City of Gaia

2023 ACC Sound Lab (Kim Suk-Jun·Yoon Jiyoung·Jo Yeabon·Cha Mihye)

〈Extending, Bending, Breaking, Connecting〉, 2023.

Mixed media, 200 × 200 × 200 cm.
Courtesy of the Asia Culture Center.

Thematically coupled with a work playing at the ACC Media Cube, Extending, Bending, Breaking, Connecting explores the organic connections among nature, individuals, and society. It represents in a metaphorical way the junctions where connections occur between a plant’s vitality, its impetus for growth, interactions with the surrounding world, and human motivity and desires. The plants filling a wooden container and roots and branches that have been cut off and reassembled represents the obstacles, frictions, compromises, and choices that plants must have faced during their growth over time. Plants confront the obstructive boundaries force them to bend and engage in competition for survival with other plants. This feature that can be associated with the motivity, energy, and reciprocity required for human life is materialized in cyanotype photographic installations —classic prints produced by natural light exposure — and elements from actual forests such as branches, roots, leaves, and soil. It also provides an acoustically rich experience by using exciters and shakers in various sizes and shapes to interpret the conflicts and negotiations occurring within the work into diverse sounds. Extending, Bending, Breaking, Connecting explores how sound elements can harmoniously mingle with visual expression, attempting to organically connect auditory and visual senses and create an expanded sensory experience. Furthermore, the work aims to shed light from various angles on the complex relationships between different elements such as nature and society or the natural and artificial, offering the audience a space for feeling and contemplating the force of life from a multiple levels of perspective.

*An artwork associated with Extending, Bending, Breaking, Connecting is playing in the ACC Media Cube.