Venue : Art Sonje Center

The artist LEE Jungwoo pays attention to the mechanism of creation and consumption of ‘fictional awareness’ in today’s society. He defines fictional awareness as unsubstantial images which dominate the reality after transformed, distorted and exaggerated through the media, both social and mass media, in the national, historical, cultural or political context. It is difficult to ascertain the truth of the images. This is because they develop meaning in themselves out of the original context after going through the process of creation, consumption and reproduction. The artist proposes fictional awareness, which is selected and introduced, based on his own experience and knowledge, to understand the substances of the images. Shot Blank, the title of this exhibition, is from blanks, the gun cartridges which contain explosive but do not contain a bullet. Thus, they are relatively safe although they have possibilities of causing fatalities and severe injuries when fired at very close ranges. In the exhibition, Shot Blank, the artist questions the methodology of image-making and its strategy of use in media, which creates the images of especially ‘horror’ particularly in order to run and sustain a social system efficiently, and fictionality created by fabricated images without substances.

Above all, the work, Shot Blank, the same title as that of the exhibition, borrows the mechanism and the structure for producing a sensation of horror in film production. Through the use of the location hunting archive for horror films, superficial impressions of specific places from the archive make the setting fit for a different narrative from its original context in daily lives. In addition, the setting has an atmosphere of a mysterious tension and agitation thanks to a combination of the images of the places and the background sounds and lines of Korean major horror films such as The Maid (Kim Gi-yeong, 1960), A Public Cemetery of Wolha (Gweon Cheol-hui, 1967), Suddenly in Dark Night (Go Yeong-nam, 1981), and so on. A unique and typical structure of Korean horror films – generating tension by an outsider’s intervention in a specific relationship or place, cinematic sound effects which are familiar today, and etc. – and the subtitles of cries or monologue plunge the audience into unsubstantial horror.

About Artist
LEE Jungwoo majored in stage design at Sangmyung University. He worked as a film production designer from 2004 to 2009. In 2010, he moved to Germany to finish video art Diplom, Meister Schuler degree at Hochschule für Bildende KünsteBraunschweig. He studied under Candice Breitz. He had his solo exhibition, My Name is Red at Art Project Space Centrum in Berlin in 2016, and participated in group exhibition held at Hannover Kunstverein, Mönchehaus Kunst Museum Goslar, Germany and Amado Art Space in Korea. He lives and works in Korea since 2017.

 

+http://artsonje.org/en/shortblank/