Preparing the next Piece

Jungran Cho, Director, nook gallery

The front and back! Certain objects or situations become either the front or back side depending on one‘s point of view. When someone knocks down a domino placed at a corner where people pass by inattentively, is the side facing us the front or back? In general, the process of preparing to make a film becomes the back side. If you are focusing on the process of making something, then the very preparation process could be the front. Paintings of staff members preparing for a concert or film behind the stage express backstage stories as the front. Through this exhibition, RohwaJeong and Jina Park reveal the obscure relations between the front and back.

RohwaJeong places dominoes around the floor of the exhibition space. The dominoes, carefully placed over a long period of time with great effort, will eventually fall on account of someone‘s carelessness or curiosity. The dominoes, standing in line all around the exhibition room, remind us of the food chain of our society, where if one falls everything breaks down in a chain reaction. After the dominoes complete their original purpose of falling down one after another, the front or back sides may be showing. The front and back, which change according to the situation, seem to show today’s complicated social phenomena. The bottom of a sphere hanging in the ceiling is visible. But the part we see may be the top, and not the bottom. Our perspectives of objects change according to circumstances. Roh Yun-hee and Jeong Hyun-seok, who have worked together for a long time while visualizing their interests in “relation” and “between,” share their thoughts but also keep each other in check. As they look at one another with objective eyes under the name RohwaJeong, they make their unique colors while traversing the front and back sides.

Jina Park paints people focusing on something, in the brief moments where change takes place. The empty airport scenes with wide gray floors shown in her past exhibitions have been moved to behind the stage, where preparations are made for filmmaking or music concert. The middle-tone gray floors have changed into yellow, red or blue floors. , which is of a photographer taking fashion photographs, assigns most of the picture-plane to the floor, and uses the effects taking place there as its subject matter. The artist is drawn to simple gestures we continuously repeat, ordinary movements to which special meaning or symbolism are not given, and movements we make without knowing as we are immersed in something. Here the figures are painted not like portraits but rather like a landscape painting. and are preparation processes for concerts. The painting that focuses on the preparation process taking place behind stage and shows it as the front can be connected to the artist‘s previous works, which used events that happened behind the scenes at exhibitions as subject matter.

portrays musicians moving unconsciously for the next session. As I imagine the unconscious movements of RohwaJeong and Jina Park making preparations for this exhibition, I am able to think once more about the relationship between the front and back.