sun k kwak

Sun K. Kwak: Enfolding 280 Hours
Brooklyn Museum



“My first reaction to the visual and emotional qualities of a given space is rendered through my spontaneous tape drawings.”
—Sun K. Kwak

When Kwak first visited the Brooklyn Museum to research the Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Gallery, where she would install Enfolding 280 Hours, she noticed that the space was “like a square enfolding a circle” with “two concentric opposing circles of energy.” On the basis of these initial impressions, she created a digital rendering to indicate the lines she envisioned in the space and the direction in which they would flow. During the installation process, which began two months before the exhibition opened, Kwak used rolls of masking tape to create the sculptural drawing. Estimating that it would take 280 hours to install the work, she titled it Enfolding 280 Hours.

Audience interaction is an essential component of the work. Kwak was inspired by the diversity of the Brooklyn Museum’s visitors and its mission to act as a bridge between the collections and the experience of each visitor: “When I go to a gallery or museum, it often feels like a dead space. I want to create work that has life, vitality. I don’t want to produce another dead body. I don’t want people to stare at my work, but to feel it by walking into the picture. The space changes as the work and audience interact together.” She says that she chose abstract imagery for the installation “so that everyone can relate to it. Everyone sees something different through their unique interaction with the space.”

At the close of the exhibition, the tape will be pulled off the walls and discarded. According to Kwak’s artist statement, “This process of emptying the space is a metaphor for the ephemeral nature of life and my acceptance of the emptiness of that nature. Yet the drawing lives on in viewers’ memories as an imprint that leaves the space forever altered.”

See more of Sun K. Kwak's work

artists and the recession

Tight Times Loosen Artists' Creativity

by, Robin Pogrebin, New York Times

"Nobody wants me to do anything, so I'm just doing what I want."

Even in the best of times Sony Holland had to hustle.

Living in San Francisco, she got singing gigs wherever she could find them: concerts, corporate conventions, wine country gatherings, weddings, hotels or on the city streets. Now because of the economic downturn the company bookings have dried up, along with some of her regular bar engagements.

But Ms. Holland, 45, said she feels liberated, able to focus on the kind of music that she loves. Rather than serving up the usual Gershwin and Porter tunes typically requested at corporate events, she can sing Wainwright and Dylan.

This singer’s story is just one of hundreds that poured into The New York Times Web site in response to a request asking artists to share how the economy is affecting their lives and work. Perhaps most striking about the comments was the considerable number who were defiantly upbeat despite grim circumstances. Many artists echoed Ms. Holland, testifying that the recession had strengthened their commitment to their work or allowed them to concentrate on their art — since the time spent on side jobs had diminished — or had even been a source of creative inspiration.

Liz Fallon, 30, a visual artist in Portland, Me., started selling her paintings and drawings to private collectors about 10 years ago, when she was still in college. She has not sold an original work in almost a year. But in the Portland area, Ms. Fallon said, there seems to be a kind of artistic renaissance under way as various groups, like photography cooperatives and drawing collectives, form to connect creative professionals with one another.

“As for myself, freed from the constraints of creating for a specific buyer,” Ms. Fallon wrote, “I’ve experienced my own surge in creativity and have been producing a great deal more than I used to. While it would be nice to still be getting paid for my work, the need to be more resourceful is having a beneficial effect on the arts community around me.”

Read the rest of the article: Tight Times Loosen Artists' Creativity

Does the existence of a patron diminish or increase the success of arts? Can art exist without funding? But does creating art for a buyer affect the sincerity of the piece? Or has everything changed with the advent of found art, such as bricolage?

lili almog - portraiture in the 21st century

Lugu Woman #3, 2007
Chromogenic color print

Muslim Girl #14, 2007
Chromogenic color print

Video Portrait #3, 2007
Still from a color video, 2 minutes 40 seconds.

The Mosuo people, a populace that has surrounded China’s Lugu Lake for hundreds of years, have no word for war, but they do have Levis and Adidas. The women of this matriarchal society are one of the minority groups represented in Lili Almog's latest exhibition and book, part of the Israeli artist’s ongoing investigation into female identity. Referencing a quote by Chairman Mao, “The Other Half of the Sky” reveals the cultural paradox of today’s rural China through portraiture. Ancient customs and modern tastes compete in the richly textured photographs. Like the flash of blue jean beneath a religious gown, the exhibition is filled with surprising details. At first glance, a group of four screens seemingly presents a slide show of still images; on closer inspection, the stoic figures animate—a subject blinks or wets her lips, a chicken wanders through the scene. Though discrete works, these “video portraits” suggest broad paradigmatic shifts of tradition conceding to modernity. The cracked face of an elderly woman is projected alongside that of a young girl, as if the former had miraculously morphed into the latter. Almog conceived the project in six geographic sections: mountain, lake, factory, street, backyard, and land. Fittingly, it is the landscape which most aptly thematizes the dilemma; the artist cogently captures her subjects at sites of literal transition—atop factory rubble or at the intersection of land and water—holding up their half of the sky.

Cameron Shaw
Artforum.com

how ironic

“To be a modernist work is to be a work that takes its own conditions of possibility for its subject matter, that tests a certain number of the conventions of the practice it belongs to by modifying, jettisoning, or destroying them, and that in so doing renders the conventions or conditions thus tested explicit or opaque, revealing them to be nothing but conventions.”

- Thierry de Duve
Echoes of the Readymade: Critique of Pure Modernism

Can there ever truly be modernism?

tolstoy - what is art

"What is Art?" by Leo Tolstoy

"Every work of art causes the receiver to enter into a certain kind of relationship both with him who produced, or is producing, the art, and with all those who, simultaneously, previously, or subsequently, receive the same artistic impression...

The activity of art is based on the fact that a man, receiving through his sense of hearing or sight another man’s expression of feeling, is capable of experiencing the emotion which moved the man who expressed it. To take the simplest example; one man laughs, and another who hears becomes merry; or a man weeps, and another who hears feels sorrow. A man is excited or irritated, and another man seeing him comes to a similar state of mind. By his movements or by the sounds of his voice, a man expresses courage and determination or sadness and calmness, and this state of mind passes on to others. A man suffers, expressing his sufferings by groans and spasms, and this suffering transmits itself to other people; a man expresses his feeling of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to certain objects, persons, or phenomena, and others are infected by the same feelings of admiration, devotion, fear, respect, or love to the same objects, persons, and phenomena.

And it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based."

Tolstoy argues that art must create an emotional link between the artist and the audience. Hence, sincerity and clarity are vitally important in the creation of good art. Do you agree? Furthermore, according to his rationale, the success of the artwork necessitates an audience. Can art exist without an audience?

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Leo Tolstoy - Russian writer known for novels "Anna Karenina" and "War and Peace"

duchamp revisited

What is art? Or better yet, what isn't art?

Perhaps the more appropriate question: what is good art?

for your consideration

Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them.

It is a question of experiencing everything.

At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.

- Rilke
Letters to a Young Poet