LONDON.- The Korean Cultural Centre UK is presenting its ‘2019 Artist of the Year’, Kang Jungsuck, in his first London solo exhibition. Also chosen by South Korean artist Haegue Yang for the BALTIC Artists’ Award 2019, Kang’s work spans across sculpture, video, installation and writing. Presenting new and recent work, the artist harnesses his experience of technology, gaming culture, K-pop, and wider society, as inspiration to form unique environments with multiple realities.
Taking the Futurama exhibit shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair as a departure point – which reimagined the world 20 years into the future – Kang adopts the exhibit’s multi-perspective model. Reintroducing three ‘creatures’ that populated the BALTIC exhibition, a Lilliputian, Self-driving Car and a Human, Kang explores how objects can contain, or be produced from, multiple, intertwined perspectives.
The Lilliputian, taking her name from the small, satirized race of people from Lilliput in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726), is an animated doll-like character that inhabits the gallery space via various screens and as a physical model. Dressed similarly to that of a K-pop star, she shares a space with the Self-driving Car; an autonomous vehicle which can be likened to the Tesla Model 3, a car with an inbuilt autopilot function.Lastly the Human gestures to a third, outsider party: the viewer. Playing an ambiguous, voyeuristic role within the exhibition, the Human also nods to contemporary society’s current state of transition, in line with, and a product of, such new technological developments.
Kang uses the video game engine as a medium itself, designing his projects simultaneously within this software and in real life. Transgressing the typical boundaries between simulated content and physical sculpture, the spaces in the game and the artist’s physical studio are mapped to one another, so it is both the ’studio’ and exhibition that are eventually embodied in KCCUK’s physical gallery space. Positioning the mainstream within an artistic context, Kang observes how changes caused by technological advancements can affect our own perspectives, prompting us to question the future possibilities of such a multi-dimensional world.
The exhibition is organised by Korean Cultural Centre UK and BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Curated by Emma Dean (BALTIC) and Jaemin Cha (KCCUK).
