RERHINKING TODAY’S HOME AND TOMORROW’S LIFE IN THE PANDEMIC AGE

A home is the pivot point of everything. Since the outbreak of COVID-19, a wide array of social functions and demands have converged on the home including the functions of places such as schools, workplaces, playgrounds, cafes, and fitness centers. While even public functions are also brought to a home and the radius of human activities is bisected into the house and nature, the initial habitat of humans, the COVID-19 pandemic serves as an opportunity for human beings to experience simplified lives in a way that opposes global capitalistic society which has pursued expansion in every arena. In an age when nature begins making a counterattack, this exhibition is intended to examine the home as an optimal, minimum sphere for humans. It is also meant to question the nature of a home and its function in a network with nature. The direction of one’s life can be set in association with aspects such as boundary, flow, relationship, pause, and cycle. This exhibition is designed to touch on abstract and material conditions pertaining to a home as a framework-like human condition and as a human habitat that would be a space with friction when everything moves to online space. Sunghong Min’s wheeled structures are movable. With camouflage veil-like sheet draped over thin wooden poles, these structures create a tent-like space in which one can avoid light and the eyes of others. If a home is seen as an extension of our skin, this work works as a roof to cover us for a while. The artist seeks an unfixed, variable and fluid value through the motif of a roof that cannot maintain its weight without walls and doors while carrying out its function for protection and distinction. Contrary to this, in Jaiyoung Cho’s work, a home becomes solid through accumulation and repetition. As if building a wall by laying bricks on the ground one by one, her step-like work can be experienced only when strides are amassed slowly. It is like the fact that 24 hours of a day can be spent when we use every hour. Although everyday routines and rhythms bring about boredom, a home, in which an accumulation of time is allowed, stands for emotional stability. Changhoon Lee looks around empty houses in the redevelopment districts where any further accumulation of the everyday is suspended. The stream of time seems to be halted in an empty home, but memories of inhabitants, their relationships with other members, and their stories are left in the air. As if representing different tactile sensations and emotions he felt in each home with materials, Lee touches on what we have to see and hear in the space of an empty box-like house with a moisture collector. In his work, a home is not made up of walls, floors, and furniture but of invisible factors. Whereas in Changhoon Lee’s work a home is either a narrative or memory unveiled in quietude, in Moonjung Hwang’s work a home is both vitality and vibrating movement. In The Contacted for Uncontact, an installation representing daily irony under the pandemic circumstances, Hwang allows viewers to peep at an acting home that incessantly vibrates in a society where only an effective movement is allowed even though it is of no use. In fact, it is impossible to unite the diversity of ideas on homes into the single word 'home', just as it is impossible to contain all meanings of life in the single word 'life'. Kwantaeck Park asks if we can find a universal feeling for home in popular songs that have passed through our ears. A few lines of a popular song including the word ‘home’ make sounds as if saying something over and over again in a paper drawing that constructs the basic structure of a speaker. A home in repetitively recited common melodies forms the imagery in which a home is something longing, suffocating, connecting, or severing everyone. A home exists in a society where its members live together with its own respective meaning. Looking at a home that is both individual and collective, EUS+ Architects takes note of its boundaries. A house is like a door that links this space to that space and also distinguishes it from that space. EUS+ Architects looks back on the basic conditions of humans who inhabit in a space from an architect’s point of view through a door that is always open, a door through which our eyes pass but our bodies not, or a door that creates boundaries in many forms. A thought pertaining to a home symbolizes the category of human actions and the direction of consciousness, if chasms and lines are enough and the radius of a plane like a wall allows a needed minimum activity. This exhibition rethinks the home not as a private space built with digital bricks but as a physical thing that friction is possible. At this time a home pertains to the conditions of humans who occupy and share their own territory more than the reconstruction of a spatial system. This exhibition is meant to bring together works by contemporary artists and architects who contemplate the nature of humans and the notion of a home as a shift in perspectives takes place pertaining to what direction human life has to proceed in. Since COVID-19, a home has grown more apart from the museum. Thus, houses are built in the art museum. New ideas on homes are forged. We try to envisage tomorrow’s life through our thoughts on homes.

Curator / Eun-young Kim, So-young Kim

참고자료: <https://bmca.or.kr/Exhibitions-Past-2021-HometoHome>