Venue: Arko Art Center

Ik-Joong Kang, Things I know is a large-scale public art project in which artists, curators, educators, and the general public will participate as creators. Things I know is considered as one of Kang’s representative series. The series contains numerous sentences of daily wisdom, each succinctly put in one sentence. These sentences become Kang’s drawing and a poem. The letters drawn on small canvases are connected and combined into completing a sentence. The letters become a massive collection of thousands and millions of drawings covering an entire wall or a space.

This project, commissioned and curated by Arko Art Center, is to become a process of exchanging the knowledge of life by collaborative learning, sharing, questioning and answering. Here we see the unique reasoning and characteristics in each other. Thus, the project aims to become a chance of learning and sharing knowledge for and from all participants instead of disseminating a “certified,” “official” knowledge from the top-down, one-way trajectory as museum educations have long been doing.

Art itself is both a work and a social discourse. Museums which house these work/discourse could be a crucial place encouraging diversity. Now we await the revival of the collective voice of the individuals in an artistic language that is diverse and communicative. Ultimately, in the complex and organic structure of the masses, we would figure out that we ourselves are bodies of knowledge and the producer of knowledge. This project is an exhibition as well as an education, a participatory event as well as a cultural movement. Things I know will present the voice of collective knowledge and minds in the 21st century.

+http://art.arko.or.kr/nr4/?c=2/11&memoryuid=471