“Garden of Memes” introduces contemporary artists who embody their own world of work using the methodology of imitation and cloning under the theme of “memes,” the digital generation’s visual characters. A meme is easy to make, easy to share, and intuitive for anyone to recognize, but they are somewhat meaningless. It has become a symbol of the changing world in the digital image communication era and a type of everyday conceptualism. This attitude to overthrow realistic norms and to break down the cultural and artistic classes, in fact, resembles the legacy of Dadaism and pop art in contemporary art. “Garden of Memes” focuses on the way contemporary artists repossess images through revelation and imagination in an era with platforms where anyone can easily create images and communicate with each other. This attempt will be an opportunity to look at how the artistic language of those who freely cross the boundaries of everyday life without being bound by art forms or aesthetic rhetoric gains uniqueness in the post-Internet era, while also looking at the impact of meme politics on contemporary visual culture.
MOON TAN SHOP
Soyoung Bae, Daseul Song, and Eun Sol Lee formed a loose form of a project team at the end of 2020. They are respectively interested in capturing and structuring the language of desire and fascination inherent in the playfulness of the creative process and images scattered around the world. Soyoung Bae is interested in collecting the images’ “epidermis” itself and the story behind it in the environment where images are created and consumed. Daseul Song is interested in creating objects in order to keep an eye on things that end with individual memories and are easy to disappear. Images/moving images are imagined as materials through which she can imagine the physical properties of time. Cultivated from this idea, Song would like to capture temporary moments that look at senses that are generated by a temporality she calls the “continuing present.” Eun Sol Lee is a 3D graphic producer who embodied the character of Kimberly Lee. She moves Kimberly’s body through a VR-based media environment in order to overcome the limitations of reality.
ECHO VALLEY
Moon Tan Shop summons Echo Valley to the “Garden of Memes.” Their exhibition hall consists of vertical multi-vision, floor-mounted monitors, objects in various shapes and textures, fog made using a fog machine, and colored lights. An echo is the sound that comes back to us after it goes somewhere else. An echo is a reflection of two sounds— almost as if it were a mirror game—and the distorted cross-reference process continues, with its beginning forgotten at one moment and an unknown end.
Eun Sol Lee embodies the waterfall of images on a long, vertical multi-vision installation. While reflecting the characteristics of memes such as cross-referencing, variations, and volatile data fragments, the falling images to Echo Valley pass through the screen as if an social media feed were scrolled down quickly. Footage sources are some of the works by Daseul Song, Soyoung Bae, and Eun Sol Lee as well as their references. Sound includes original footage, music created by one of the artist’s social media friends, and the echo effect to express the impression of a cave in a waterfall.
Daseul Song recognized the ennui caused by one’s fate to live—regardless of the individual’s will—on the already infinite line of time as the repetition and continuation of the present. She embodied an individual’s erroneous perception in the state of being pushed somewhere (a state where something is moving but still, or a state where something is still but continuously moving). When considering panning and zooming, which are camera photography techniques, this work reminds the viewer of the linear movement that escapes to the x- and z-axes. This work presents the motility of a person walking around the Han River, holding a smartphone, and the screen of the phone shows axes in different directions. The video, which consists of numerous repetitions of differences, works as an empty stage that creates boredom, and a device that causes viewers to slip from their sense of reality and sink under the epidermis of images. The video will be shown with objects in the form of stalagmites, mainly tilted at various angles to the floor, using six monitors and three moving images in a twisted pattern. Objects that imitate long-time condensed mineral are produced to fix video objects—vibrating on the x- and z-axes—in the physical space. Around the video installation, Soyoung Bae’s various objects will be combined with the video, and sometimes overlapped under or above the monitors.
Soyoung Bae conducted installation work that creates a strange disharmony and discomfort in a familiar and comfortable atmosphere with various materials such as fur, hair, dolls, silicon dummies, cloth, and smoke. The artist focuses on tactile-based cognition and sensory transmission, and intends to embody a rock on the surface of Echo Valley in this exhibition. It will provide a rest area (like a person sitting on a rock by a valley) to view the exhibition hall, while creating a fantasy atmosphere through the images of strange creatures hiding here and there at the same time. Focusing on the process of creating distorted images which are facing each other, an important concept of Echo Valley, Soyoung Bae wants to experiment and realize the possibilities of the project team relationship through the experimental process in which cross-referencing and variation are conducted with images.
Moon Falls
- Single-channel video, color
- 6:30
- 2021
Riverside_Panorama & Zoom
- 5 channel video, sound, color
- 34:18
- 2020~2021
Touches of the Night Ghosts on the Moss Land
- Plaster casting, fabric, spandex, cotton wool
- Variable size
- 2021
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MOON TAN SHOP, ECHO VALLEY
