There can be time, money, physical requirements, etc. to create an object. Time in this respect can be the time that an artist spends to create, think, and to do research, and even the artist’s entire lifetime. Money represents the costs for materials, the living expenses for an artist during the working time, and in the wider aspect, the cost of living during his or her lifetime. Physical requirements are the quality of the material, size, weight, and the lifetime of the object. An artist’s name, career, academic background, and demand are added to these properties to establish a valuation. What an artist experiences and takes, and how the time and money are spent remain the foundation of the artist’s idea through life, which become artworks. Finally, they become money through the act of selling.

Artwork can be bought and sold. Then, can the sale process be measured and standardized? Can a concept be for sale? Can a concept be put definitively into a work? If so, can a concept be sold and bought? And when one buys an artwork, does it mean that the buyer really buys its concept or it is just a feeling of owning it?

In order to solve those questions, ideas (important in conceptual art emphasizing concepts rather than sensual elements) are recorded. As ideas are recorded in my sketchbook, the thinking time is recorded. The only artwork in this exhibition, the object, can be a stopwatch bearing the time of their creation. The archives of the values created in the process of making readymade objects fill a space of discussion in the form of a white cube, the CYART SPACE. How can the value of this object be calculated ? Is the price in the market their value ? Or can the price be converted based on the time and amount of money spent in the process? These archives and object ask questions on what conceptual art is, and furthermore, what art is. What kind of value are the concepts that can stand alone out of their physical properties in contemporary art in an exhibition space?

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Kim Jiyeon, 2021

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About the process of art-making and results referred to in the questions:

Through this exhibition Jiyeon Kim asks what kind of value conceptual art has in an exhibition and sale by presenting the records of art-making and their results as this object. In the center of the exhibition space there is an object: a stopwatch that marks in numbers the amount of time that the artist spent on the idea of an artwork. There are also the records relating to the artist’s personal life and framed pages of the artist’s sketchbook. The pages of her sketchbook in the exhibition space turn the process of making an object into an artwork as well as the final piece, showing how the artist thinks and establishes meaning. This process and the object of her work and the exhibition show how the artist asks questions on what defines art in a certain circumstance and situation - in other words, from the issues relating to the concept or condition of art to what is given and created in an artwork and even the fundamental problems about the system from an artist’s point of view of a white exhibition space and the overall art market.

As the artist’s questions cover various matters in art, it can be seen that the artist seems to expand her questions too widely but the artist could not neglect inclusion of all the related aspects because they are important bases for her to work as an artist, and they define fundamental problems for an artist. Meanwhile, what is really interesting in this exhibition is that Jiyeon Kim brings her way of thinking into artwork rather than summarizing it into one object in order to fill the exhibition space. This approach is a way to establish a situation for interaction rather than to draw a conclusion or suggest an opinion - it leaves questions. To sum up, the artist opens a dialogue with the audience through her frames and exhibition space and in the system of art.

The artist seems to ask where her idea came from but it is actually a tool to set the possibility that its source is a third person for an open conversation. Also, her question about bringing ideas into language does not declare that language has a limit which includes all thinking but asks to talk about the limits of language. This approach is also shown in her way of dealing with the issues about the value of art, and how artworks turn into money. The area showing her personal life includes objects from her careers to receipts and bank statements. By transferring the value of her artwork into physical objects hanging in the exhibition space in frames, the artist makes them objects of artistic reason and discussion. As the series of the work process finally returns to artistic incidents in the exhibition space it digs into the boundary and limits around the meaning of artistic acts and the originality of the artist. The artist does not actually try to find certain answers. Rather she takes the audience into larger and more diverse questions. By doing so the artist tells us that art and artwork have to continuously rewrite the perspectives of a concept or condition through interaction with audiences.

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Lee Seunghun, 2021