Kyungwoo Chun is one of the leading South Korean photography and performance artists. He studied in Seoul and Germany, and currently works as a professor at his alma mater. He gained international renown for his distinctive extended exposure photographs. Since the early 2000s, Kyungwoo Chun’s interests have extended beyond photography to also encompass performance art. Since then, he has completed several performative works in public spaces all over the world, including in Gdańsk.
Jadwiga Charzyńska, Ingo Clauß, Juhyun Cho and Jacek Kołtan all contributed texts to the catalogue. In her essay, Jadwiga Charzyńska, Director of ŁAŹNIA CCA, describes her fascination with Kyungwoo Chun’s art and the project they carried out together in 2010. Ingo Clauß, curator at the Weserburg Museum of Modern Art in Bremen, introduces the reader to Chun’s most important performances and installations. Juhyun Cho, author of the third text, works as the chief curator at the Ilmin Museum of Art in Seoul and as extraordinary professor in cultural mediation at the Yonsei University. In her text “When the Nation speaks: Kyungwoo Chun’s The Listener’s Chair as a square, memory machine and memory theatre”, Cho describes the artist’s works in the context of South Korea’s history and culture. The fourth text featured in The Listener was written by Jacek Kołtan, philosopher, political scientist, publisher, director’s plenipotentiary for research at the European Solidarity Centre and lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdańsk and the Artes Liberales College at the University of Warsaw. His essay “The three promises. Tenderness, solidarity and politics”, includes reflections on the Vice Versa exhibition and Kyungwoo Chun’s art in general. Jacek Kołtan summarizes his deliberations in the catalogue in the following words:
“While the late modern world keeps making us promises of a better life, it painfully deprives us of the possibility to fulfil them at every step of the way. By initiating his artistic practices, Kyungwoo Chun opens up room to fulfil these promises. His art is affirmative – its dominant need being a focus on spaces where impulses stemming from tenderness, a sense of solidarity and the experience of political interconnection may change our attitude to the world. His art is focused on shared experience, experience that is so close to us that it naturally encourages us to get involved with others. It reveals the close co-presence of others and discovers the pleasure of interaction – with tenderness, solidarity and in the spirit of freedom. Kyungwoo Chun’s artistic practices seem to create a kind of real utopia, a utopia in action, which makes the impossible possible – by removing people from their individual worlds, it tempts them to practice co-presence and makes them aware of common horizons. In doing so, art clearly demonstrates that it has surprisingly much to say in this respect”.
The publication also features an interview with the artist conducted by Jolanta Woszczenko, the curator of Kyungwoo Chun’s solo exhibition held at ŁAŹNIA CCA in Gdańsk in 2020.
The book’s graphic layout was designed by Ania Witkowska.
Editing: | Jolanta Woszczenko |
Publisher: | LAZNIA Centre for Contemporary Art 2021 |
Data: | Hardcover, illustrated, 269 pages, dimension: 175x225 mm |
Language: | Polish/English |
ISBN: | 978-83-61646-59-4 |