AN Gyungsu

A Place for ‘Ambiguous Things’

These days, artists’ ‘migrations’ affect their ways of sustaining themselves and provide important physical conditions for their art. For this reason, some artists use material or tools that are easily transportable, while others actively incorporate their nomadic condition as the main context for their work. Owing to unstable conditions and situations in recent years, An Gyungsu has constantly moved and stayed in different locations. However, these changes of scenery in his surroundings have deeply influenced his practice.

In moving his studio to the countryside of Ilsan, Gyeonggi province, there was another change in the landscape that the artist viewed and walked in. Unlike the city’s vacant lots in his previous works, An observes ‘the periphery’, the middle zone between (metropolitan) city and the satellite cities, from outside of the city. There is also a difference from his perspective, which is to include a wide field of view in a frame, instead of depicting magnified parts of objects or landscapes. If he captured the border zone of anonymous vacant lots in his previous works, his new work shows someone’s habitat that emulates a sense of private space. The familiar suburban landscapes that do not gain much attention, such as the spaces that substitute for the role of houses like a vinyl greenhouse storage, warehouse, and container, look somehow unstable because they implicate the possibility of development, in spite of the trace of humans.

An Gyungsu grabs things that we forget as quickly as the pace of the developments that erase certain contexts. Then he elaborately depicts them in his paintings as if he is promising not to forget their traces. The painting that is made through the techniques of scattering or the accumulation of scratched materials, ironically show the very flat texture of the plane. He also expresses the incompleteness and fluidity of the ‘flat vacant lot’ through the drippings on the surface. The traces of dripped paint, scattering, scratches or the sense of foreign objects tactically separate the viewer from the paintings. In this case, the dripping on the surface that cannot easily be separated can be seen as a ‘parergon’, dividing the inside and outside of the picture. Derrida redefines the concept of Kant’s ‘parergon’, which means a subsidiary part of the work, as the element that allows the work to go beyond the contrast between the content and form, or the boundary between the inside and outside of the canvas. If we apply this interpretation in An’s painting, a ‘drip’ is the borderline of painting and non-painting, where the work is generated through disrupting all the binaries. In this in-between space, main elements of the work coexist with its foreign or subsidiary parts rather inducing the aesthetic substance of beauty.

In his other recent piece, the artist makes the borderline image more concrete, then captures the very subtle moment into an image. Bright Night (2014) is a painting of an early evening landscape where darkness and brightness exist together. In this ‘in-between’ space, that is neither bright nor dark, the existence located in the border inevitably holds anxieties. But these anxieties are potentially mobile because they are constantly moving without pause. The other recent piece, which has the same title, shows both inside and outside of the landscape with a window in the middle. The reflected surface of the window that transmits both street life and the fluorescent light indoors, is a border-line where inside and outside overlap. The landscape recalls ‘faint things’ that can exist both outside and inside. In order to possibly contemplate these indistinguishable things, An tries to visualize the in-distinguishability as an image. That is, to locate ‘vague things’ for him.

Jo EunBi, Extracted from ‘A Way to Live in a Vacant Lot’ (2014)

AN Gyungsu
Born in 1975, Busan, Korea

EDUCATION
2003 M.F.A. Department of Oriental Painting, College of Fine Arts, Hongik University, Seoul, Korea
1994 B.F.A. Department of Oriental Painting, College of Fine Arts, Dankook University, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2015 On the way, mmmg, Seoul, Korea
2014 On Ground, GALLERY HYUNDAI WINDOW GALLERY, Seoul, Korea
2013 On Ground, project space MO, Seoul, Korea
2012 Barricade, ccuullpool, Seoul, Korea
2010 Island, GALLERY b’ONE, Seoul, Korea
2008 Green Mountain, Brain Factory, Seoul, Korea
2006 Playroom, Alternative Space Gallery Cott, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2015 Russia-Korea Exchange Exhibition Irkutsk Regional Art Museum after the name of V.P. Sukachov, Irkutsk, Russia
2014 The Breath of Fresh, Gyeonggi Museum of Modern Art, Ansan, Korea
Untitled Stage, nikita bencharov’s hotel Music hall, Baikal Olkhon island, Russia
COMMON CENTER Opening Exhibitions, ‹Today’s Salon›, COMMON CENTER, Seoul, Korea
2013 galleryFACTORY project , KOBALT+FACTORY, Seoul, Korea
2012 ULTRA-NATURE : Overdose of Green, Suwonartcenter, Suwon, Korea
UP-AND-COMERS, Totalmuseum, Seoul, Korea
2010 Artists in Residence – Jahresausstellung der Frankfurter Gastkunstler, Frankfurt, Germany
PROPOSE 7 KUMHOMUSEUM, Seoul, Korea
2008 11th The Hoanghae Art Festival ‘I DON’T KNOW YOU’, Incheon Culture & Arts Center, Incheon, Korea