By using text as a medium, questions about what is defined in our society are asked continuously. Text is a direct and representative way of communication in the time of excessive information and media. Overheated communication from thoughtless and continuously created text rather causes misunderstanding among people. The artists ask questions if a regulated subject can individually attain autonomy through text, if unseen truth can be reality, or about misunderstanding created in the regulation and intervention. And furthermore they question how they define art or rather should not define it, and perhaps whether they have to let it be.

 

Jiyeon Kim uses text as a medium to reveal the variety of regulation and intervention around us in respect to language, the laws of nature, politics, and economy. The artist asks about the role of image and text when they interfere with each other and eventually covering art as the subject in this exhibition. In the work Intervention of Text, the artist enlarges a caption often placed next to an artwork at a gallery next to a canvas and makes us think what is first, text or image? And it even asks if text can substitute for image. With the other work, Interlinguistic Text, Synthetic Rigor Mortis, and The Last Moment, the artist sees text as a product, and translation as an act of reproduction. By using printing as a medium to hold and present language, the artist studies how it confines or liberates language and text. She also intentionally mistranslates and causes misunderstanding in order to see how text and its meaning change and destroy and show the underlying regulation. By examining the artist’s point of view, the audience can think about how and how much mistranslation and misunderstanding in our communication influences what they see.

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Woo Jungwon, 2021