Seeing means more than forming an image on a retina: it is a holistic sense of understanding the world. In his essay Eye and Mind, Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the act of seeing as ‘having at a distance,’ that seeing is not a ‘will’ but an ‘event.’ According to him. Understanding both one‘s visual perception and that of other's - being understanding the holistic situation that one sees and being seen at the same time, we recognize that everyone is situated in the visible world. In other words, we establish relationships with the world through visual perceptions. Merleau-Ponty contended the necessity of actions to change ‘events’ into these ‘perceptions’. Painting what one saw could be interpreted as ‘actions’ that he claimed. The born paintings from these actions are not just chunks of paint nor reproductions of images: they are something other that having relationship with the world. Through artworks, a visual perception of an artist “becomes gestures, not when he expresses opinions about the world.”

His philosophy becomes all the more interesting, when you think of the artworks that transfer virtual images back to paintings, which have started to appear in recent years. We are living in a world of virtuality and reality getting intertwined, and immaterial communications affecting overall everyday living. Yet, why are artists willing to re-materialize them? Why do their eyes refuse to reside in the virtual, and try to return to the real?

Starting with these questions, the exhibition Manners of Representation: A Piece of Cake invited following ten artists, who observe phenomena as if they were enchanted, and invoke perceptions by transferring forms of the observed back into artworks.

Artists : Woobin Cho, Mo Min Choi, Yongkook Jeong, Hyewon Kim, Seok Ho Kang, Hoin Lee, Jungin Park, Eunjoo Rho, Hyunseon Son, Dongwook Suh

Further Information :
ONE AND J. Gallery