IN THE MIDDLE OF SOMEWHERE
Nantes Art School & K'Arts, Seoul, april 2018
LELIÈVRE Gérémy
Language’s Weakness
Video, 3 minutes
This video reveals the fragility of the meaning in front of the inability to understand form. This fragility is in association with the weakness of the technology (not a perfect translator).
LELIÈVRE Gérémy
What is my connection with the Korean language, that I don’t know, and can’t understand, neither the talking nor the writing? How can I face up to the language barrier and to this unknown that is impossible to learn in this short time. I would like to build on this problematic, beginning to the idea of inability to understand this language as a way to enable free playing with this, without the affect of the meaning. I started this work with a sentence from Le Bruissement de la Langue by the french philosopher Roland Barthes. I tried, with this sentence to reveal an isolated situation and the feeling to stay in the background caused by the lack of understanding the language. The many translations that the sentence suffered (from French to English, then to Korean) and the use of a visual recognition translation application on my mobile phone deconstruct the sentence’s form (significant) and the meaning (signified).
LIU Zhixing
Three-Seconds Sculptures, 2018
Painting on paper (150 x 217cm), video, 11min 46.
My work is to explore the boundaries of sculpture. Sculpture has always been used to express the concept of eternity, but I think that besides eternity, it can also express an instant. The material of the sculpture should not be limited to wood, stone and metal and so on. I like to use materials from everyday life and give them new possibilities. In this work, I use soapy water as the material for the sculpture. The soap bubbles are fleeting. When they break, the sculpture is over, that is, the “Three-Seconds Sculpture”. Then the traces of their rupture will remain on the paper. This is also the process of the conversion of sculpture to painting.
SONG Sejin
Common Senses, 2018
Video installation, 1min 03 sec.
Based on my researches about Suncheon, I found out a traditional solidarity performance between Korea, Japan and China, inspired by the “Hooded crane (Black Crane)”, a migratory bird originally coming from Siberia, who rest in these three countries just for winter time. It is an ongoing project through the performance, based on the movement of the Hooded crane to find commonalities defined in East Asia, which makes a solidarity between different territories and at the same time overthrow the identity defined in East Asia. This “mixed culture” represents to me a kind of trans-identity.
BLAKE Matthieu
Defense Display, 2018
Mural drawing map and scenario, water painting.
In accordance with the fact that Suncheon is an arranged territory between naturality and artificiality, I made a drawing, which takes some motives and some reminiscent images from the landscape, in order to imagine a new organized space. The aim of this map is to put a symbolic aspect to each element I chose, like the drawing studies of the theorician and director Guy Debord about the war-cities. This mural scenario is not just here to reveal a poetical potential of each place and object, but also to give the keys to analyse and re-imagine the landscape of Suncheon through these “leitmotivs”.
Living-Memory-Bike, 2018
Sculpture, bicycle with pieces of paper and painted words.
This sculpture consists of a bicycle, took as the simple object which represents my daily transports in my travel through the roads, the paths, the landscape. This bike is presented with some fragments and pieces of words written by hand on soft papers, and directly hanged on it. It’s like tens of little thoughts or prayers, simply naming some places, more or less in a figurative sense. The intention is to illustrate the memories of the bicycle by the names of the different locations where we went together, like if the bike was able to express his mind and communicate the journey that we shared.
PARK Seungman
Fantasy Garden, 2018
Digital inkjet print, 56 x 84 cm.
The Suncheon National Garden is a fantasy space with a mixture of virtual and reality, and has been designed and implemented through a total of two stages. The National garden is a kind of virtual space that implements the landscaping, architecture style and ecology of each country and causes illusion and illusion as if it is in the real place. The purpose of my work is to implement the artificial-imaginary process in the Suncheon Bay National Garden and the last process through the photographic medium as a whole.
CHENIVESSE Lou
Without Title 3
colour digital photos, 21 x 29,7cm.
In this project I was interested in the park of Suncheon bay. I often work on the relations we have with reality and, by extension, the relation between reality and artificiality. A park is by nature artificial. Human creates it in order to reproduce nature. This park is particularly unnatural and kitsch. Indeed, gardens from different cultures are reproduced in a stereotyped way to symbolise the different countries. More, a parade comes every day in the park to make a show. The costumes and the choreography make me think of Walt Disney’s parks, which are also quite fake. In this work, I wanted to put together the characters of the parade and some of the gardens, to stage artificial situations, which never happened since these are collages and, by this way, I wanted to speak about our perception of reality.
GIBERT Paul
Churches of Suncheon, 2018
11 studies, oil painting on paper inside a Chinese sketchbook, 17 x 12 cm.
This project is a documentary study of landscapes of Suncheon, focusing on the many churches of the city. I’ve been really surprised to see so much churches in Korea, and I’ve seen it as a cultural and pictural link between Western and Eastern countries. The presence of these churches is also directly linked to the complex Korean history. While visiting all the churches I met, an old English Literature teacher told me about Korean history and introduced me to the pastor of the Wild Flower Church. This meeting encouraged me to make this series of studies.
Korean 2553 & Korean 2494, 2018
2 pieces, oil on canvas, 45 x 38 cm
These paintings represent two Korean Manuscript, « Ceremonial provided by Councillors for the Queen In Son national funeral » and « Ceremonial provided by Councillors for the King Hon Jong national funeral ». These manuscript were stolen by the French Admiral Pierre-Gustave Roze during is invasion of Korea in 1866. These documents have been recalled back to Korea by the different Korean Governments since the end of the 20th century. In 1993 French President François Mitterrand promised to give them back to Korea, but it was not done. In 2007 the French President Nicolas Sarkozy promised to give them back to Korea once again. These manuscript are still in the archive of the French National Library nowadays.
HAN Dageong
A Moving Mountain, 2018
Oil on canvas, gouache on paper
4 pieces 24 x 32 cm, 1 of 60 x 73 cm.
I always wondered why a very personal experience seems insecure. The motif of my pictures came from folktales about a mountain in Suncheon. A mountain that moved to be at the place it locates today. The unknown storytellers all tell slightly different stories. In this drawing series, I assume this one event happened simultaneously to the witnesses.