Past Exhibitions

OUR SET 2025: Gimhongsok × Kiljong Park

2025-03-25 ~ 2025-10-12

OUR SET 2025: Gimhongsok × Kiljong Park

This year’s iteration pivots from emphasizing collaborative processes themselves toward an examination of medium-specific experimentation undertaken by two distinguished artists, Gimhongsok and Kiljong Park, both of whom have consistently expanded their aesthetic practices across diverse media and generic boundaries with exceptional conceptual fluidity. 

Gimhongsok (b. 1964) subverts artistic conventions and established forms through a diverse range of media, including painting, drawing, video, performance, and sculpture, creating ruptures within social consensus, institutions, and conceptual frameworks. His deployment of intangible materials—text, narrative, voice, and breath—renders visible the mechanisms of perception, the clandestine operations of power, and institutional hierarchies. 

Kiljong Park (b. 1982) operates Kiljong Arcade, a conceptual space wherein he interrogates the demarcation between spectatorship and utility to propose novel formalistic potentialities for objects. With perceptual acuity, he apprehends the distinctive taxonomic order inherent in quotidian circumstances—a distorted bookshelf, an elderly woman’s repurposed conveyance for recyclable paper collection, domestic artifacts, or transitory visual fragments of encountered scenes. 

This exhibition establishes a discursive platform for incisive intellectual wit within the medium-based experimentation of these two practitioners. The curatorial framework unfolds across four conceptual domains: “Running Time,”, “Open Stage,” “Intermission”, “Backstage,”. We anticipate that our approach to accommodating visitors arriving at disparate temporal junctures will facilitate a mediatory aesthetic experience. 

Running Time Kiljong Park’s object-artifacts function as a catalytic medium that animates the otherwise static temporality of exhibition space, transforming it into a dynamic performance unfolding in real-time from the moment of its inauguration. In An Exhibition Walker, the artist crystallizes the organizational logic observed in elderly women’s ingenious modifications of strollers repurposed for recyclable paper collection. The companion piece, Hide Hide, Your Hair’s in Sight—another exhibition walker conceived specifically for this installation— incorporates elements appropriated from the artist’s personal bicycle and the utilitarian architecture of janitorial equipment, each component situated with calculated precision. In Seoul Scarecrow, memories and cinematic fragments are personified through the meticulous orchestration of carefully selected props, while botanical matter extends organically from one structural vertex. Hard Work Pays Off. employs a configuration of stratified linear elements to modulate the interplay between illumination and shadow, while An Eight-Way Wind on the Hill generates ephemeral thresholds that reconstitute themselves daily. These works function as temporal mechanisms that acknowledge visitors arriving at disparate chronological junctures, offering each participant a unique encounter determined by the variables of temporality and kinesthetic engagement.

Open Stage Gimhongsok’s oeuvre resists taxonomic categorization by conventional media distinctions—such as painting, sculpture, drawing, sound, or performance—functioning instead as interactive interfaces. In this exhibition, particular emphasis lies on text, voice (narrative), and breath as invisible mechanisms that structure the experiential dimensions of his practice. Oval Talk is a multivalent piece that simultaneously operates as sound installation, sculptural object, and spatial intervention wherein the artist, pursuing the fabrication of a geometrically perfect sphere, constructs a mythological origin narrative for this form, translates this account into English, and articulates it through his own vocalization. Solitude of Silence presents a hyperrealistic anthropomorphic figure that manifests the visual semblance of a performer. The artist’s textual declarations regarding the subject’s professional identity, chronological age, contextual circumstances, and the transactional conditions established between artist and subject provoke critical interrogation of hierarchical structures, ethical considerations, and labor politics intrinsically embedded within the work’s conceptual framework. Public Blank comprises a diptych of textual components and graphic renderings that propose an alternative paradigm for immaterial public art, diverging from conventional sculptural interventions deployed for urban aesthetic enhancement in favor of positioning individual action as its constitutive element. 8 Breaths juxtaposes three autobiographical texts authored by the artist with morphologically identical sculptural forms, illuminating the complex and multilayered nature of his practice—one that systematically resists reductive categorization.

Intermission Like an intermission that provides a temporal caesura between theatrical acts, this section presents the two artists in juxtaposition. In Four Gracious Plants - 231234, the artist introduces a fictional persona, Kosgnoh Mig, as an allegorical selfrepresentation—an individual who, during the 1980s, acquired knowledge of Western artistic traditions through Japanese textual mediations while pursuing education at a Korean art institution. Reflecting this multilayered process of cultural translation, he renders the traditional “Four Gentlemen” motifs (plum, orchid, chrysanthemum, and bamboo) utilizing Western materials—acrylic paint and modeling paste—in place of traditional East Asian ink and brushwork techniques. Kiljong Park has systematically identified spatial and conceptual discontinuities, an investigative methodology that finds expression in An Ant Cave Chess, a work that unfolds as an allegorical narrative addressing the ontological vacuities of emerging urban centers. 

Backstage In the manner of heterogeneous botanical specimens grafted together, Kiljong Park’s objects are presented here as backstage counterparts to the main exhibition space. Analogous to natural ecosystems where innumerable species propagate, these artifacts— conceived outside conventional taxonomies of tools, fixtures, furniture, devices, and implements— proliferate in modes that transcend definitional constraints. This expansion beyond categorical boundaries represents not a linear progression toward functional efficiency but rather a meticulously orchestrated symbiotic relationship within urban civilization, a system of coexistence deliberately conceptualized by the artist. Objects infused with poetic and material imagination manifest sequentially: Hyugeo(Rapture), which functions to eliminate the physical manifestations of emotional distress; Jean Valjean, wherein illumination symbolizing redemption and spiritual deliverance emanates; Three Houses, Three Castles, where morphological correspondences establish connections through rhythmic linguistic play; Ya-ho and 8 and 1/12, which embody the rejuvenating essence of mountainous landscapes and cucurbitaceous fruits through internal luminosity; and Summer Shade, wherein a serendipitous discovery undergoes deliberate inversion. In these works, memories and imagery interlock seamlessly, interior and exterior domains converge, and the functionless and utilitarian coalesce. Kiljong Park’s object-artifacts establish connective tissue between disparate elements through a material imagination that oscillates between humorous intervention and contemplative inquiry.

Introduction of Artists

Gimhongsok(b. 1964)

Gimhongsok operates across a diverse spectrum of media, encompassing sculpture, video, performance, installation, painting, drawing, text, and sound. His academic formation at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf during the 1990s precipitated critical interrogation of Western modernity’s pervasive influence within epistemological frameworks. In response, he strategically positioned himself not as an autonomous creator but as a reactive practitioner, approaching artistic production through methodologies of translation and appropriation. He has participated in significant international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale(2003, 2005), Lyon Biennale, and Fukuoka Triennal(2009). His notable solo presentations include Hero Maniac (Gallery Hyundai, 2000), Ordinary Stranger (Art Sonje Center, 2011), Good Labor Bad Art (Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art, 2013), and Normal Order for the Purpose of Failure (Kukje Gallery, 2024). In 2012, he received Korea’s Artist of the Year distinction from the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA).

Kiljong Park (b. 1982) 

Since 2010, Kiljong Park has operated under multiple professional identities, including Kiljong Park, Park Processing, and Kiljong Arcade, engaging in multifaceted creative production. His bespoke designs, developed in response to specific commissions, encompass objects, interior furnish-ings, exhibition apparatus, and spatial configurations, traversing domestic environments, institutional contexts such as museums, and commercial venues including department stores. His significant undertakings include the fabrication of painting display structures for Cheonsu Mart 2nd Floor (CREATIVE SPACE PAN, 2011), participation in the exhibition Spectrum Spectrum (Plateau, Samsung Museum of Art, 2014), and sustained engagement since 2015 with the Hermès Show Window Project and spatial design for Unlimited Edition. He contributed both exhibition architecture and artistic works to Floor Plan Cabinet (Audio Visual Pavilion, 2017), and in 2021, he designed the archival repository at the Paju branch of the National Folk Museum of Korea. In 2023, following more than a decade of prolific production, he presented his inaugural solo exhibition, Summer Shade, Rapture (AVP lab).