowski is talking about HERE. By the way - not in any way would I be comparing myself with Bukowski or any other poet/writer, I'm shitting a different sort of texts, but I would never the less be comparing the processes of writing any kind of texts with each other.

PS. Experiencing constipation while on a deadline is nothing new. Ask any kind of writer.

Jan Christensen

Jan Christensen is an artist from Norway, based in Berlin, and doing a residency in Norway at the moment also. So he travels a bit and he's doing painting, video, music. He left art school in 2000. He has a very clear understanding of the artworld and thinks the market is overheated.

Born to parents who made a fortune in shipping in the late 60s, Jan is the one-man party, author function-umbrella under which we all try to hide. When he is not conducting experiments on the nature and practice of various forms of value he enjoys dragging people off to join weird cults from which no individualized personality ever escapes, drinking Jinro and flyfishing. He has a remarkable ability to make the flies feel that they are important, if disposable, actors in a creative game in which process is what matters, not the final display of fish on the table.

He is currently in the market for a videocamera, a JVC GZ-HD7EX, and his next project will be to direct the movie "Jim Jil Bangers 17" starring his old friend, and longtime adult-actor, Leif Magne Tangen (who is joining us in Seoul for the 195-project next week.)

His most recent exhibitions include Tempo Skien, Initialraum (Münster) "Believers and Illusionists at R.T. Hansen (Berlin). He is the main artistic supervisor of Kunstverein Privaten Zimmer.

Jan is also dyslexic but has managed to overcome this obstacle to make great sucess as a textbased artist.

Interference

The key word here in the process has to be: interference. To make all the artists involved and the art works should be cut'n'pasted into the show and the artists "should" interfere with one and another.

Update on our Seoul-life in progress

Back in Fort Banga Banga after a visit to Paik Hae Young Gallery where Jan, Jooyoung, Erlend and myself saw Paik Hae Young herself and managed to somehow convince her that we were honest and wonderful people that deserved to stay in her supernice modernistic building (built only 35 years ago) where she lives, has a gallery and also have some spare rooms for art people like our self for a week at least. Me very happy. We'll sleep in real beds tonight - at least Erlend and myself!

Jan is still super enthusiastic about the Jjimjingbang however so he'll stay on a while longer together with Bjørn.

Erlend took off to explore the city's fashion district by himself, Jooyoung went to do some errands just like Jan, and I came back to the project space to find Bjørn surfing some pages about Seoul's more shady districts. I'm looking forward to that excursion.

Last night we spent working until late and then we went to the bar SUM that is owned by the sweet lady who owns the building of the gallery. SUM is by the way a great place with four cats, a homely environment and a giant record collection with some mean Korean disco from the 70-ies. We had a few drinks, spoke about the importance of a good pick-up line and had quite an early night due to the early morning meeting this morning at the gallery. A slight confusion about the date of the opening occurred but I believe that everything is settled now, but I suspect I'll find out later tonight when we had our meeting. I am happy that we now have a lay-out for the invitation card (below) signed Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen. Me thinks it looks much like "I dream of Jeannie".

I'm assigned by the INSA Art Space to write a text on the exhibition we had a talk about the other day, so I'd better get on with it immediately!

One of Erlend's other projects

I am sitting in the Jimjilbang reading my emails properly here at night and realize that our companion Erlend Hammer has written the following press release for a show opening at Lautom Contemporary in Oslo now June 28th. Nice little text, it's just a press release, he did not curate the show (my other friend Raimar Stange did,) but he wrote this text for it. I wanted to link directly to the website HERE, but for some reason it is not online there nor is he credited. But here it is for all the our dedicated friends who follow our work in Seoul:

So there I was in Berlin generally minding my own business and then Randi flew down so that I could meet Raimar. ”I think you two will really get along” she said. ”What the hell?” I thought. ”You could be brothers” she said when we were sitting in Raimar’s kitchen. ”What? Nooo...” Raimar and I both said with exactly the same look on our faces.

”Historyteller.” There’s something just slightly off with that word. It’s very close to what we are used to, but that little prefix suddenly makes all the difference and adds a tension that transgresses the cosiness of just telling stories. It’s like in that great episode in season 7 of Buffy where Andrew the reformed geek is telling the story of “Buffy- slayer of the vampires.” Immediately your ears prick up.

Raimar tells us that the exhibition is structured in sections: history of pop culture, history of politics, history of science, history of architecture, history of art. So then it’s a history of the Project of Enlightenment, I think. But now that all that is over and done with, should we still understand it as a collection of different histories developing in parallel alongside each other? Of course not. In reality they’re all branches of the same thing, the human storytelling that makes up the entirety of our shared histories and cultures. Not so much autonomous units within a framework, and more like different genres within a shared social practice. Science, for example, is the genre where we tell the story of how to master nature. Art is the genre where, depending on certain preferences, we tell stories amuse and delight, or shock and raise awareness. A huge part of modernity was about defining how these genres differed, and a large part of postmodernity has been about describing how they are similar. So we’ve become more interested in how they don’t differ. There is difference, of course, but it is usually of focus, not kind.

Returning the difference between story and history, the central issue here concerns how the word history writes a check that story knows won’t clear. History makes certain demands that story usually does not. History is what happened. A story is what I want to tell you. For this exhibition the phrase is adjusted, so that your attention is projected towards how it is a history that I want to tell you. Well maybe not I, but Matthew Antezzo, Isabell Heimerdinger, Christine & Irene Hohenbüchler, Elke Marhöfer, Karina Nimmerfall, Peter Pommerer, Julia Schulz, Veronika Schumacher, Christine Würmell. And Raimar Stange brought them together to do so at Lautom Contemporary, Randi Thommessen’s gallery in Oslo.

So then, back in Raimar’s kitchen, we talk about football, whether or not Bill Drummond is just a cynic and how Øystein Aasan had told Randi that Raimar probably shouldn’t hang the exhibition by himself. And then suddenly Randi says that the real reason we needed to meet was because I would be writing the press release for the exhibition. “Sometimes Erlend is kind of a gonzo writer” she said. “I don’t care” Raimar said.

Erlend Hammer

Eunji Cho

Here are Han Juyoun and Eunji Cho on the phone and online from banga-bange HQ, after our meeting today. Eunji is one of the first artists to come visit us in the Yeonhee-dong space, and she has a very interesting project which will be reworked for our exhibition. We are all looking forward to seeing (and hearing!) it soon...

I see grey camels in the horizon

Today, at fifteen hundred hours, Power and myself were sent to collect more food and supplies for the inhabitants of Fort Banga Banga, situated at the top of the hill with plenty of green buses and people too old to dance to the gymnastic song. As the two of us desended from the steap hills of Yeonhee-Dong in our chic urban explorer gear, the black pixels from Civilizations 3 revealed traces of Pizzas lost in translation a Peter Pan bakery and numerous Korean giant-miniature-dog-cats licking windows that we had to fight of with our bare hands.
Last nights fights at the front with Erlend and Jan was still lurking at the back of my head, but as I won the stone scissor paper battle at the break of dawn, I was rewarded a soft coach, a price that would later give me the sense of well-being ( best described as feeling of a hand scratching your chest, up and down. With the nails. Not hard. But firm and with confidence and compassion.)
A coach you say ? No tiles nor the floor ? Yes. A woman working in her wine bar with cats, not the MA GO - but the SUN took Jan, Erlend and myself to her quarters last night - a refreshing experience after having slept with white and pink people on brown madrases for several nights in a row. An experience that will probably subconsciously make me buy tri-color ice cream for the rest of my life.

It`s zero-dark-thirty, and I am checking out. Tomorrow I will continue looking for a future wife for Mr. Sudoku

More for the Invitaition card

초대장 관련 내용입니다.
Please includes follwing info on the invite
1. Title need to be both Korean and English:
연희동 195 레지던시 프로젝트: 100개의 아이디어와 10000개의 조화

The Yeonhee-Dong 195 Residency Project:A HUNDRED IDEAS AND TEN THOUSAND COMBINATIONS

2. Our blog http://195seoul.blogspot.com
and www.project195.com

3. When: dates of the whole project from 21th of june to 15th of july Opening dates 3rd of july @6pm??

4. Where: address of the gallery in KOREAN and English, other contact details.
195-12, Yeonhee-Dong, Seodaemoon-Gu, Seoul, 121-110 Tel: +82 2 338 7059 Fax: +82 2 338 7059

5. Name of the participants: With Erlend Hammer, Bjørn-Kowalski Hansen, Jan Christensen, Power Ekroth, Jooyoung Lee, Youngho Yoo, Eunji Cho, Jung-lim Han, Kyungah Ham, Jaejun Lee and others. (need to be alphbet order)

*DONT FORGET "THE PAID POST STAMP SYMBOL" need to be postioned on the coner of the top right.
*sponcer's logos

Are we missiing anythingelse? Please let Bjorn know ASAP as he is going to off to a bar in gangnam soon. dead line is by monday.

Jooyoung Lee

Jooyoung met Jan at the Chang-dong residency in Seoul back in 2004, and this is their first collaboration since then. She has been invited to initiate several projects at 195 Yeonhee-dong and found this opportunity to invite the Yeonhee-dong crew over to Seoul. Jooyoung's practice of work ranges from video to spraypainting - quite an unusual practice in Korea, but the common denominator seems to the the emphasis on words and statements. Her themes include the confusion of languages and a focus on gender politics. Her education and long stay in London has given her good insight in the European way of thinking and has made her a very good representative of Korean culture. Jooyoung has been busy with several projects and exhibtions in Seoul and recently held a residency in Melbourne. She likes to surf and fry in the sun on the beach when she is not gulfing down Australian barbeque, and plans to serve some good proper fat steak for the rest of the gang and any visitors one of these days.

[In her spare time, Jooyoung likes collecting Grateful Dead-bootlegs, watching Cheech & Chong-movies and staring into space saying "wow" and "dude" at odd intervals.]

Power Ekroth

Power is from Stockholm. Power probably knows Jan the best, almost everybody else in the crew are pretty much new to each other. They worked together occasionally on different things, from lectures that she arranged for Jan to shows she arranged for Jan to other things she takes care of for Jan. She is the aunt of Jan's son (2-year old Joar Alexander Pablo) in Stockholm and takes care of him for Jan when Jan is not in Stockholm. Power takes Pablo on walks after work every day as long as it is not raining and plays in the sandbox as often as possible. Pablo even learned to say "Power" even before he could say mummy and daddy.

Power has traveled extensively and writes regularly for publications like Flash Art, Contemporary, Artforum, Frieze and she is a contributing editor of the Stockholm-based paper SITE. She likes some good dancing. Though this is her first time to Seoul, she has already rocked the dancefloors at Via, Bar Nana and Cargo. She is going to take up a short residency at Paik Hae Young Gallery during the stay in Seoul and can be reached by email at powerekroth@gmail.com.

Eunhee Park

Eunhee is assisting us on our trips around the city. She is an aspiring young artist and attending art school in the US after the summer. Being a young Seoul-gangsterine, she knows the dark corners of this town and can help us with free entries to most clubs in Hongdae. Eunhee has a friend in US Army camp at the Sobingo compound and can get American cigarettes and Juicy Fruit at the backdoor anytime. Her art work consists of large-scale canvases with silk-screened images taken from Vogue and Playgirl on top of images of wrecked Black Hawk helicopters and burning tanks. One of Eunhee's first missions will be to guide Erlend and Power to the Hermes superstore (and the gallery) in Kangnam one of these days. We expect her to make them a good deal on a scarf.

Erlend Hammer

Erlend Hammer is the academic in the crew. He is currently doing his Ph.d at the University in Bergen, Norway. He has been attending a curator course at the Academy of Art in Bergen as well. For the last year he has been running a project space called... it is actually secret. You will have to ask him about it (his Skype name is "-----------", or call him on +82 108 33 82 561). Erlend likes good music and a good complex challenging thought. His special interest is doing sudoko blindfolded when he is not preparing art history lessons and researching contemporary artists.

Gallery view, June 24 (19:00)

Launching the project

Trying to figure out how this "Villa Medusa/Big Brother in the Gallery" will work out we kind of had a major meeting today. I'm a bit concerned about the structure of the project and try to stress the importance of clarity when approaching other artists from here to join in the collaboration. The discussion turned into more clear ideas and Jan suggested that mine and Jan's differences in approaches towards both art and artists will be the starting point in a "bad cop-curator v/s good cop-curator"-approach, where the discrepancy between our curatorial approaches can be the initiating point towards describing the project. Jan and I have had this "bad cop/good cop" for a long time. I remember once in a seminar I invited Jan to participate in, a lecture at Robert Meyer art school in Oslo many years ago, where we were talking about curatorial approaches. Already then he was advocating how artists should just let go of their work and not fuss about what the curator does with their work, while I was advocating that the artist is responsible for their work at the end of the day and that the curator has the role of the mediator between the artist and the spectator. Whatever. It is a complicated discussion and maybe I'll write a proper essay about it while here that can be published somewhere else.

What the project really aims at? It will maybe come as a revelation soon. I hope. It is a "work in process" and I need to process it a bit and will most likely turn into the "bad cop-critic" of the whole thing while in the project itself, hehee. I think that this is in the likings of Jan's anyway.

Bar Nana with Bjørn-Kowalski on the wheels

Street vendor in Seoul

We were all quite baffled how successful this street vendor in Seoul was...

Gallery view, June 24 (02:00)

The Holy Grail

Maison Hermés Dosan Park is the fourth of the Maison Hermés prestige stores, after Paris, Tokyo and, hmm, New York? South Korea is apparantly the fourth largest market for Hermés. Not only do I want to go there for my own enjoyment (and possible economic ruin) it would be awesome to get Jan into their gallery. They've had two exhibitions so far: Daniel Buren and, grr, somebody else that I forgot. Then it turns out that the curator there was actually the one who curated the first show Jan was part of in Seoul. That should mean that this is now a done deal, no? Only snag now is how to work into the deal that I somehow get a lifetime supply of ties or something.




Buren at Maison Hermés Dosan Park.


More here and here

For the Invite, Web Communications etc.

i know Bjorn is preparing our for our invitation card, thanx lot!! The design need to be done by next tuesday as we have to PRINT/POST out by next thursday lateast AND we all need to prepare the images of our invite for the Korean email magazine called Neolook, http://neolook.net/ by middle of next week somehow. it needs to be sent 5 days before the opening.

following info need to be checked and soon will be collected:

1. Up to 700 x700 pixel 5-7 images, Jpg files
2. Text within 700 words in Korean( either or Power or Erland write INTRO of our project and i can translate, so it dosent need to be a like Press Release, just a short introudction about 200-300 words should be ok)
3.it costs about 110,000 won (including tax): its on my budget!!

Days 1 & 2 & 3

Met up with Power at Kastrup after finishing and filing my review of Transiteatrets performance of "Die Maßnahme" during Festspillene i Bergen in May. Then we met Bjørn and Jan at Frankfurt. Semi-first time meeting Bjørn, since we had only briefly said hello once at Rasmus Hansen's place in Berlin. Our first on-hand contact with the people of Korea came when Bjørn knocked a woman and/ or her daughter in the head on his way into the pre-boarding gate-area of Lufthansa flight 712. Slightly envious of the people seated inside the All Nippon 747 at the next gate, we found our seats inside our Airbus 330. Bjørn and Jan at 54 H and K, Erlend and Power at 56 H and K.

Bjørn and Jan immediately fell into game-mode and started playing Call of Duty, which, after some time, I too got involved with. In spite of Jan’s claims that I got off to a great start I really only went into my old habit of walking around, aimlessly and away from the action, getting killed occasionally.Power and I then talked about the importance of avoiding the trap of exotification of everything on our trip. Lost in Translation-style jetlag-fueled wide-eyed what-the-fuckness is one thing, and can be lots of fun to see or read, but photographic evidence and endless reflections of everything that is "different" in this oh so weird weird country is just a kind of American-style post-graduation get a brain morans travelling abroad for the first time bullshit.

The first day went by pretty much as Power described. We were very good and stayed up until late so as to avoid getting bad jetlag. We could rightly be very proud of ourselves as we went to sleep at a local jimjilbang (For the record: I'm somewhere inbetween Power and Jan on the merits of these places. I love the sauna-action, but I have to admit a certain tendency towards Power-style diva princess-requirements when it comes to sleeping arrangements. I.e. wouldn't mind a bed at some point here.)

So anyway, on the second day we of course went and got trainwrecked at various clubs and now we're here a bit past midnight of day 3. Day 2 ended around 8 a.m. this morning when Bjørn, Jan and I stumbled back into the jimjilbang and went to sleep on the skinny, skinny mattresses again. Miraculously day 3 didn't start until 16.30 when we all finally woke up again and, after more lovely sauna-action, went for breakfast at, ahem, Starbucks. So yeah, our excesses last night means that we're actually back on Norwegian time and even though I guess we're kinda sleepy right now, I think we're basically fucked. And oh yes, the humidity right now, according to the Yahoo weather service is 88%. We are sitting at each our computers listening to Etta James. Jooyoung just asked Bjørn to look at something. Bjørn replied with asking if she could send a link.

Photos from Insa Art Space/Choi Soo-jung

Already day two Bjørn, Erlend and myself headed out to Yongsan Electronic Marked to browse for some cameras before going to Insa Art Space where we were participating in a round-table talk with the artist Choi Soo-jung courtesy of Heejin Kim (curator, Insa Art Space). We met up with Power and Jooyoung in Insadong before the talk and had a bite. Bjørn took these photographs of us during the talk. I took some of the quick installation views. It was a very nice discussion and a great way to get introduced to the local scene and getting started with our work.

Dong Koh did an excellent job with the translation during the talk.