스킵네비게이션

Born 1982 in Busan, Korea

Lives in Busan

 

 

SONG Kicheol’s practice derives from two references: the masochistic and the lumpenproletariat, two ideas fused with both disturbing and liberating meanings. The idea of logic and the meaning of words is the “power” structured in the neoliberal world. Power and order are constructed through the law and symbols, but according to the artist, it is the lumpen that discards the order. The lumpen is for SONG Kicheol a state of exclusion that opens up to emancipation. Masochism is a method of self-denial before achieving the lumpen when desire reflects the other people’s ones like a mirror. But, for not belonging to any desires or anywhere, you can create a new context and dismantle the status quo. If we look at the figure of Julian Assange, like the artist is explaining, we can understand self-violence (the act of giving access to some public forbidden information, at the price of having to be condemned for that) as an act enabling emancipation: free circulation of information. In this meaning, one obtains his or her true freedom and break the authority by betraying the “desire.”

Using performance and installation-based works, the artist is engaged in mixing medium to overcome boundaries as an attempt to separate us from the laws that govern our lives. His installation for the Busan Biennale 2016 Already Peacefully Existing Here as Always was a strong manifestation of the non embodyment of frontier-barriers, recalling the fact that we are not living in a totally free world. For his installation at Busan Biennale 2020, entitled Deeply dark, Far distant from the dim, we see a wall painting representing a truck full of chairs and truncated bodies in such a way that both are dependent from each other, and staked if all objects to maximize transport costs. The bodies occupy the space between the chairs, then reduced to holes, since we observe they have fallen apart, becoming beats, a mixture of half-human and half beast, born from the neoliberal world we live in.