From June 9 to July 29, SongEun will present Planet Theater, a solo exhibition by Hyewon Kwon, the Grand Prize Winner of the 19th SongEun Art Award 2019. Hyewon Kwon’s work reconstructs the unwritten history of a particular place, which exists only in memory, in a narrative form and captures it on video. The exhibition focuses on how machines that measure and observe nature change our relationship with it and create a ‘new nature’.

At the 19th SongEun Art Prize, the artist presented two new, more dynamic videos of her journey to a cave on Jeju Island, which took a serendipitous and unexpected turn. In these works, the artist takes her ongoing interest in video experiments and installations to another level, reconstructing the fragmented history and cultural context of her personal experiences. The exhibition raised expectations for what new sites of memory she will show in the future and how she will document them.

In Planet Theater, she seeks to find the point where humans, technology, and nature connect with each other through virtual reality. After building a fictional laboratory, the artist questions the relationship between reality and fiction and the “reality” that the artist has recreated through the technology and environment in her imagination, asking the question, “What can we learn from machines that aim to coexist with us?” and imagining the possibility of a world in which the power of ecosystems and human technology is reversed, rather than subordinated to the purposes of humans and industry, beyond anthropocentric perceptions. Through this imagination, we look at the world through the eyes of humans, nature, and various organisms on the planet today, and we are interested in how the relationship between technology and society shapes social and psychological consciousness, and we hope to continue this new transition through the practices and actions of others.

Planet Theater
6.9-7.29, 2023
SongEun Art Space
441 Dosan-daero, Gangnam-gu, Seoul
Mon-Sat, 11:00-18:30