Date: 5 December - 31 December 2013 (Opening: 5 December 2013)
Place: Trunk Gallery
The Taey lohe's solo exhibition, ‘Restless’ shows beds outside homes, in the street and in the woods. In a video work, we see a person slowly rising in a bed as it flows down a stream. Surely the viewer cannot but ask: What on earth are these beds doing outside their homes?
The bed in his or her head is connected to secrets, passion, rest and the body. Showing the body, under the gaze of others, as it changes clothes, rests, makes love, writes diaries and tosses and turns at night, tormented by unfulfilled desires, is something unfamiliar, at least to the imagination. But the concept of privacy, which began in the 17th century and was still more actively designed and developed in the 18th, was already based on the precondition of its violation.
Neoliberal’s economic structure and the psychology based on it, social media and other platforms for the creation of cyber-relationships, migrants who cross national boundaries by various means and en- tertainment industries hellbent on exposing everything lest they lose the interest of their viewers – all of these things have now reduced private life to something of a myth. Within today’s context, Taey’s images quietly observe relationships between private lives and the public sphere; between the intimate and the political. A state that takes every chance to peer into the rooms of its citizens (on the pretext of making policies on immigration, raising birth rates and reversing population aging); the people we call “the homeless,” who have nowhere but a cold street corner to rest their backs. People who want to overcome the life crises faced by private individuals by restoring the social and creating communities in spirit and in reality; people who want to turn us back to face the political. Beds that shuffle one inch closer into the street, down alleyways and to the edge of the woods each time we turn our heads, in an adult game of Grandmother’s Footsteps. Taey’s beds speak to all of these people, to the state and to even to those who, without any such thoughts, have been dreaming of their own private inner rooms. They become open letters in themselves.
-Kim Young-Ok, Image Critic-
To blind alleys, to cinemas late at night, to empty houses, hurriedly vacated by their occupants, on flowing rivers, under cold bridges, through parks and squares as night turns to morning, I drag around the temporary bed he left behind and try to sleep. The names carved on a spine sucked down into the soaking sheets and mattress... I ride the bed around. I am crossing the thresholds as they turn and grow obscured. Beyond time and space; beyond reality with its repeating revivals and restorations.
- From the artist’s statement -
Taey Iohe's website
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