* Open Studio and Exhibition 「Rich Disorganization」
▷ August 27, 2010~ September 5, 2010
▷ In PS333, Warehouse, and else at Seoul Art Space_Geumcheon
▷ Participated by Kim Myong-Nam, Gisoo Kim, Rho Jae-oon, Luigi Coppola,
The Pure Theatre Laboratory Machal, Moving Milmeory, Park Nung-saeng,
SUPERFISHES!, Studio Woohaha, Youn Ju-hee, Lee Kiil, Lee Soo-young&Lee Geum-hong,
Rhee Sei&Che Swann, Lee Ho-jin, In Jin-mi, Jang Suk-joon, Jeong Jeong-ju, JoSeub,
Jeff Schmuki, Chun Young-mi
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Rich Disorganization
Since the 1980s the manufacturing industry-centered cities in advanced countries have undergone a rapid decline due to economic reorganization for post-industrialization, and their municipal governments have enacted diverse city restoration programs to overcome this. The Guro Industrial Complex, as the sole national industrial complex located in Seoul, spearheaded Korea’s export-led economic growth. However, the complex made new efforts starting in the late 1980s when it suffered gradually weakened competitiveness and was regarded as an industrial complex falling behind cutting-edge industries. Renamed the Seoul Digital Industrial Complex in 2000, the complex has put into practice a plan to enhance its industrial structure. Culture and arts were embraced as the city’s amenity, aesthetic value, and dignity was underscored through the process of a city restoration project. Seoul Art Space Geumchon, designed in as part of the worldwide trend of urban restoration projects in post-industrial society, was inaugurated in October 2009 after the renovation of an unused industrial facility located in Doksan-dong, Geumchon-gu, Seoul.
The exhibition highlights ways of interpreting the space of Geumchon. Twenty first-term artists from four countries stayed in the Seoul Art Space Geumchon for two months to one year. The exhibition’s theme Rich Disorganization was proposed to metaphorically present the artists’ new dreams, their individuality, diverse perspectives, and the possibilities of a newly evolving city from viewpoints different from those of administrators and local residents. These strangers who enjoy traveling alone, leaving their home voluntarily, and moving to new places anonymously shed light on Geumchon from the perspectives of collectors, urban scholars, and detectives, like the flaneur appearing in Walter Benjamin’s ‘Arcade Project’.
In Garibong-dong where Chinese-Koreans reside now, replacing laborers of the Guro Industrial Complex, Lee Geum-hong and Lee Soo-young documented those migrant workers’ unique food and language in a book. Jang Suk-joon and Nam Ji-woong explore elements of an ideal city local residents dream of, through urban policies to redevelop a declining industrial complex into an up-to-date urban image. Jeff Schmuki created a minimalist structure with built-in filters for electronic goods he collected from every corner of Geumchon-gu. About 1,000 manufacturing companies are still clustered here despite the process of reorganizing the area for advanced, high value-added knowledge and information industries.The scenes these artists rendered are mere manifestations of their individual concerns for life here, but have nothing to do with regional issues such as the reality of migrant workers residing here, and reckless development of this area mixed with industrial and residential facilities. A scene, however, is perceived through the subject’s selective recognizing process, and the memories imprinted from an individual or a group’s daily life involve in this process. Individual scenes resident artists rendered acquire meaning of its presence through structuralized, symbolized representations as cultural images, and the memories, reflected by this region’s artifacts and images they collected, are not individual but collective. Can the artists’ aesthetic attempts to add new identity to this declining area save its concealed, forgotten moments of the past?
By Kim Hee-young, Manager of Seoul Art Space Geumchon
