Installation view of 《IT‘S ALL DINOSAUR》 © CR Collective
CR Collective
presents a solo exhibition 《IT‘S ALL DINOSAUR》 by artist Kim Hee Jae, on view through August 22.
The motif of
this exhibition, 《IT’S ALL DINOSAUR》, is the bottarijeon placed on Jeju ancestral
ritual tables. This bundle-shaped ritual offering signifies both travel money
and provisions sent along with the ancestors. At the same time, it is also an
expression of care for beings who cannot be enshrined at that table.
The leftover
surplus of mujugohon (無主孤魂, spirits belonging to no one and bound to
no place), and the bottarijeon that no one can receive or eat, are unresolved
remainders outside the community, left only in the forms of ritual and myth. In
the art world, languages of new kinship, the redesign of care, and alternative
community have become widespread grammars of artistic practice.
Yet the
question of those beings left outside affirmative networks of relation has
often been avoided. Mujugohon, which Kim draws from Jeju mythology and makes
into her own language, belongs neither to this world nor the next.
Within the
work, it exists not as a new possibility to be subsumed into alternative
community, but as a point that has been avoided. A world in which those who
circulate and those who wander outside that circulation exist simultaneously is
not an indictment of deficiency. It is the very mode through which community
exists.
Within an
unadorned yellow space from which no specific sense of place can be discerned,
only the LED-panel video emits sensuous images, vivid colors, the vibration of
techno beats, and sound.
Folk and
shamanic rituals and the beat of techno; mythic time and urban time; active
refusal and a passive mode of existence unknown to neoliberalism. These are not
smoothly synthesized hybrids; they constitute a state in which heterogeneous
elements coexist on a single body without erasing their seams. The form of
community lives its content as such.
