BEIJING, July 18,
2024 /PRNewswire/ -- The convergence of art and
science can ignite thrilling innovations. Internationally renowned
artist Yunchul Kim has crafted a universe of transmattering at
798CUBE, fostering the synergy of creative technology and
forward-looking artistic production. His exhibition, Elliptical
Dipole: Visceral Particles and Sorcerous Flows, marks both his
debut solo showcase in China and
his most extensive presentation to date.
According to Hera Lee, Executive
Director of 798CUBE, the exhibition highlights the institution's
commitment to exploring the multifaceted intersections of
cutting-edge art and technology. Elliptical Dipole: Visceral
Particles and Sorcerous Flows delves into the intricate
interplay between humanity, technology, and nature, as seen through
Yunchul Kim's distinctive lens. Utilizing diverse artistic mediums
such as sound, unconventional painting methods, and kinetic
installations, Kim constructs a richly imaginative material world.
His works provide not only a visual feast but also engage deeply
with philosophical and scientific dialogues.
The exhibition features Kim's most iconic pieces from various
phases of his career, alongside his latest experimental works.
Visitors are invited to immerse themselves in the artist's
visionary matterReality (a term coined by Yunchul Kim) and resonate
with the cosmic infinity, unraveling the perpetual enigma of
polarity within the captivating vista of "Elliptical Dipole."
Encapsulating Yunchul Kim's intellectual pursuit and artistic
insight, ZHANG Ga, curator of the exhibition, has noted the
following:
Yunchul Kim is an alchemist turned physi-chemical provocateur.
He seems to bear the brunt of modernity's quintessence. As an
artist with a philosophical penchant for the most current,
reminiscent of what Arthur Danto
radically illuminated about art today, he is both old-school and
ultra-modern, befitting what Giorgio Agamben has argued:
"Contemporariness inscribes itself in the present by making it
above all archaic." He employs concepts such as pataphysics and
transmattering in his thought process before getting entrenched or
enchanted, one might say, in his intricate laboratory work with
rocks and metals, recently also biological agents, churning them
into micro-substances and unspeakable elements that can only be
extrapolated in particle physics and electro-magnetic fluids that
have dipolar charges to fire up otherworldly sensations and
spiritual meditations.
Yunchul Kim thinks cosmologically and acts microphysically. He
allows himself to indulge in cosmic reveries, meandering through
the geophysical expanse and astrophysical immensity and permitting
caprice in planetary temporality alongside the circadian cycle of
earth-bound creatures. He is at once pre-scientifically
abstruse, recalling when alchemistic enunciation proclaimed the
divinity of a totality of the living and the undead, of solids and
spirits, and in which the suprarational reigned in the domain of
knowledge, and post-humanistically amorphous, by which homo sapiens
is understood microbially in rapport with plants, and quantum
mechanically in tandem with rocks and stones (we are all
particles!).
Argos (2022), our first encounter with Kim's
preternatural reality, is reminiscent of the monolith in Space
Odyssey that channels the celestial stupendous to the everyday
profane by the violent act of cosmic rays striking the earth's
atmosphere. In this ultimate contact of the human abode with the
cosmos, the thousand-eyed monumental structure originating in Greek
antiquity, equipped with a modern apparatus of a Geiger Muller
tube, scans muons, the subatomic particle that is the result of the
interstellar collision, transforming into sounds and lights and
setting in motion cluster of actions and interactions of things and
substances in their vicinity – it crisscrosses, traversing matters
of different natures, magnitude and properties, materializing not
only matters of fact but also "matters of concern," as Bruno Latour would have it, enabling a
reciprocity that is both physi-chemically necessary and
ethical-aesthetically indispensable.
The French philosopher of science Gaston
Bachelard once stated that "realization takes precedence
over reality," that is, in Yunchul Kim's parlance, a
techno-matteReality which foregoes the real perceived by human
sensory faculties. Chroma IX (2024), the colossal,
knotted assemblage of a vastly elongated ouroboros form, engenders
a reality coming into being through the very process of putting
into action the phenomenon of fluctuation of the variegated liquid
that is the marvelous work of a modern alchemist, of an
entanglement of energies both positive and negative, converging
into an elliptic dipole in sedimentation and ascension. Yunchul Kim
hence presents to us a reality through the actualization of a
techno-phenomenological phenomenon: phenomenon that is
instrumentally produced and has "no genetic tie to human
consciousness and perception." (Mark
Hansen, The Critique of Data) In doing so, the artist has
intuitively undone the damage of anthropocentric hubris and made
equal footing of varied and multitudinous subjectivities.
We get a glimpse into Yunchul Kim's underworld of alchemy.
Amorph II (2024) reveals, shedding light on the intricate
contrivance and technicality Yunchul Kim creates in his visual
enchantment. Rather than an optical illusion, the wondrous spectrum
and brilliant intensity are a manifestation of a materiality of
forces, both artificial and organic, solidified in the form of
hydrogel derived from layers of seaweeds. Ancient tapestry
techniques and the progressive mono-tonality of Morton Feldman weave into the transcendental
splendor of the artist's imaginative mattereality. Two
installations of Amorph II, resonating with each other
across the expansive gallery space, in Yunchul Kim's pataphysical
explication, make salient a "matterphor" in the physicality of an
ellipse enacted by dipoles. It is eternity reconciled with
evanescence, like in the quantum mechanical revelation of waves and
particles, commingling, erupting, penetrating the Double Slit to
land both infinitely far and near all at once. In that vertigo of
electromagnetic charges, opposite forces achieve an equilibrium and
arrive at the negentropic tranquility.
As if two elegant harps were to orchestrate a vortex of harmony
and dissonance with the mechanical precision and articulation of
clockwork, Triaxial II (2017) is a liquid furnace that
incinerates metal particles and sand residuals, turning them into a
fluid gyre, coagulating dissolution into suppleness, winding up,
twisting down, cochleated, rushing geometry into entropy and
vice-versa, disintegrating and regenerating. Yunchul Kim's piece is
cyclicity, open-ended closure, a system of reciprocity and a
resolution of the polemic. It is this polyphony of multi-nodal
intensity and Variantology, as German Media theorist Siegfried Zielinski might concur, that forms the
leitmotif of the artist's inner chamber.
If Zielinski's polyphonic articulation on Variantology stems
from his erudite study of Deep Time through the lens of media
archeology, Yunchul Kim, once a student of the prolific professor,
inherits not only his mentor's pluralist worldview of humans
ancient and modern, but also takes the word very literally in the
mineralogical sense of stratification of rocks in light of
geological immensity and with the cellulose composition of trees
that enliven, and of that which subsists at the bottom of the deep
ocean. In Strata (2024), the artist explores material verity
that is beyond immediate human perception and cultural conception,
excavating and unveiling the depth of pigmentation unseen by a
naked eye.
In an homage to Raymond Roussel,
the French poet who has inspired the artist during his formative
years and alongside his prolonged pataphysical elucidation of the
world through poetic, extra-scientific reveries and introspections
(the artist named his studio after Roussel's novel Locus Solus),
Yunchul Kim has created a living sculpture, inventing a new
substance granulated from minerals that can only be viewed by
custom-designed lenses subtly integrated into hexagonal glass
containers. Stony liquids gush from small jets inside the
translucent vessel, arising upward as if longing for and embracing
solar gravity, the source of all life. Transmuting and transforming
the unstable into the potential, the boiling liquid culminates in
the co-arousal and co-ascension of the organic and the artificial,
incinerating all that are incommensurable and contradictory of the
grime of the earth into the Dust of the Sun (La Poussiere de
Soleils III, 2022).
If Studio Locus Solus is the hermitage where Yunchul Kim and his
assistants exercise their arcana of metal, stone and vegetation,
Remnant Vitrine (2024) opens a window unto the sorcerous
inside. Nested in an alcove in the mezzanine area, the Remnant
Vitrine is a miniature laboratory that hosts a medley of the
alchemist's archive of things, objects not following the convention
of classification, but alongside the exactitude of materiality such
as measurements beyond the apparently visible or matter's
indeterminacy contingent on temperature, pressure, and the
elasticity that's yet to be unleashed from the potentiality of the
thing itself. The juxtaposition and infiltration of varied
categories defy the taxonomy of species, genus, family, order,
class, phylum, kingdom, domain, etc. The chandelier of magic
(Impulse) hanging above appears as a crystallization of
wondrous and uncanny things, its hydraulically powered pumps
resemble the respiratory connectedness of a living tree, pulsating
and resonating, circulating liveliness throughout in an
audio-visual spectacle both sublime and subliminal.
Yunchul Kim paints, too, but in an uncanny stunt of painterly
action. Call it particle painting; it embodies the artist's somatic
gestures that transpire in a process analogous to conventional
painting or photo developing. Yet, it is also akin to unveiling the
vicissitude of geological eternity. The bodily movement unpacks the
trajectories of nature in the epiphany of microscopic rudiments.
Eluvial Horizon (2024) reaffirms Yunchul Kim's materialistic
symbolism as action carved in longevity, here the ephemeral has
acquired its indisputable manifestation in physicality and
temporality.
As much a visual artist as an accomplished musician, Yunchul Kim
constructs his own devices to make music that is electronically
acoustic and classically avant-garde. His turntable-styled
instrument C-Ray is a chemical reactor turned synthesizer
which amplifies the seawater-generated electrical currents into
audio signals. Sound is produced by a chemically infused "writing
pencil," inscribing onto an aluminum plate. It is a material
imprint that materializes the inaudible.
Yunchul Kim eschews the convenience of a metaphorical toolkit,
defies the dictatorial sovereign of the Signifier. His pataphysical
imperative demands a "matterphor" that is capable of agential
autopoiesis, that impregnates and brings forth. His world is
otherworldly in which only surrationalism can untie the
never-ending knot of polarity in the mesmerizing image of
Elliptical Dipole. The artist's mystic granules thus stir up
emotive flux in the concurrence of cosmology and mineralogy, of
biology and geology; of monad and dialectics, of immanence and
contradiction; and ultimately, of life and death in the co-rising
of the ascending flare of eternal return, in the atomic vortex that
swallows humans and everything else, Yunchul Kim finds his own
respite and solace.
The earthly space is a space where you can see the hydrodynamic
flow of nanoparticles made from stones, seaweed, and trees. For
example in the artwork
La Poussière de Soleils II (Dust of Suns II)
, Kim created a new substance composed of mineral particles that
boiled and spewed in a hexagonal glass container, achieving the
simultaneous awakening and sublimation of organic and artificial
objects. And for his new creation Strata, explores physical
realities that beyond human perception and cultural concepts,
unearthed and revealed the depth of colors invisible to the naked
eye.
About the Artist:
Yunchul Kim is an artist and
electroacoustic music composer. Asking fundamental questions about
"material" and "materiality", he has demonstrated the possibilities
of imagination and the creation of a reality beyond the realm of
human experience, paying attention to its potential tendencies. His
work embodies the material world imagined by the artist and is a
story of a dimension before humans formed cultures or were defined
by language. His works, in which humans, non-humans, machines,
materials, and substances are considered equal, exist as active
matter (transmattering) as the subject of events.
He has won international awards, including the 2016 Collide
International Award from CERN, Ars Electronica, and the VIDA 15.0
Third Prize. His works have been presented by a number of
prestigious international organizations, including the Korean
Pavilion, 59th La Biennale di Venezia, Italy; CCCB, Spain; FACT Liverpool, UK; Ars
Electronica, Austria;
Frankfurter Knstverein, Germany; and International Triennial New
Media Art Exhibition, China.
He was chief researcher of the research group Mattereality at the
Transdisciplinary Research Program at the Korea Institute for
Advanced Study. He is a member of the art and science project group
Fluid Skies and Liquid Things, an artistic research project at the
University of Applied Arts, Vienna,
Austria.
About the Curator:
Zhang Ga is a media art curator. He
was curator of three editions of Media Art Triennial
(National Art Museum of China,
2008–2014). His recent curatorial projects include Chaosmosis: A
WANG Yuyang Exhibition (Shenzhen Art Museum, 2024), Motion
Is Action: 35 Years of Chinese Media Art (By Art Matters, 2023), Topologies of the
Real (MoCAUP, 2023), The 6th Guangzhou Triennial
(co-curator, GDMOA, 2018), and Datumsoria: The Return of the
Real (ZKM, 2017). His publications include edited books and
essays. He is currently Distinguished Professor at Central Academy
of Fine Arts. Since 2015, he directs Chronus Art Center in
Shanghai.
About 798CUBE:
798CUBE is located in the core area of
798 Art District in Beijing, with
a floor area of 3600 square meters, the building is designed by
renowned Chinese contemporary architect and artist Zhu Pei, and is
one of a series of experimental creations by Studio Zhu Pei on the
theme of industrial heritage. The industrial "box cluster" in 798
Art District fully demonstrates the combination of technology, art
and industrial heritage. With the slogan "Into the Unknown",
798CUBE is dedicated to the integration of science and technology
and art. Relying on the innate advantage of 798 Art District as
China's cultural card for
contemporary art, 798CUBE creates a platform for the general public
to link international high-quality art resources, to inspire the
public in the context of emerging science and technology and the
avant-garde art breeding, and participating in the world-wide art
context.
Curated by: Zhang Ga
Presented by: Beijing 798 Culture
and Technology Co., Ltd.
Organized by: 798CUBE
Duration: 2024.05.25-2024.10.13
Address: 798CUBE, 798 Art District Creative Square, Chaoyang
District, Beijing
CONTACT: Una Ding,
una.ding@part-group.cn
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