HEO Chanmi
조회 1,445
관리자 2020-09-05 13:12
Born 1991 in Busan, South Korea
Lives in Busan
HEO Chanmi, Daily Walking Rehearsals_rooftop-sky & roof-sea, 2020, Gouache on Paper, twigs, variable dimensions
There is a place for the unapproved, evicted, forgotten, and vanished in works of HEO Chanmi. Starting from her personal experience and expanding out into a social context, in her process, she fixates what she has encountered on the canvas in a quiet tone, like writing down a personal diary. However, it doesn’t actually seem like a diary, which is usually event-centric, but like a series of everyday happenings too trivial to be captured in a concrete form. In this respect, as an attempt to understand the world surrounding her, she engages with materials that she finds, and turns them into tools for making art works. Starting from the matter of selecting a tool for painting, her concerns stretch out to the matter of the images she creates with the tool. She, for example, starts to work by unfolding a paper that she was given, and then fills out the paper with random, unappreciated things that she found while roaming around the area where she started unfolding the paper.
The artist uses these tools to cling to things that will soon fade from memory, even though it works only for a short time. In the work Samilgongsa (2019, Space Clip, Busan), she brings “Samil Corporation” back to life, an organization which was located where the Busan Regional Military Manpower Administration is now located in the Mangmi area. Its name, “Samilgongsa,” was used to hide the presence of the Defense Security Command Busan branch from the public, and it also made it possible to commit brutal violence against citizens under the name of national security. The artist tries to confront this historical background, recalling its memories and resisting their disappearance by using the blanket she used for covering her own body as a brush. In such a way, the artist evokes collective memory and allows us to hear “the stories which couldn’t root down yet keep hovering around” by retracing the memories that have now been blurred.