김혜연 | The show must go on

Artist: Hyeyeon Kim

Curator: Jia-Zhen Tsai (Taiwan)

Hyeyeon Kim investigates how people interact (or do not interact) and the social (or anti-social) principles that are involved, through performance and its video documentation. The artist is especially interested in the psychology and process where a relationship to another person operates as the fundamental motive for him/her to move. So far, she has held two solo exhibitions, 《Air Cake》(2018) and 《Setting Sun and Everything That Isn’t the Setting Sun》(2020).

1979 was born in Taiwan, Jia-Zhen Tsai is an independent curator now, and used to run a non-profit art space tamtamART TAIPEI with other four members since 2013 June until 2015.

In 2011, she got the idea that art is not only making more works and exhibitions after making few exchanging and different kind of scale of exhibitions over 4 years. She desired to figure out the contemporary art development sight and context in Taiwan,so she stared interviewed lots of artists as a field research since the end of 2011.She focused on 1)moving-images, 2)new generation to be the beginning points of study.

She and four friends organized the non-profit contemporary art space “tamtamART TAIPEI,” which focuses on new media, including video and installation, while also developing collaborations with other individuals and organizations. Aside from the experimental film festival in 2014, there will also be a collaborative exhibition with Polish independent curator Mateusz Bieczyński, and an artist talk with Southeast Asian artists, organized with the online Taiwanese contemporary art magazine “No Man’s Land.”

Brilliant White. Brimful Speechlessness/Wordlessness

Hello Hyeyeon,

On a warm, sunlit winter morning over the weekend, I opened your work A Minute while playing Max Richter’s album “Sleep” on my speakers, its composition presenting a calm, serene atmosphere. Sitting inside the “MY SEAT” circle that you’ve designated, my racing thoughts gradually trickled into a stream within a minute, distracting thoughts drained away, and I felt “grounded,” a balance that could not be defined or contextualized with words. For one minute on this white blanket, I wondered: do all words and speech exist to showcase a “speechlessness” that is full to the brim? And what is the meaning of our words and expressions about artwork? Where does this go with the artwork? How does this develop with the artwork?

Can there be a “speechlessness” that provides meaning, as there have been works that allude to the invalidity and mediocrity of actions, for example: “There's a new opportunity in Sweden, promising a cool $2,320 a month for doing absolutely nothing. This wildly unique new dream job comes courtesy of a conceptual art project in Gothenburg, Sweden, which is looking for one employee to essentially do nothing beyond clocking in and out at a newly refurbished train station. (2017)”

Inaction prompts us to ponder the current state of art production and discourse: “In the face of mass automation and artificial intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all become productively superfluous?” I am prompted by your work, but the answer is still unclear. However, the question may guide us towards the answer: how can we create self-evident works in subtractive production and speechless/wordless void?

After studying your portfolio, I feel that you are contemplating, layer by layer, year after year, and time and time again, the deepening of “relationships.” A Minute is an earlier work, its expression simple and concise, while the interaction is relaxed and light. However, A Room In Which One Can Only Breathes (2020) contains a suffocating tension. In other words, one senses the progression in your work in exploring the abstract distance between individuals, revealing a “profound” nature within relations.