Tuesday-Saturday 11:00~19:00 / Closed on Sunday, Monday
DOOSAN Gallery: 15, Jongno 33-gil, Jongno-gu, Seoul, Korea
Tel. 02-708-5050

And being rash, and much more courageous than you are, I do not temper my beauty with meanness lest it should scorch me. I gulp it down entire. It is made of flesh; it is made of stuff. My imagination is the body's.

— Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Gulp. The sound of connection between substance and body; the shape of an emotion or a desire, concealed or revealed; a metaphor for the experience of coveting that which is not our own. In this exhibition, the word “gulp” is both language and image. Something moving down the throat; a thing making its way through a damp, dark passageway to position itself within the body; a substance exploring the body; and simultaneously, the body, touching and shaping the substance within it. It is a brave world, this place — a place either passed by or fallen into forever, an unexpected destination, a place where beginning is indistinguishable from ending. In this way, the gulp serves to mediate between body and substance.

How many things does the body do, both in and outside itself? How many events does it find itself exposed to, willing or no? Outside the body, there exists matter that expects to be swallowed and matter that does not expect to be swallowed: combinations of parasitic and symbiotic relationships; byproducts at the end of their lifespan; beings that slide past, unabsorbed. Inside the body, an indescribable, almost instinctive circulation burrows into the deepest recesses of the flesh, carrying the most intimate emotions of emotions as it alters the very physiology of the body. This movement is visceral. Gulp. Substance and body intermingle as one, blurring distinctions between inside and outside, subject and object, active and passive. This ambiguity is itself a metaphor for the simultaneous subjecthood/otherness of the body; each gulp creating the other in the other’s body. 
 
Though the gulp as an act of appropriation is not necessarily aggressive, neither is it passive. After all, even as it brings something belonging to another into the self, it also expels its own desires outward. This is an expression of the most natural and basic of appetites, yes, but at the same time it can also be read as a radical, even coercive gesture. And finally, the exhibition asks if you, too, will join in — and gulp. Some may swallow Gulp whole, without delay; others may covet only a handful; and others still may digest it only in part, leaving behind scraps — or even, without warning, vomit it back up in a chunk. 

Using narratives built on concepts like travel, dislocation, and belonging, Laure Prouvost focuses on “becoming something else.” The two video works in the exhibition, Shed a Light (2018) and Swallow (2013), speak to the sense of joy and claim inherent to basic human desire. First, Swallow stimulates a kind of sensory nostalgia. Even as it visualizes the sound of strolling, gulping, conception, and sunlight as images, it points out the authority of the visual image, inviting us to listen to the sensation of tongue against palate, of inhalation and exhalation. This move, in turn, brings us to Shed a Light, a piece that uses dynamic camera movements to showcase a journey of escape from a melting, degraded planet to an alternate world. Follow Prouvost’s lead, and we eventually find ourselves before a fountain in the shape of a breast, invited to join in and get wet: You are the liquid inside this, I can feel it…I swallow you up. Here, the artist awakens, in us, the possibility of discovering the wilderness beyond our walls, of exploring anew that which has been abandoned.

Working toward a deeper understanding of the living organism, Elinor Haynes uses sculpture to visually capture the intangible and malleable nature of the body. Haynes’s sculptures bear witness to the desire of the body, porous and permeable, to shatter the efficient grammar of machine-tech. Addressing the importance of fleshiness, embodiment, warmth and wetness, the artist imbues her work with liquid organic matter like bone marrow, saliva, sweat, and breast milk. The newly presented work Tu viens en moi, je viens en toi (You come in me, I come in you) (2024) depicts the intertwined relationship between the subject and the other, where their metaphorical ceramic bodies are entangled and penetrate each other,  overlapped with a wooden trunk as an analogy. Dry Spell (2024) is an assemblage of human and non-human figures approaching a drinking fountain to swallow the water pooled inside it, showing the way different species, struggling with thirst, become one with the liquid itself, entangled. These works call out: We are alive, and so we are thirsty; we are alive, and so we are filthy.

Eunsae Lee's paintings are visual and material performances of female desire. Using substances in liquid form and the bodies that covet them as her medium, Lee captures moments of thirst and desire, filth and disgust, licking, swallowing, and vomiting. One scene in Mite life 1, 4 (2023) derives from the artist’s own experience of quenching her thirst in the middle of night with a bottle of water she doesn’t remember opening — reminding her of the great Buddhist monk and philosopher Wonhyo, who famously mistook a skull for a gourd and drank from it in the night. Lee digs into depictions of polarity: dirty water-clean water; life-death, object-being. Meanwhile, her The Mole with Sharp Teeth (2016) series — as well as P cutter (2016), positioned amidst the series — renders the body in bolder lines and strokes, faceless and objectified within the structure of the male gaze while also returning that very gaze in turn. Produced with this inherent parallax, Eunsae Lee’s works intuitively unfurl the metaphorical progression of eating and being eaten suggested by the term “gulp.”

Laure Prouvost (b. 1978, Crox, FR) crosses the boundaries between fiction and reality by interweaving the narratives of reality and imagination through various media, including video, installation, and painting. She playfully explores the concept of escapism through fictionalized narratives while examining real-life issues such as gender, environment, and capitalism. Her major solo exhibitions include Our elastic arm hold in tight through the clouds (Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, DK, 2021), and Deep See Blue Surrounding You, which represented the French Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019. Major group exhibitions include Busan Biennale 2022 (2022) and the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020).   

Elinor Haynes (b. 1995, Paris, FR) is a multidisciplinary artist living in London. Striving to comprehend the body’s living substance, Elinor’s research is driven by the desire to capture the intangibility of the sensitive human experience. The sensual is a core principle she works towards. She explores the significance of embodiment, our warm and fleshy incarnation of being. Using glass, clay or found objects, organic matters often infiltrate her objects, such as saliva, human breast milk or bones. Her major solo exhibitions include Faux (The Split Gallery, London, GB, 2023), Annual Sadness (The Organ Factory, London, GB, 2023). She is the recipient of the Kenneth Armitage Young Sculptor Prize 2023 Royal Society of Sculptors, Gilbert Bayes Award 2024.  

Eunsae Lee (b. 1988, Seoul, KR)’s images are visual snippets of discontentment in daily life and the attempts to combat those moments. Lee pays particular attention to people who are easily objectified in the normative framework of our world and portrays them as active subjects in paintings. Her major solo exhibitions include mite life (Gallery2, Seoul, KR, 2023) and Charcas (L21, Mallorca, ES, 2023), Cold Rub (PHD Group, HK, 2023). Major group exhibitions include Hexed, Vexed and Sexed (West Den Haag, The Hague, NL, 2023), Young Korean Artists 2019: Liquid Glass Sea (MMCA, Gwacheon, KR, 2019).