JIYEON LEE, KYUNGEUN SON

In Talpidae, Jiyeon Lee and Son Kyungeun each choose to lose what was originally theirs. They affirm the false emotions that seep into the tunnels dug out from the original, or leave intact the unexpected things that emerge while chasing after it, placing them side by side with what came before. That which makes us wander because it can never be fully grasped, and which becomes clearer the more one tries to erase it precisely because it must not be known this is memory as the original, the subject of Talpidae.

The works of the two artists run in opposite directions, above and below the ground of memory. To feel one’s way through memory and to overwrite it with lies move in different directions, yet they are alike in that both leave behind only the act of replacement, without erasing anything of what was originally there. The original, unreachable because it has fled too far or because it has been refused, proves itself to be real precisely through that distance. The two meet before the fact that the very act of digging becomes yet another new memory. The excavation that seeks to reach the original never arrives at its destination. Yet the talpid has dug through the earth, and its ground has gradually changed through that act.

Jiyeon Lee connects the indeterminacy of the memory she has been searching for to the structure of nightmares, accumulating without erasure the unexpected things that arise in the process of tracing memory that is, the original. Spaces linked not by logic but by visual resemblance adhere to one another in compartments, while the new original and what had once been the original are placed on the canvas, freed from any relation of before and after.

Son Kyungeun creates sculptural pieces that fill in a forced logic: an attempt to call the tail a symbol of lies. Writing a score for this process, she explores a sculptural procedure that may be regarded as a lie. The score is carried out in the cities of Seoul and Frankfurt, asking after the false existence of “another tail”—made through the same process, yet unable to be sensed together.