New Cartographers, 2015
5 August – 26 August, 2015
Songwon Art Center
Curated by Somi Sim
In collaboration with Julien Coignet
Artists
Jungeun Kim, Taeheon Kim, JungKi Baek, Bureau d’études, Linda Havenstein, Kyuha Shim, Yunsun Shim, Suniy Im, Changchang Yoo, Optical Race (Jaehyun Bahk, Hyungjae Kim), Ja Woonyung, Jinyeoul Jung + Changmo Ahn, Julien Coignet, Caroline Corbasson
Supported by Seoul, Seoul Art Foundation, Art Council Korea, Songwon Art Foundation
A map conveys the relationship we have with this World. Moreover it also projects the expectation of this World. This map that journeyed through history is a tabloid version of society’s system, which represents the growth and innovation of human civilisation. Therefore, the construction of a World into a map is more than just geographical information. It also provides a marker, a point of worldview at that specific time, a cartographer’s view and embodies the skillset of cartography.
Although a map plays an objective and empirical role, its visual structure offers dynamic elements that stimulate imaginations; such implicit desire and imagination can also be amplified through the eyes of the artists into a number of diverse arenas. There is no fixed formality or concept that artists focus upon. Rather, enlarging the boundaries of mapping by transitioning between formality and concept and abstract and real. This exhibition presents works of 14 artists, designers and urban researchers. Their works are based on visual codes and geographical information that traces the roots of contemporary ways of thought and ideology, social system, inhibitory areas and an endless number of juxtapositions are being reconciled and displayed in the exhibition. Consequently, we redefine artists who demonstrate disparity from conventional and non-conventional ways of mapping that challenges the inhibitory zone and intangible World as ‘New Cartographers’.
These participating artists exploit the use of ancient maps, modern day maps and even GPS in a diverse form of visual art, and heads on from individual interest, social awareness to even new ways of mapping methods that across a different moments in time. Those physical, human social, psychological and imaginative maps that have been created by artists portray from ordinary road map, city maps, social system maps and to its extent to map invisible relationships formed amongst individuals and one’s society. Each works gap is created, due to the uncommunicativeness of the individual towards individual and individual towards society. This is being reconciled and displayed in a mapping manner that is reciprocal towards the contemporary phenomenon. Their maps will function as the introductory map, which navigates innumerable paths of one’s unrevealed life. We head to where only the new cartographer’s geographical imagination has reached, yet remains as an unknown World, where the unreachable World exits.
Somi Sim / Independent Curator