Project Fulfill Art Space presents "Will You Be There" in Taipei

TEXT:Sue Wang    DATE: 2018.12.24

Project Fulfill Art Space presents the much anticipated collaborative project Loom 02, opening at the end of December 2018. Featuring artworks by the Korean contemporary artist collective ‘Loom’, with highly recognized Seoul-based curator Sunjung Kim as art advisor to the project. The collective consists of five young Korean artists all born in 1981, bringing a dynamic mix of paintings, installation, sound and new media works, exhibiting for the first time to Taiwan audiences as the Loom 02 project. Their creative approach explores space and time, transcending boundaries and engaging with the local environment, creating a unique energy within their work.

Guillaume Musso’s novel Will You Be There charts the journey of the main protagonist Elliott Cooper as he travels back in time to encounter his past self from the 1970’s. Moving through a time gap of thirty years, the novel illustrates the life of Cooper in two different time periods, as he attempts to communicate with his past in order to change his future. His past self leaves a message for his future in order to revisit him, by tattooing on his body the words; “Waiting for your next visit”.

“If time travel is possible, where are the tourists from the future?” -Stephen Hawking (Will You Be There, p. 65)

The present is essentially an accumulation of the past. We often wonder whether things would have turned out differently if we had chosen otherwise, raising the question; “what if I had…?” Much like Elliott Cooper influencing his life and those around him through space and time, the collaborators in the Loom Project are interconnected in a similar way. The Loom Project is a collective formed by the artists RohwaJeong; Jungki Beak; Jaeyoung Park and Hyein Lee. Since 2016 the artists collaboratively conducted research and experimentation contemplating the issues surrounding generational discourse and the uncertain future laid out before them. This process was carried out over the course of a year, programmed as Loom 01, and continued to define the focus of the project, with its latest progression exhibited for the first time as Loom 02 in Taipei.

The central thread among the art works is the notion of time. The relationship between time and space is portrayed through visual abstraction, archived contents and displacement through real-time video. Artist duo RohwaJeong’s art works 0-llll and screen0-llll applies various textile materials with different opacities and thickness, such as gauze, polyvinyl sheet, mesh screen and carpet among others, creating suspended layered patterns that are materialized as silkscreen prints overlaid on paper. Jaeyoung Park’s installation Piece portrays a section of space reconstructed from different time periods. The work is spliced within the exhibition space, creating a segmented experience of time. Hyein Lee’s painting series XDXD capture the random occurrences during her FaceTime and Skype video sessions with local Taipei artist Lu Yi, exploring the perceptions of real-time and simultaneity across time zones and geographical boundaries. Jungki Beak’s art practice directly uses time and space as a medium; his photographic series of autumn foliage Is of: Fall are printed with pigments extracted from the fallen leaves themselves; while his sound archive series Memorial Antenna records the sounds collected using public statues as radio antennae. The exhibition will also include a collaborative four-layered work portraying each artist’s particular nuances as well as the interactions created as a collective.

The Loom Project’s exploration extends beyond a singular notion; where even a simple gesture in conversation can muster a retrospective power, shaping our human relationships both formally and conceptually. Through a communal exchange between collaborators, the salience of particular locations and the associations derived from each collaborator’s experience of time is retained and permeates throughout the exhibition space. The exhibition portrays a novelty in the familiar, by arousing individuality of space, invigorating the past and through exchanging the differences in locations. Not only are questions of crossing time and space explored, but also the effects that emerge from the process of discovery that reach beyond one’s individual subjectivity.

Text by Sunjung Kim

About the exhibition

Dates: Dec 29, 2018 - Feb 2, 2019

Venue: Project Fulfill Art Space

Artists:?Jungki Beak, Juwon Choi, Hyein Lee & Lu Yi, Rohwa Jeong, Sunjung Kim, Jaeyoung Park

Courtesy of the artists and Project Fulfill Art Space.