http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/398
5/8/08 - 7/6/08
Museum as Hub space, 5th floor
Dongducheon: A Walk to Remember, A Walk to Envision
Guest curator Heejin Kim, Insa Art Space, Seoul, Korea
The complex and contradictory national characteristics of modern Korea are condensed in the region of Dongducheon, the subject of Insa Art Space’s Museum as Hub presentation on the topic of neighborhood. With a population of 88,000 people, Dongducheon is a small city located between Seoul and the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). Because of its geographical conditions, surrounded by a wall of mountains and a stream running right through the middle of the city, Dongducheon has been a crucial military base of the Japanese imperial army and then the US armed forces stationed in Korea over the last century. Dongducheon has evolved through a long historical process and its history is full of conflicts and regrets, prosperity and downfall, despair and hope. What is crucial in these histories is the motivation and awareness of the issues by local residents who believe in the significance of these memories, histories, and narratives as something worthy of representation and documentation.
Insa Art Space has commissioned Sangdon Kim, Koh Seung Wook, Rho Jae Oon, and siren eun young jung to work on projects about Dongducheon and to participate as members of a collective team, along with project commentators, designers, local activists, and IAS to realize this project. For the team, the Dongducheon project is an act of rousing consciousness in individuals as subjects and social beings through encounters, dialogue, and participatory activities. Theirs is an active process of intervention, documentation, and evolution that is open to various methods and strategies.
A partnership of five international arts organizations, Museum as Hub is a new model for curatorial practice and institutional collaboration established to enhance our understanding of contemporary art. Both a network of relationships and an actual physical site located in the New Museum Education Center, Museum as Hub is conceived as a flexible, social space designed to engage audiences through multimedia workstations, exhibition areas, screenings, symposia, and events. Initiated by the New Museum in 2006, the partnership includes Insa Art Space (Seoul, South Korea); Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo (Mexico City, Mexico); Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art (Cairo, Egypt); and Van Abbemuseum (Eindhoven, The Netherlands).
Images TOP
Profiles TOP
siren eun young jung
Born 1974, Incheon/Lives and works in Seoul
jung’s photographs, videos, and installations recall people who exist among us, yet are invisible. The “invisible” are unregistered, undocumented, and unidentified individuals marginalized from the common vernacular language, and instead, have their own nonverbal counter-languages. jung’s consistent endeavor is to identify and enrich the vocabularies of these counter-languages in art by questioning the ethics of representation and the politics of such collective sentiments as loss, agony, remorse, and sadness.
Sangdon Kim
Born 1973 in Seoul/Lives and works in Seoul
Sangdon Kim’s work addresses socio-political and ecological issues through research-based, collaborative community projects in such contested sites as Seoul, Pyeong-taek, Yeojoo, Busan, and most recently Dongducheon. His projects address the effect of government policies and economic globalization on minoritized citizens and the creative potential of a society. Operating at the intersection of art and cultural activism, Kim creates a meeting ground where local communities, activists, and artists can engage in productive dialogue and provocative understanding of the area of focus.
Rho Jae Oon
Born 1971, in Daegu/Lives and works in Seoul
Rho Jae Oon produces meta-narrative with drifting images and sound archived from the Web. His work starts with meticulous research and the archiving of image clips and sound files, which he appropriates and recomposes into his own narrative. His narratives never directly describe a specific context, but allude to a context’s socio-political issues. His final Web “publications” take the form of loose random sequences divided in chapters, often recalling sci-fi novels, and can be compared to contemporary literature, music, and painting.
Koh Seung Wook
Born 1968, Jeju Island/Lives and works in Seoul
Koh Seung Wook uses photographs, installation, and video for his conceptual projects criticizing art systems and conventional art practices. In his solo show “Please Honor Me with Your Attendance,” Koh presented a text piece appropriating the gallery’s rental contract. Since then, he has presented performance-based photo and video works such as Playing in a Vacant Lot and Triathlon, criticizing progress-driven urbanization and industrialization. Koh currently works as a director of alternative space pool, for which he is organizing a seminar series on autonomous civilian movements based on regional understanding and solidarity in East Asia.
Sponsors TOP
Insa Art Space’s presentation for Museum as Hub is made possible, in part, by a grant from the Asian Cultural Council.
Museum as Hub is made possible by the Third Millennium Foundation.
With additional generous support from 
Additional support is provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, and the New York State Council on the Arts.
Endowment support is provided by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Skadden, Arps Education Programs Fund, and the William Randolph Hearst Endowed Fund for Education Programs at the New Museum.
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