Your studio is full of strange and mysterious objects. What is the role of accumulation in your work, and how did that enter your practice?
I am a bit of a collector – or a hoarder. I collect many materials as I see them on the street or in stores. Usually there’s something about the material’s quality that appeals to me, and I want to bring it back to the studio or home. A lot of the time, the materials I’m drawn to seem to have a specific function, but I don’t necessarily know what that function is. Other times, it’s purely about the materiality.
How did I arrive at this practice of collecting things to make sculpture? Honestly, I don’t know. I think I just like having things that are beautiful to my eyes, and then I like looking at them and seeing how different compositions can work together.
Can you tell us about your presentation at this year’s Venice Biennale and where the title Bearing comes from?
The project I’m presenting at Venice this year consists of eight different stations. Each station is connected to some sort of action: mourning, remembering, waiting, sharing, living, mending. I thought of these stations while thinking about what kind of person I want to live as, and, if I were to have a child, what kind of person I’d wish them to be. It’s a space where I hope people can walk around and contemplate past events, life right now, and the future.
The title comes from the verb “to bear,” which has many meanings – primarily to bear a child, to support, and to change direction. As I was thinking about this word, I also thought about the mechanism of a bearing – the most exemplary would be a ball bearing. It’s a mechanism that controls certain movements and reduces friction to create a desired motion.
For the Korean Pavilion project, we were thinking of creating a living monument of sorts, so I thought the bearing’s motion-generating mechanism was closely tied to the pavilion’s concept.
In this presentation, I see something particularly prepositional – movement through, movement across, movement between. What is the reasoning behind the artistic choice to create a journey for your viewer as they move from station to station?
When you shared the question, I thought “prepositional” was a very fitting word — it’s something I hadn’t considered before. I’m interested in relations: the body and the experience of being in a space. I think that’s why the work becomes prepositional.
Even when I’m approaching sculpture or sculptural objects, I think of them as essential to a space or in relation to the viewer’s or performer’s body. It’s about being in a space and experiencing it, rather than something you look at it from a distance.
I’ve noticed a kind of architectural visual language in your practice — as in the Kia Niro you presented at Canal Projects. What is the role of holding, carrying, and bearing in your practice, and why are you drawn to skeletal structures in sculpture?
You know, I wanted to be an architect when I was nine. Actually, before that, I wanted to be a sculptor, an artist, a painter, but then I thought I should have some sort of more practical job. Architecture is interesting to me because it’s fundamentally related to the human body and to space.
For the project I presented at Canal Projects, Niro, it was quite important for me to make it skeletal — to build up from seemingly meaningless tiny pieces of wood, connecting them to build a structure and create a space to inhabit. It’s also porous — it has many holes that can hold different meanings. For that project, I wanted to recreate the interior of a specific 2018 Kia Niro, rather than presenting the car’s exterior.
I think it’s all about wanting art and life to be almost inseparable, in the sense that we hold different memories. A lot of my sculptures can be viewed as metaphors for the human body — there’s a structure that holds the internal organs, with its own system for things to go in and out and interact with each other. This connects to how architecture functions too: if a building’s outer structure is its skin or bones, then the water, electricity, heating, and all the pipes are what make the building live.
What was your approach to the Venice Biennale space, and how does your arrangement of objects respond to the pavilion?
This pavilion has a particularly interesting shape: a cylinder, a wavy wall, and it’s full of light, with very few walls in the space. When I first saw it, I thought it might be some architect’s ego-boasting building, but it turns out they were working under a lot of restrictions. There were many trees around the area, and none could be cut down during construction.
So when I was thinking about the space inside this pavilion, I thought it would be interesting if the audience could physically experience the footprint of that constraint. That’s when I thought of the organza walls. When you enter through the main entrance, you first encounter the organza wall, which guides you through the building – a bit like moving through a garden, taking a roundabout path to arrive at the things you’re meant to see.
Once you’re inside the organza walls, you get this embracing, nest-like feeling. From there, you can walk to eight different stations, each offering a different experience.
Can you speak a little bit more about each station?
The Mourning Station has two stools for the audience to sit on. The sculpture naturally invites you to look downward, at the objects lying close to the floor. It acts almost like a vitrine, or like when you’re a kid building a fortress or a house under a table with a blanket. Everything is placed low, so your gesture, leaning forward while seated, felt more introspective or mournful to me. It almost becomes a gesture of paying respect – leaning forward, bowing your head.
The Remembering Station houses, or bears, the work of two fellow artists. At the bottom, there are 72 linocut plates by Christian Nyampeta. Each day, the bearers – the performers – pull out one plate to change the visible image. The other work is by an artist named Yezoi Hwang. Through photography, she documented the protests leading up to the Korean presidential impeachment two years ago. Two or three images from those protests are attached to small triangles in the back.
One station, the Outlooking Station, sits where the pavilion opens onto glass, and from there you can see four other national pavilions – the Russian, Japanese, German, and British. I’m carving tiny miniatures of those four buildings to place there. That station addresses the Korean Pavilion’s geographical position within the Giardini, but also layers in the geopolitics of Korea as a nation in relation to many of these countries.
