Today, we experience an ease of motion unknown to any prior civilization, and yet motion has become the most anxiety-laden of daily activities.
Richard Sennett, 1977 [1]
The exhibition Go Without Transfer shown in Waley Art (Taipei), curated by Seewon Hyun – the director of the Audio Visual Pavilion (South Korea), [2] takes its title from a recent infrastructure development project that sought to connect Seoul and Busan via a direct railway route [3] that is unprecedented in its speed, convenience, and accessibility. These three adjectives make up the characteristics that have come to define not only South Korea’s public transportation but also the nation as a whole since it began the process of modernization over half a century ago. Since the 1960s, South Korea has witnessed enormous economic growth along with drastic changes in birth rates, death rates, and urban expansion. Its gross national product per capita increased from about $80 in 1960 to $1,600 in 1980, and surpassed $10,000 in the mid-1990s. This so-called East Asian miracle was made possible in parts due to the country’s long standing policy framework centered on efficiency, where all reforms and developments must generate immediate, visible, and tangible results. [4] The triumph of these efficiency-based policies is even more significant, considering that the country had successfully modernized and completely transformed itself beyond recognition within the span of 30 years — something that took European countries 300 years to achieve since the Industrial Revolution.
While on the surface, the title Go Without Transfer seemingly champions the same efficiency and immediacy, the exhibition’s poster, however, explicitly contests and undermines this idea by borrowing from Seoul city’s sprawling subway map, with its numerous transfer stations, and maze-like routes. The dichotomy between direct travel and transfer, and the fragmenting nature of a transfer itself, serve as a metaphor for urban imagination, which frames and deepens the exhibition’s core themes, revealing the various complexities and contradictions underlying the South Korean ideals of modernity. And as the age-old story about modernity goes, rapid industrialization and economic growth have left the country with no lack of unwanted and unaddressed side effects. Simply and effectively put by writer Jin-kyung Kim: How can someone experience the equivalence of 300 years within just 30, truly be themselves? [5]
Serving as the entry point for the exhibition, artist Sindae Kang’s three-channel video Landscape Study S#1, shows a young man centered against the backdrop of a typical post-industrial landscape filled with chimneys, factories, and smog. He walks along a river tirelessly, never stopping, yet never moving forward. The direction in which the river flows doubly impedes his desire to advance, and highlights the man’s impossible predicament by amplifying his Sisyphean character – he is trapped in a relentless pursuit for progress, toward a goal he did not choose, with no end in sight. With this simple but powerful imagery, Kang perfectly encapsulates South Korea’s blind reverence for never-ending development, while failing to reconcile with the reality of its slowing economy and deepening inequality, resulting in a kind of motion, deeply felt within society that is, as Sennet put it, laden with anxiety. [6] This piece sets a bleak and nihilistic tone for the whole exhibition.
Sindae Kang, Landscape Study S#1, 2023, Courtesy of the artist.
In I am a Lion and PungJeong.Gak – A Town with a Blue Hill, Joowon Song expands on this sense of alienation. Both video pieces use dance for the camera to position the dancers in the foreground, but only to subtly guide the audience’s attention towards the urban landscape in the background through both choreographed and improvised performances. I am a Lion, set in Taepyeong-dong, Seongnam, a suburb area south of Seoul, spends over half of its length showing its protagonist dancing solo on a rooftop. The audience is invited to observe the human figure as much as the space she occupies. The rooftop is the only place where one can experience the floor space of a residential building without the obstruction of internal walls. By placing the protagonist on the rooftop, it is clear that the building is peculiarly small for the standard of housing construction. As a result of Seoul’s intense suburbanization since the 1960s and the district’s inability to keep up with housing demands, the South Korean government adopted a relocate first, develop later policy. This policy, or lack thereof, created cramped, disorganized neighborhoods all over Seongnam, with some buildings occupying plots as small as 20 pyeong (approx. 66 square meters). With frequent cross-cuts between day and night scenes, a technique often used in promotional videos for tourism, the work is an uncanny record of contradictions: on the one hand, a glimpse into the brutal reality of urban life; on the other, an upbeat and overly optimistic advertisement.
Joowon Song, I am a Lion, 2019-2023, Courtesy of the artist.
Joowon Song, I am a Lion, 2019-2023, Courtesy of the artist.
PungJeong.Gak – A Town with a Blue Hill takes a similar form to I am a Lion but instead of solo dancing, it adopts group choreography, where the dancers’ intricate movements intensify the absence of narration and dialogue. In certain sequences, the dancers’ silence and lack of expressions, especially when accompanied by periodic pauses in the choreography, turn them into ghostly figures – dehumanized, estranged, and merely drifting through an urban wasteland.
Joowon Song, PungJeong.Gak – A Town with a Blue Hill, 2018, Courtesy of the artist.
In popular Korean films, from Oldboy (2003) to Parasite (2019), cramped and dingy living spaces have become a visual shorthand for the country’s ever-heightening class inequality, spawning the popular slang Hell Joseon (지옥고) amongst the youths, a term which combines the first syllables in the three low-quality housings type in South Korea: basement rooms (지하방), rooftop rooms (옥탑방), and small student dormitories (고시원) to describe the alienating feeling of living in a hellish version of what should be a period of great technological and therefore, social advancements (Joseon). The modernization effort requires individual life to yield to collective interests in the name of public goods and national development, effectively pushing the former, especially young people, into increasingly smaller, insular, even isolated spaces, both literally and metaphorically.
Moving away from urban spaces shaped by top-down policies, works by Su-Beom Kim and Sangun Ho illustrate Henri Lefebvre’s concept of representational spaces [7] - spaces shaped by subjective experience and cultural symbolism. In Gallery Goers, Su-Beom Kim presents scenes of museums, galleries, and alternative art spaces — known as white cubes — showing not only the artworks but also their patrons lying, sitting, and walking around, physically inhabiting these spaces, which resulted in some mundane, but also some surprising moments that would otherwise go unnoticed without the presence of the camera eye. At times, this ever-present eye takes on an oppressive quality, surveilling its subjects and their experiences in an obsessive manner. Although the work, as the title suggests, takes a visual interest in the gallery goers, it reflexively references Kim himself, revealing to the audience more about his own relationship to these spaces rather than those appearing in the video. Filmed over two decades, from 1994 to 2015, the work also serves as a documentation of the South Korean art scene and the evolution of video technology, with low-quality footage slowly morphing into high-resolution images, offering audiences a glimpse into twenty years of social and urban development.
Su-Beom Kim, Gallery Goers, 2005/2024, Courtesy of Waley Art.
In Mountain Nam and Weather series, Sangun Ho chronologizes the view of the Namsan Tower — an essential part of Seoul city skyline — from the same window over four years as it changes with the weather and visibility. Although photography might seem like a more suitable medium for such typological studies, Ho’s use of colored pencils allows for an imaginative and even meditative engagement. Rather than capturing a collection of fleeting moments, suspended in time, the artist’s enduring gaze, necessary to produce multiple drawings over 4 years, gradually alters the view that would otherwise be constrained by the window frame or the camera lens. By constantly revisiting the scenery before his eyes, he is able to transform it into a fully-embodied representation of the space.
Ho uses the same approach in his No Parking series, imbuing humor into public and private owned objects such as traffic cones, buckets, and brooms that are often appropriated by citizens to form makeshift road-blocks. These objects are stacked, arranged, and held together in a sculptural gesture, creating instantly recognizable and playful fixtures in an urban environment, demonstrating the powers that citizens have in occupying, delineating, and crafting spaces using what they already have. No Parking turns these merely functional roadblocks into aesthetic interest, highlighting the creative and resourceful nature of their inventors, proving that imagination isn’t solely an artist’s domain.
Sangun Ho, Mountain Nam and Weather, 2016-2018, Courtesy of Waley Art.
Sangun Ho, No Parking, 2015,Courtesy of the artist.
Donghee Koo’s BISANG-HORIZON: MINIATURE plays with scale by miniaturizing large-scale public artworks found in public spaces across the city of Seoul. A simple shift in scale naturally alters our understanding of and relationship to, not only a particular artwork, but also the space in which it inhabits. In playing with scale, monumental sculptures become approachable, even humorous and cartoonish in their neon colors, taking on a toy-like quality. Much like countries in the West, South Korea mandates that 1% of the budget for each public construction project be put towards aesthetic enhancements to combat monotonous urban landscapes. Over time, however, this has become a routine formality to fulfill necessary quotas rather than to genuinely or thoughtfully enhance public engagement and revitalizing urban spaces. Koo visualizes this overlooked topic with miniature sculptures, creating a microcosm to communicate the exhibition’s dual themes of public/personal, progress/conservatism, direct travel/transfer.
Donghee Koo, BISANG-HORIZON: MINIATURE, 2024, Courtesy of Waley Art.
While the theme of the exhibition and the curated artworks clearly delivers a strong social commentary and takes a critical look at South Korea’ obsession with progress and development, the exhibition itself lacks a sufficient amount of on-site curatorial intervention. Perhaps this exhibition is self-evident for audiences familiar with the cultural context of South Korea. However, the iteration exhibited in Taiwan appears somewhat roundabout and obscure in part due to the aforementioned lack of rigorous cross-cultural collaboration.
In 1973, the French Concorde aircraft achieved the remarkable feat of direct transatlantic flight for the first time in history. The slogan to capture the spirit of this historical achievement? Arrive before you leave. The title of the exhibition Go Without Transfer is perhaps second only to Concorde’s slogan in its unwavering confidence in the modern world’s inexhaustible capacity for progress. It is therefore no surprise that the transfer is deemed undesirable, and must be done away with for the benefit of the arrival. But Go Without Transfer shows that sometimes, transfer is not merely the price we must pay for transportation, but rather an opportunity for us to readjust our pace and position during the process of rapid movement, in order to frame a better understanding of a potential arrival, especially when the arrival forces us all to reconsider our point of departure. As Paul Virilio describes, no doubt there will be no longer anything but arrival, the point of arrival, the departure will itself have disappeared… [8] After all, when we focus excessively on the destination, and when speed continues to accelerate, the details of the landscape along the way will cease to exist. —[SCR]
[1] Sennett, R. (1977). The fall of public man. New York: Knopf.
[2] AVP Lab is an influential, office-styled exhibition space located in Seoul, South Korea. In addition to serving as a research space and a platform for connecting with artwork and artists, it is also active in publishing practices.
[3] Money Today. (2021, December 10). 이건희 미술관, ‘한국미술의 거장’ 전시 개막… 10대 작품 공개 [Lee Kun-hee Art Museum opens exhibition ‘Masters of Korean Art’ … Revealing 10 major works]. https://news.mt.co.kr/mtview.php?no=2021121014124644976
[4] Asia Society. (n.d.). Population change and development in Korea. https://asiasociety.org/education/population-change-and-development-korea
[5] The Kyunghyang Shinmun. (2019, January 27). 김용균 없는 설 [Seollal without Kim Yong-gyun]. https://www.khan.co.kr/opinion/column/article/201901272032025
[6] Kim, S., & Lee, J. (2024). The impact of digitalization on traditional industries in South Korea. Asian Journal of Business and Technology, 3(2), 117-134. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43253-024-00117-1
[7] Contrasted with abstract conceived spaces such as blueprints or city plans.
[8] Virilio, P. (2005). Negative horizon: An essay in dromoscopy. Continuum.
*Header Image: Poster of Go Without Transfer, Graphic design: Kyusun Shim, Courtesy of Waley Art.
