DMA - DAEJEON MUSEUM OF ART

NEXTCODE is the Daejeon Museum of Art's yearly exhibition project showcasing young and emerging artists and promoting their artistic visions. Begun in 2008 as Spring of Change, the exhibition has introduced more than 140 promising artists over the past fourteen years. Prior to each year's exhibition, the Museum organises an open call for artists where it receives portfolios from applicants in their 20s and 30s who have connections to Daejeon and Chungnam province, and invites a panel of outside experts to examine the submissions. NEXTCODE 2022 features a total of five artists chosen from this year's applicants— Kim Sojeong, Kim Eunhye, Kim Hyunseok, Baek Joseph, and Chang Cheolwon --who show new artistic sensibilities and experimentation.

We're living in an age of sleek smart devices and 'likes'. Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han describes that smoothness is the signature of the present time. The smoothness of a society of endless positivity neither injures nor offers any resistance. It only gives a passing sensation of pleasure and gratification and does not interfere with or call into question the present world. NEXTCODE 2022 brings together over 150 works of 5 artists, which are not sleek. The featured artists resist and distance themselves from authority, interrupting it and blemishing its sleekness. They look at the world with their eyes narrowing into slits and enjoy uncertainties.

Kim Eunhye

Kim Eunhye works across video, installation, and sound to talk about language, power, and media. She collects existing images and s and reconstitutes and re-appropriates them as a way of disorienting the order and authority imposed on them by others. In doing so, she poses us a question about the boundary between art and the ordinary, the power of naming, and naming's inability to capture everything that a thing can be.
The works VIP general advertising firm (2022) and 2104 (2022) were created by digitally transforming commercial images like abstract paintings, cutting the abstracted images into pieces, and reassembling them into sculptural forms, that they obscure the distinction between subculture and high culture. In an evanescent spatial drawing entitled Flexible drawing 001 (2022), made in the air through the movement of a rubber hose, and in My phone number (2021), where the artist likens self-promotion on social networks to personal information printed on a signboard, Kim opens mundane s to new interpretations. Employing a soft recycling mesh bag, fluorescent rubber balls easily scattered, and crystal cords drawn on the floor, she makes her works variable and accidental, showing her playful resistance to the fantasy of immortal works of art.

Kim Hyunseok

Kim Hyunseok takes "technology and contemporariness" as his working themes and probes them in terms of 'user' and 'media'. Kim examines contemporary technologies focusing on their origins and contexts rather than the possibility of new expression through the use of new media.
Sword of Damocles: Blind Watchers and Relics (2022) is a four-channel video installation in which an AI-generated virtual character called Blind Watcher plays the role of the narrator. In this time-space where the real and the virtual are hardly distinguishable, the audience recognizes the realm of another dimension open through AI technologies. The Horizon of Reason (2022) consists of 3D printing models of virtual s appearing in Sword of Damocles. 'The Horizon of Reason' is also an AI-generated concept. Coloured with luminescent paints, the 3D models emit the energy as light on wavelengths visible to the human eye, that appear as floating illusions in a virtual space, and this implies that they are both substance and illusion. Observer (2022) is the sculpture made using the motif of the 'monolith' in the film 2001 Space Odyssey, the black obsidian symbolises a medium that allows one to enter a virtual world. The observer's hand that holds the stone, which is a dot and a pixel, is a metonymic form for a haptic interface operated by the touch of a fingertip (digit).

Baek Joseph

Baek Joseph has continued his work on the themes of memory and time. By repeatedly applying paints on canvas, peeling off the applied , and covering the surface with another paint , he explores how the language of painting makes the accumulation of time tangible. Using the traces of the past he discovered and collected in the redevelopment areas in central Daejeon, he has conducted several research projects including How to remember the city (2019).
Hard works are wasted (2022) is an installation comprising a precarious concrete structure against the backdrop of a single channel video, A spot not occupied (2022) that captures the lonely appearance of a bird flying through the darkening sky. The work questions the present reality where the areas and houses holding countless memories disappear continuously for the sake of capitalist purposes, evoking the times and places in our memories lost in the process of reconstruction and redevelopment. Through thickly wrought s of paints, Experimentation on the moment of being swept away 22-19 (2022), Experimentation on the times left as the traces 22-10 (2022), and The moment when virtual traces are woven 22-30 (2022) portray things bearing the accumulation of time, an atmosphere peculiar to the place, and a vanished world now buried in oblivion. Ancient palimpsests retaining the faint traces of the erased writings were the inspiration for these works.

Kim Sojeong

Kim Sojeong uses traditional picture framing forms, such as scrolls and folding screens, and the visual language of traditional ary court paintings in Uigwe (the records of the state rites of the Joseon Dynasty) such as the illustrations of royal weddings and funeral processions. Inspired by the purpose of ary court paintings to communicate state rites to the future generations, Sojeong Kim tries to record events and scenes reflecting individual and social struggles and by drawing them within the traditional red s elevate those struggles to affairs of national importance.
In her two OOO (Out of Office) series, OOO (2021) and OOO (2022), she borrowed the format of the illustration of a royal procession to express various forms of street protests, and by removing the slogans of the protests and their signature colours, turns the protests into universal images reminiscent of all those that took place in different times and places. TL:DR (2022), made in reference to the Uigwe illustration of the wedding of King Yeongjo and his second consort Jeongsun in The Anreung Procession by Kim Hongdo, depicts a long procession of masked protesters holding sloganed banners and balloons followed by trucks. Comprising over 130 drawings, unhinged image (2021-2022) put together the images of kickboards, placards fallen on the ground, various things found in street demonstrations, somehow strangely gathered groups of people, and passers-by in a red circle, reminding the viewer of what we just pass by in everyday life.


Chang Cheolwon

Chang Cheolwon creates works by rearranging-reconstructing in a new time-space the patterns and structures inherent to nature. Traversing between the invisible principles of nature and variables, he explores the passing of time, discontinuity, the principle that everything changes in nature, and mortality.
A shape resembling a triangle, A shape resembling a square, A shape resembling a pentagon, and A shape resembling a hexagon are the pieces from the series, produced in late 2022. Using Bezier curves, he created those simple shapes on a computer, and projected the images onto canvas and filled the areas inside and outside the contours of the shapes with coloured pencil lines. Round and Round (2021) is the result of drawing natural patterns in pixels on a monitor and reproducing the images on canvas. The lines digitally drawn materialise as they are drawn on canvas by the artist's hand, revealing the 'haptic visuality' of lines and the traces of the artist's warm hand. Rolling (2022) is his optical illusion series by moiré patterns using three pairs of images printed on transparent film which are seen differently according to where the audience stands. Two s (2022) shows the artist's experimentation with the possibilities of two-dimensional painting. Using a beam projector, he tried to capture the interaction between the projected image and the image painted on the wall.