Installation view of 《SCULPTURE CENTER 4/4》 © PS ROY
PS ROY presents Gwon Osang’s solo
exhibition 《SCULPTURE CENTER 4/4》 on view through July 30.
The exhibition marks the final chapter of a
yearlong project between the artist and PS ROY, and features a full scale
rendition of an idea conceived in his earlier years and previously exhibited as
an esquisse in his duo exhibition at Ilmin Museum of Art, 《The Other Self》. Inside Deodorant
Type, a sculpture covering all five surfaces of the 369 cm-high
central exhibition cube, is presented alongside three preparatory esquisses
that trace its development.
Installation view of 《SCULPTURE CENTER 4/4》 © PS ROY
Gwon has long redefined sculptural
conventions through his signature method of adhering printed photographs to
lightweight iso-pink foam and coating the surface with resin. Challenging
traditional notions of mass and material, the new work whilst continuing the
usual photographic sculptural methodology departs from earlier approaches by
designating the exhibition walls as the primary structural framework.
Where traditional sculpture constructs form
through an exterior logic—building upon or carving into a central core—this
work uses the five planes of the exhibition space as its foundation,
redirecting the viewer’s gaze inward. In doing so, it expands sculptural
language into the realm of the interior, disrupting the historical hierarchy
between sculpture and space and proposing a structural shift in which sculpture
becomes the very condition of space.
The work references the Palau de la Música
Catalana in Barcelona, an iconic early 20th-century building that combines
innovative steel construction with ornate Art Nouveau decoration.
Installation view of 《SCULPTURE CENTER 4/4》 © PS ROY
The esquisse underpinning this project was
produced in the early 2000s using virtual imagery captured from Google Maps,
reflecting the artist’s long-standing interest in translating technologically
mediated space into sculptural form.
To realize this vision, the artist sifted
through numerous online images and fragmented this monumental building into
discrete parts—reassembling them across the sculpture's structure. The
deliberate omissions and distortions that arise in this process give rise to a
new space articulated in the artist's own language: the stone, columns, and
ornamentation of the original architecture are displaced by media as weightless
as flat image, drifting away from the physical laws that architecture has long
upheld.
The photographic layers exceed simple
collage, combining multiple temporalities and viewpoints into a single
sculptural form. Inside Deodorant Type emerges as a new
virtual real: an infinite space in which countless temporalities coexist at
once.
