During her summer/fall 2021 Artist Residency at SomoS, supported by the Arts Council Korea (ARKO), Kwon took inspiration from the signs, symbols, and maps that comprise Berlin’s informational grid. The results of her creative urban research are presented in an installation of drawings and ceramic works, on view at SomoS art space between October 12^th and 16^th, 2021.

As a contemporary visual artist, Hyehyeon Kwon aims to elevate ceramics from the Arts & Crafts denomination, expanding its potentiality beyond the given limits. Leaving the Craft sphere behind, she applies an interdisciplinary approach, combining drawing, ceramics, and installation. Moreover, while Craft is associated with utility, domesticity, introversion, traditionality, and conservatism, she instead introduces worldliness, looking out, engagement, and a sense of cosmopolitanism, and progressiveness, showing a feminist aspect of her work as a young female Korean artist.

Initially researching concepts of “home,” such as Geoffrey Hayward’s Nine Phenomenological Concepts of the House and the philosophical theory of Gaston Bachelard’s house, Kwon’s work has gradually expanded this focus into exploring the notion of place and the idea of home as a movable and dynamic “place of one’s own,” including considerations of belonging, mobility, migration, and orientation. As critic Lee Dong-hyun noted in Viewers magazine, hers “is a new perception of place centered on non-physical media such as texts and images, rather than the traditional physical space where individual experiences are accumulated.”

In these new Berlin-inspired works, Kwon thematizes movement, space, and the place of individuals. Drawing inspiration from big cities and the signs and symbols that inform and guide its inhabitants, she achieves a creative interpretation of this urban informational structure by appropriating universal and recognizable graphic elements, working with the notion of the “unit,” one of which is the dot, an essential and returning symbol in her work.

As the artist explains:

One dot stands for an individual and a present moment. Each one of these dots forms the world spatially, the life temporally. The dot becomes a country on the world map and a station on the subway map. It also becomes one pixel and consists of letters and numbers on the airport timetable. The ‘dot’ in my work is an expression of an abstract place.

In Kwon’s work, dots are part of a personal language that, in turn, creates a narrative. In this process, which also has a social component of learning and exchanging opinions about belonging and origin, she considers other peoples’ perspectives to discover their “place of one’s own.”

Next to a video installation documenting her photographic research of Berlin’s urban visual language, the exhibition presents two new workgroups that show how Kwon interpreted her findings, based respectively on paper and ceramic. The different natures of these media enable the artist to be both spontaneous and systematic in the act of creation, with the initial paper-works leading up to the more formal ceramic tiles.

In a laborious process, that deliberately includes small errors and aberrations, the artist’s very tactile and intensely colored dots are applied to the ceramic surfaces with nail polish. While not one to follow societal beauty dictates blindly, Kwon does appreciate the mighty Korean cosmetics industry offering a wide range of nail polish colors that would make any Fine art painter jealous. While undercutting South Korean society’s expectancies towards women by applying it on her artworks rather than on herself, the impermanence of the nail polish as a medium also suits Kwon’s narrative in another way: It suggests that the position of each point is not fixed, but temporary and potentially movable. In this way, her dots represent but an evanescent constellation, possibly alluding to the fleeting nature of the points of our existence.

At first glance looking reduced, her hard-to-photograph ceramic surfaces reveal glowing and glistening surfaces and areas of painterly urban patina and grime, discrete, but rich in detail.

Containing representations of grids consisting of dots, often the pieces of each series are in turn placed on the gallery walls as an expansive grid or constellations of dots themselves. And if we follow Kwon’s thinking, and zoom out even more, we could imagine the exhibition visitor captured in one of the dots representing her various exhibitions around the world.

In their strict inner logic, use of repetition, grids, and seriality, Kwon’s installations bring to mind the Minimal and Conceptual art traditions. At first glance, Hyehyeon Kwon’s art also seems inspired by particular attention to graphic design, both in the grid-making process and the emerging dots-shapes. Nevertheless, what drives her imagery goes far beyond. As an outsider who recently arrived in a foreign city with no access to the spoken language, Hyehyeon re-creates a “safe reality,” rendering its symbols and icons unrecognizable. Ordinary city signs, such as those of the subway, supermarkets, public libraries, and traffic lights, are blown out of their original proportion to reappear as mutated shapes eventually. The distortion here serves to produce a sort of contradiction. Indeed, the intention pursued by the artist is to confound the viewers in front of their cultural signs – an ironic way of making a local feel like an outsider.

As such, Kwon makes effective use of “Defamiliarization,” the classic artistic device aiming to render the familiar strange first described by Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, and applied by such artists as the Dadaists, Situationists, Bertolt Brecht, and Science Fiction writers, later complicated in Jacques Derrida’s concept of différance, and most recently reformulated for the digital age in “the Uncanny.”

With the installations in Movable Point, Hyehyeon Kwon has developed a very personal and engaging way of “making it strange,” offering an exquisitely discombobulating but ultimately enlightening and rewarding experience, enabling the exhibition visitor to view their culture and urban environment with fresh eyes, to feel empathy with the “outsider,” and to consider what constitutes home.

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About Hyehyeon Kwon

Hyehyeon Kwon earned a BFA (2015) and a MFA (2017) at the Ewha Woman’s University in Seoul (South Korea), specializing in ceramics. Between 2015 and 2020, Kwon presented her work in several group exhibitions in South Korea and Japan. In 2020 her work was on display in two solo exhibitions in Seoul; at Sanwoollim Art and Craft and at Gallery Meme. She received various awards as a student and starting artist, including the Sanwoollim Art & Craft Young Artists Award in 2019 and the Young Korean Artists Association Award in 2020. The artist’s Map Projections received an Honorable Mention at the 2021 Cheongju International Craft Competition, at the Cheongju Craft Biennale in South Korea. Read more about Hyehyeon Kwon.

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Movable Point – solo exhibition by Hyehyeon Kwon
October 12^th-16^th, 2021, Tuesday – Saturday, 2 – 7 pm

Entry free

SomoS, Kottbusser Damm 95, 1.0G, 10967 Berlin (U8 – Schönleinstraße)

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Press release / Facebook Event Page / Visiting Information

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Hyehyeon Kwon’s artist residency at SomoS is kindly supported by the Arts Council Korea – ARKO.