PANAJI.- Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts presents a solo show by South Korean artist Kyungwoo Chun titled Songs without Lyrics, presenting in-situ, photographic, video and performance works. Chun is known for his experimental portraits that are based on temporally set processes. Relationships form the core of his practice and much of his work is based on situations and encounters that revolve around concepts of empathy, care, compassion. In this process, people become an important asset in the work.
Chun is concerned with how we interact in the world, how we relate to ourselves and each other. Creating un-familiar situations that can provoke modes of interdependence, he provides a space for individuals to enter, shed exterior excesses and traverse an interior scape. Ordinary conversations, requests, tasks initiate the possibility for exchange.
Forging a series of meeting points that require the physical presence and engagement with strangers, the body, histories, hopes, fears, faults become the raw material for Chun’s study. Part of his working process is to nudge individuals into unusual settings. How these provocations are accepted/rejected, determine the shape that the work will take. Participants deliberate on the meaning of the most ordinary actions.
The title of the exhibition Songs without Lyrics takes an unexpected twist searching for alternatives for lyrics with no notes. Stretching our capacities for listening to sounds that are imagined or interpreted, generate new forms to communicate. Children from the Ektaal Children’s Choir are invited to select picture scores composed by Koreans with hearing and speaking disabilities. Each score carries a title, a colour corresponding to melodies and a number indicating the length of tone. In Korea, these sound sequences were activated by the sound of bells. In Goa, the choir singers, acting like conductors, create their own rhythms to each piece as they perform for the original composers of these scores.
This association with the Ektaal Children’s Choir continues in Resonance, a photographic piece where the children sing to nature. As each one speaks to trees, their portraits are captured using the technique based on temporally set processes, rendering the final image as a blur of moments that passed between each child and the tree.
Ordinary Unknown marked Chun’s first intervention at Sunaparanta, where 30 guests were invited to dinner and instructed to feed the person sitting before them in total silence. Tapping in to sensibilities of nurturing, trust and humility, feeding became a symbolic gesture enabling layers of intimacies to unveil. 1000 Names greets visitors with a sound piece and are given a minute to write down the names of those most precious to them. Participants in Travelling Faces connect with a person they know in another country using their smartphones. The contacted friend/family member is asked to send a selfie, that the participants are then requested to make a sculpture based on the photo they received. With Seventeen Moments, the breath, or our perception of life and the expanse between one breath and the next, is at the heart of this moving image piece, pointing out to the beginning and end of that moment that sustains life. In 100 Questions, a hundred participants from various backgrounds ask a personal question that is answered live and with a slight nod by 10 anonymous people.
The ephemeral settings and the conditions that are prescribed become the catalysts and witnesses for something to take place between people who are brought together. It is in this in-between liminal space where relationships can emerge, communication takes place and vulnerabilities can breathe.
Kyungwoo Chun
Kyungwoo Chun (1969, Seoul) has for many years been working on photography projects and initiating performances in which the audience is actively involved. He attained international recognition through his portraits, many of which have a characteristic blurriness in their movements – the consequence of extended exposure times. As diverse as the artistic approaches seem at a first glance, Chun considers both performances and photographs to be in equal measure “visible manifestations of that which is not visible.”
Chun has realised numerous performances with participation of the public in many cities including Barcelona, Seoul, Berlin, Liverpool, Zurich, Mumbai, Bremen and New York. His work is represented in major museum collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH); Huis Marseille stichting voor fotografie, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Emden; Museet for Fotokunst Odens; Musée Mac/Val in Vitry-sur-Seine; The Museum of Photography Seoul; National Museum of Contemporary Art in Korea (MMCA), among others.
