KOH MyungKeun

Transparent Containers

As an artist, I have worked extensively with bodily structures and images and yet have faced great difficulty incorporating substantive and three-dimensional structures with illusory images. I guess that’s why there has been little attempt for such incorporation in art history. Nonetheless, my interests in both sculpture and photography have led me to pursue this seemingly unfeasible incorporation.
I used to construct frameworks of wood and iron and wrap them with printed photographs. In other words, I created art in which structures and images existed in discrete forms. They seemed to be flesh and bone. However, as I have begun to use transparent materials in my recent works, the images themselves have become frameworks. Thus, frameworks come to be blended with images.
These transparent bodies have unlocked a new realm of art for me, and at the same time have allowed me to make another step toward expressing my creative vision. I believe that art’s substance lies not in the artwork itself, but in an attempt to ‘see’ with a new perspective. That is, to see is more significant than to be seen, and the act of seeing itself is an important aspect of art. Transparency embodies not only temporal transience but also spatial emptiness. It enables us to see through the inside and to feel inner space overlapping with the outer space, and it provides a different sense of spatiality along with our viewing angles. In this respect, I believe that my transparent containers influence people’s attempts at ‘seeing,’ and also to serve as ‘generators’ which create new images within themselves.
I have paid attention to particular scientific research which, I think, seems to belong to the realm of art rather than science. In an attempt to ascertain the origin of life, scientists have built a laboratory which resembles the earth’s earliest environment, and have developed experiments to synthesize organic substances out of inorganic matters under extreme conditions of temperature and light. Similar to the flasks used by scientists in the laboratory, my transparent containers are ‘experimental tubes’ or ‘matrices’ in which various mixtures of images on human bodies, buildings, nature, and so on, generate creative combinations.
In my attempts to create ‘mental pictures’ by synthesizing human memories, intentions, and minds in these containers, I have hoped for a miracle to reveal the entity of art. This hope is apparently in vain, as is the scientists’ belief that they can witness the first birth of life on earth in their laboratory. However, I am always aware that the ‘emptiness’ of my attempts mirrors the ‘emptiness’ of my transparent containers, which, since they can always be returned to a nothingness, have become an irresistible obsession to me.

KOH MyungKeun
Born in 1964, Seoul, Korea

EDUCATION
1998    M.F.A, Pratt Institute in New York , USA
1990    B.F.A, Sculpture, College of Fine Arts, Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITION
2010     LOUIS VUITTON, Taipei
2008     Frey Norris Gallery, San Francisco, USA
2007    O.K Harris Gallery, New York, USA
2006    Tokyo gallery, Tokyo, Japan
2003     Hanmi Photo Museum, Seoul, Korea

SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITION
2013    Who is Alice?, National Museum of Contemporary Art, LIGHT BOX, Venice, Italy
2011    Korean Eye: Energy and Matter, Museum of Art & Design, New York, USA
2010    Aspects of Korea Contemporary Photography, National Taiwan Museum
             of Fine Arts, Taichung, Taiwan
2009    Korean Contemporary Photography Now, 798SPACE ,Beijing, China
2008    Station 2008-Art on the Tsurumi Line, Tokyo, Japan
2005    “ARCO 2005” Tokyo gallery, Madrid, Spain
2004    Vent d’ est, Chapelle de la Sorbonne, Paris, France