[소현우, sohyunwoo]The sculptures of So, Hyun-Woo

The sculptures of So, Hyun-Woo

Capital erodes soul

(Kho, Chung-Hwan, Art critic)

Cruel Fairy Tales, the theme represents the works of So, Hyun-Woo.  The theme is unnatural and abnormal.  Cruelty makes a fairy tale unnatural and abnormal.  Cruelty and a fairy tale are not terms going together.  The togetherness creates an uncomfortable and unfamiliar situation.  A fairly tale is a story of adults that is designed to read for children.  It is childish and innocent like the story created for their dreams.  It is the story of a dream and for a dream.  Should the world be like a dream and innocence, how would it be lovely?  Unluckily, however, the story is not the outcomes of recognizing actuality or the process of reconfirming it.  The story is the outcomes of negative recognition on actuality, and facts are desperate to what actuality deficits.  Regarding an epic within a fairy tale, you may read it in irony.

For children to shift from the range of imagination to the one of symbolism, they should pass through the boundary, suffer from the rituals of passage, and pay their sacrifice, which is constraint.  They should also accept moral and custom, commons and rationality without a doubt and restrain themselves to taboos and prohibitions.  A fairy tale is said to be created for children to have a dream.  However, the tale does not tell a story of dreams, but of restraints, a story of an unwritten rule, and a story dramatizing taboos and prohibitions.  Like these, a fairy tale is not for children but for adults, and reflects the aspirations of adults.  In this sense, it is twofold from the initial phase.  It is equipped with what actuality deficits and what it denies in a constraint format.  It is also a tactic that adults have developed in order to foster children as naïve and innocent global citizens and a wit designed by rationality.  However, they avoid the situation when the innocent and naïve tale turns to be a lie.  Killing and violence, sacrifice and death motives are returning beyond the difference of actualities through the gap between a dream and reality.    

Thus his cruel fairy tales is indeed natural and normal.  Every tale is hiding its restraint aspiration like a shadow, representing the negative perception on reality, and possessing the latent revolution.  When the tales is turning to be a lie, the reality realm being unwittingly revealed is structured with gluts and redundancies, deficits and lacks, thus opposing the principles of reality.  Furthermore, it even threatens the reality.  These are all predictable in that fairy tales are deceiving and based on a lie.  If so, who deceives whom?  Adults deceive children.

The works of So, Hyun-Woo are emphasizing the shift of a story weight from the world for children to the world for adults and the extension of a fairly tale to society.  The extension makes it possible to see that institutions and capital deceive people.  They have developed so-call a fairy tale for modern people or ideology and are deceiving people.  From the perspective of institutions, the ideologies, such as commons-based and order-oriented society, and the society where the diligent can succeed, were to initially realize the common goodness, but in fact they have got to fall down to an instrument to educate the criterion between normality and abnormality and allow for internalizing the rules for common senses and rationality.  The enlightenment is vulnerable to powers.  In the movie, <Juyoosu Seupkyeok Sakun – the event of a sudden attack on a gas station>, characters are allergic to the enlightenment.  It is an instrument for those who have powers to defend their logic, rather than for common goodness and played as an instrumentalized rationality.

Assume that institutions do so, how about capital?  Institutions are more naïve comparing to capital.  Capital is unconditional, relentless, and automatic.  It is also epicene and value-neutral, and classless.  It is involved in the industry cooking aspiration.  The industry is not grotesque at all, or unfamiliar, but common.  Penetrating into the cliché of pop-cultures, capital is to shape goodness and innocence into obviousness and convention.  Furthermore, it is making the story designed for dreaming a dream commercialized, the industry of dream and aspiration.  Let people dream and desire!  Let them meet their compensation psychology and get vicarious satisfaction!  Furthermore, remove the reality, fill out the void with dreams and aspirations, and announce that a new, real, and omnipotent utopia advents.  In front of such a relentless capital is not a dream innocent any more, and aspiration stops serving as an agent of revolution.  The sculptures of So, Hyun-Woo let us stand in front of rusty machinery which does not run any more before the industry of dream not allowing for more dream and relentless capital.  

His recent works have rented a great epic like mythologies, fairy tales, and religions.  He rented a half-human half-horse monster in the ancient Geek mythology, an elf in a fairy tale, and a religious spectacle renowned for the scene the God reinvigorates Adam.  The characters rented from epic stories are like those in pop-cultures, sex-machine appearing on Japanese animations, and warriors equipped with arms in games.  Armed with cool and sharp stainless steel, the characters appearing on epics are revived as modern warriors who are more aggressive against others.

He overturns the mythologies and turn around epics.  Roland Barthes views a mythology to arise when cultural facts are considered to be as-if natural ones.  Disguising the ideology into as-if natural phenomenon, not humanities, this is, the artist’s characters reborn in murder weapons are to reveal the desire hidden and constraint by epics, the agencies under the names of mythologies, fairy tales, and religion.  Reading the recognition of actuality as dystopia where Utopia ideology is acting on, and the exteriors generating sentimental pleasure and its chic completion being consistent with the logic of commercialization of capital, these are, the artist’s sculptures implicitly represent the similarity like reading between lines and strategy of avant-garde typed unfamiliarity.

The artist has mixed relentless ones in a series of projects: the avarice of a half-human half-horse monster, pretty and cute Disneyland-like elves, cutty of fancy-products, Lolita syndrome, enchanted but sharp Siren, sex machine, femme fatale, the cruel bloody scene, players wearing game-character costumes, and religious images and even accompanying aura.  The chuck mixed with indiscreet ones looks more freshly and dizzy when the glitter surface texture reflects.  Likewise, the exteriors of indiscreet ones are opposing to the commercialization of capital that is led by the logic of self-identity (the logic of non-identity and logic of difference), meanwhile they are consistent with the avarice of capital and its nature (the congruity of incongruity and the evolution to the principle of aesthetic inappropriateness).

Such two-fold facets (consisting while opposing to capital centrality) is coincidental with a kind of patch structure occurred during the artist’s works.  Namely, attractive as the exteriors of his sculptures are like appealing products, pieces of stainless steels are indeed being welded as pieces of cloth are weaved.  The whole structure seems to represent the organic relationship between part and whole (thus, coincidental with the planning of commercializing), but rather just the set of distinctive and indiscreet parts (thus, opposed to the planning of commercializing).

The structures and exteriors of his sculptures maintain two-fold and strained relations with the planning of commercializing.  From where do these duplicity and double-fold relations come and what do they mean?  Capital was said of the industry triggering avarice, not satisfying avarice.  Capital dies when satisfying the avarice, and should continue to trigger it in order for capital to sustain and implanting the illusion that the moment will come when the avarice is filled out.  Therefore, capital is an elusive industry and the industry of dreams.  Furthermore, the avarice itself is like gluts and redundancies, so that we cannot seek for its alternatives in reality.  Therefore, it is said that I am joining and plotting together the planning of capital as long as such delusive machinery mediated with avarice works normally, thus helping to explain the duplicity and discrepancy reflecting from his sculptures. 

Capital is the industry of avarice, of dreams, and of delusiveness.  Avarices are gluts, redundancies, and deficits.  They are all absent in reality.  Capital is a delusive machine enabling to dream through mediation with avarice.  The better the machine works, the more it let people dream and the dream is the more delusive.  It is to remove the perception of reality, wipe out the reality itself, and finally erode soul.  His murder weapons that remind of games, SF, animations, Cutty, and costumed players are exposing the absent avarice and testifying the planning of capital relying on the avarice.  The sentimental exteriors like attractive products are good at concealing the planning and exposing as well.

So, Hyun-Woo

Born in Tongyoung, Kyungnam in 1978

Received his BS and master’s degree in sculpture, Dong-A University

Exhibition

2011 Individual exhibition, Insa-Art Center “Jaehoi”

     Cruel Fairy Tales 2, Insa-Art Center

2009 Individual exhibition, Cruel Fairy Tales (Insa-Art Center)

2007 Graduation Exhibition, A study on the shape of modern people from a critical view, Seokdang Gallery

Group Exhibition

2011 The 10th Songeun Art Contest (Songeun Art-space)

2010 Seoul Auction Hong Kong SALE

     The 3rd Design Auction (Seoul Auction, Kangnam)

     2010 Korea Modern Sculpture Invitational Exhibition (Choonchun MBC Hoban Square, Crown Haetae Art Valley)

     Tongyoung Art Festival (Tongyoung city hall, Hemidang Gallery)

2009 The 2nd Art Auction Show (KOEX)

     The 60th anniversary of Donga Universty (Pusan city hall)

2007 The 3rd Pusan Lotte Art Fair (Lotte Department Store)

     Chazaganeun Misugwan (Pusan Jin-gu office hall)   

     New Wave 2007 (Gallery Jamiwon)

     Para Jiboong-cheon (Keumjung culture center)

     Jeonsi-sijang and Jeonsi-sijang (GM Daewoo dealer’s shop)

     Saebbalgan Geojitmal invitational exhibition (Art Space Mindle)

2006 The 1st Yangsan Sculpture Festival (Samdoek Park)

     Lotte Castle Housing Culture Hall invitational exhibition (Gallery Kanji)

Award

2007 The 33rd Comprehensive Grand Frix, Pusan Art Contest

     The 20th , the 2nd winner (Choiwoosoo), Sungsan Art Contest

2004 Winning a prize, Danwon Art Contest

소현우, 인사이트 센터 2011.02

작가 페이스북 : https://www.facebook.com/hyunwoo.so.98