Korean Group Exhibition: Everyday is Not the Same

The exhibition Everyday is Not the Same will introduce young Korean artists to a Chinese audience in the hopes of activating art interchange among Asian countries, and embodying the unique culture of Shanghai with a ‘daily life’ motif. The exhibition is going to be a part of a larger project in which 23 Korean artists stay in Shanghai to research and experience every day life in the city. Their experiences will be expressed with their artistic sensibilities. In this project, the exhibition includes two versions of Shanghai, one which is imaginary and another which is real.

The artists escape from their existing artwork and life in Seoul into Shanghai, and indulge themselves in the city in various ways. First, they will build an imaginary Shanghai and explore daily life through their minds and research. But when they face the reality of the true Shanghai, on the moment of their arrival, they will immediately find conflicts between the imaginary and real city life. This will inevitably lead to new artistic concepts and greatly inspire the artists.

Everyday in Shanghai, which is only different from those in Seoul in terms of space, becomes another daily life experience–inevitably memorized as fragments that make up their overall lives. Their memories and traces of the artists’ daily lives in Shanghai will be documented in the form of artwork on which their hypersensitive viewpoints, which foreigners often have when traveling in a new place, will be reflected. The artists have had several workshops in Shanghai and researched the site for six months prior in Korea, so naturally they developed imaginative expectations of the city. Moreover, they were able to give concrete forms to their ideas and reflect on what they hoped to produce in advance. However, as part of this project it is interesting to notice the way that their ideas are modified and the artists react to variables and impossibilities during their stay in the city. Although thorough research is conducted upon arriving, they very likely could go through a process of trial and error due to the brevity of their stay–a limited two weeks time in Shanghai. For that reason, their work could be unrefined, but their vivacious ideas and improvisatory faculties could then be projected onto their work. For young artists, this kind of artistic experience would be influential, nourishing elements in their future careers.

The initial idea of the exhibition Everyday is Not the Same was inspired by Norwegian artist Jan Christensen’s work, a site-specific wall painting Tomorrow Never Comes (2006). In his work, he tried to show that the audience was quite contrary to his own project. He repetitively transformed the phrase “Everyday is the Same” by sloppily writing “The Same is Everyday,” in calligraphy on the wall again and again, thus reminding the audience that there is no difference from day to day and every day is just a repetition of our daily routines.

However, our exhibition Everyday is Not the Same was meant to disclose everyday affairs and trivial experiential differences dissimilar, but sometimes similar to those of Seoul. The artists had distinct sensibilities and viewpoints, they looked into people, regardless of their being aliens or Chinese residing now in Shanghai, examined their lives–which was miraculously both mundane and varied; doing so allowed them to grasp the cultural differences and illuminate them anew.

Since modern times, everyday affairs have been recognized as an approachable subject matter in the art world. Everyday repetitive lifestyles, including food, clothing and shelter, the necessities of life, people’s involuntary behavior, talks and attitudes, seem to have few effects on our lives. However, when we realize that these operate within the contemporary social cultural political framework, our daily life is no longer trivial or banal but becomes important as part of a big picture of texturized context.

In this respect, Shanghai is an attractive city worthy of in-depth examination. Shanghai has two sides; on the one hand, since the Opium Wars, it has been rooted in decadent, feudalistic, and colonial customs, typical of what is fondly referred to as Old Shanghai. On the other hand, it is a better and more direct beneficiary city of material civilization, advances in technology, globalization and capitalization than any other one in Asia. Lofty business buildings in Pudong coexist with modern European architecture along the Bund. Meanwhile, the well-off life of the wealthy foreign residents and tourists, contrasts with the poverty-stricken one of the lower middle class and laborers. These elements float about and compose the city as a whole. While some sauntering artists, a commonly used term by Charles Baudelaire, might be attracted by the spectacle of modern Shanghai, hopefully the more sensitive artists will not fail to notice the other side of the coin.

The 23 participating artists and 4 curators in this exhibition are working individually and the mediums they are using vary. Thus, the exhibition will present interesting works of art composed of a variety of styles and techniques. Likewise, the unifying theme of daily life in Shanghai for the individual artists, will still be variedly presented in the light of their own experiences and knowledge, and concurrently reveal comprehensive contemporaneous characteristics. The exhibition Everyday is Not the Same is expected to be a feast of the young artists’ art world.

– Text written by Lee Kyung-Sook
Edited by Lim, Boram

Everyday is Not the Same was completed in collaboration with BizArt Art Center in Shanghai, China.

Curators: Lim Boram, Park Sun Young, Shin Dong Yi, Oh Kyoung Mi

Participating Artists: Kang Sung Eun, Gu Myung Sun, Kim Naum, Kim Mina, Kim Binnara, Moon Sungsic, Moon Jung Ki, Park Mikyung, Park Yeon Hee, Park Jin Young, Suh Bokyung, Song Ho Eun, Oak Jung Ho, Lee Young, Lee Eunu, Lee Ji Hyun, Jeun Jin, Cho Joohyun, Cho Tae Kwang, Cha Young Seok, Choi Ami, Han Seon Uk, Hwang Hye Young