Poster image of “Walking Korea: Cut Pieces” ©The WilloWThe WilloW presents a group exhibition, “Walking
Korea: Cut Pieces,” curated by independent curator Sooyoung Leam in
collaboration with Paul Salopek, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and National
Geographic Fellow, through January 5, 2025.
“Walking Korea: Cut Pieces” originates from
Paul Salopek's ongoing project ‘Out of Eden Walk’, an 11-year journey documenting
the footsteps and migration history of humanity through walking. “Walking
Korea: Cut Pieces” reinterprets Salopek’s journey through the language of
exhibition-making. Featuring works by six artists— Kim Oksun,
Youngrae Kim, Alexander Ugay, Son Hyunseon, Jun Jinkyoung, Cha Ji Ryang —the
exhibition likens the act of walking together to "cutting."
This metaphor evokes the deliberate motion
of traversing land and time, interweaving personal and communal lives
encountered along the way. It mirrors the creative process of artists who
continuously navigate and dissect the world around them.
The participating artists explore themes of
displacement and temporality in diverse ways. They delicately cut-out and
thereby illuminate the fringes of society’s topography, slice through layers of
time with fictional narratives, reimagine tools by severing their functions to
create strange juxtapositions, and focus on the wounds etched by reality.
Together, these works construct a shared
terrain within The WilloW, located in Gyeongdong Market—a relentless conduit of
migrating goods and capital. The exhibition invites visitors to trace
the uneven contours of this terrain, to walk together, to lose their way, and
to pause for a moment of reflection.
Ji Yeon Lee has been working as an editor for the media art and culture channel AliceOn since 2021 and worked as an exhibition coordinator at samuso (now Space for Contemporary Art) from 2021 to 2023.
