SUNG NEUNG KYUNG

Sung wrote in 2008, ‘Some examples include reading a newspaper, cutting, counting money,stretching, eating candy (or cola, cake, or rice cakes), flossing teeth, jump-roping, sharingaphorisms, reading head copy from commercials and film, spinning the Hula-Hoops, liftingdumbbells, shooting ping-pong balls with a rubber slingshot, dragging a suitcase, applying babyoil, scratching, fanning, changing clothes, taking Polaroids, peeing, drinking, reading Englishnewspaper, applying shaving cream, masturbating, reading poetry, performing handstands, etc.These are the fragments of oblivion excavated from everyday life.’ The exhibition As IfNothing... The Artistic Meandering of Sung Neung Kyung reflects the artist’s ongoing interest indaily actions that become iconic when isolated within the context of the art work.

This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with a commercial gallery. In 2023–24 he will participate inthe group exhibition Experimental Art in South Korea 1960s-1970s organised by the NationalMuseum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York,which will travel to the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. Breakthrough works from 1976included in As If Nothing... The Artistic Meandering of Sung Neung Kyung include Smoking,Hand, and Contraction and Expansion. Together these works establish the artist’s set of terms.In Smoking, Sung arcs his body farther and farther backwards, smoking a cigarette in a single,long drag while he attempts to keep the column of burned ash intact atop the filter. The formsand endurance of the body and the cigarette are tested. Sung’s body relates to the numericalterms of economics through Hand, in which gesture and quantity are equated. Sung’slongstanding interest in print media as networked communication prior to the internet is reflectedin his extensive body of performance work involving newspapers and state censorship.Contraction and Expansion extends these ideas to acknowledge the political stakes of Sung’swork, which was created under the authoritarian rule of Park Chung-Hee. ‘Contraction is whatthe people in power wanted and expansion is what the people under control wanted,’ Sungexplains. In this work, as in his iconic Newspaper works, Sung silently comments on Korea’sunfree condition and every individual’s desire to expand.