Installation view of 《Future Elegy For a New Life》 © CHOI&CHOI Gallery
CHOI&CHOI Gallery presents 《Future Elegy For a New Life》, a three-person
exhibition featuring Hyunjin Park, Soeun Bae, and Gijeong Goo, on view through
September 30.
The artists’ practices build post-biological futures in an
effort to resolve the questions of mortality along post- and trans-humanist
frameworks. Through building alternative bodies, the artists' works engage and
activate each other through form and materiality.
In doing so, they expand upon a notion of what it means to exist
in multiple realities, as well as care aesthetics that both outlast and
transgress what is human.
Installation view of 《Future Elegy For a New Life》 © CHOI&CHOI Gallery
Gijeong Goo’s process involves the intermedia
translation of bodies, nature, and technology, problematizing their linguistics
as their existence transcends the boundary between the digital and physical.
In this exhibition, Goo places man-made steel objects alongside
real plants that continue to grow and wilt, requiring constant observation and
care throughout the exhibition. Nature, ever-more iterative through the
digital, becomes entwined with virtuality through augmented reality.
As a result, his work hints at a vision of the Biocene, a
speculative era in which governance of the Earth is restored from human
intervention to nature.
Installation view of 《Future Elegy For a New Life》 © CHOI&CHOI Gallery
Hyunjin Park combines tradition, history,
folklore, and mythology to create scenes that hover between life and death, the
human and the nonhuman, and care and mourning. The dog, a recurring motif in
her practice, symbolizes the boundary connecting this world with what lies
beyond; in this exhibition, three dogs are derived from the myth of Cerberus,
the three-headed guardian of the underworld.
The three heads of Cerberus are reinterpreted as skulls dyed
with balsam and skeletal forms combining dogs, plants, and female bodies,
evoking ideas of waiting, ethnicity, and femininity. Rather than offering
definitive conclusions, Park creates a placeless space where biological,
inanimate, and post-biological beings coexist, asking how we might care for
life beyond the boundary of death and for those who remain behind.
Installation view of 《Future Elegy For a New Life》 © CHOI&CHOI Gallery
Soeun Bae creates post-biological android
bodies that can become new subjects of care, drawing on her personal
experiences of exclusion and isolation. Her objects take the form of
transhumanist lovers and posthuman beings capable of forming tender, queer, and
intimate bonds, exploring new possibilities of embodiment through bodies that
exist beyond physiological laws.
Created through 3D modeling, mold-making, and casting, these
bodies occupy the threshold between physical and digital realities, combining
materials such as metal, plastic, silicone, and resin with archival models
based on the artist’s own body. Through these works, Bae asks how we might
touch, caress, and care for their skin and flesh, exploring new possibilities
for relationships and forms of care.
Participating Artists: Gijeong Goo, Hyunjin
Park, Soeun Bae
