<Understanding Writing and Critical Writing Practice>

In this seminar, the participants had the opportunity to analyze works by the artist Seoyoung Chung, and discuss the participants’ writings on the artist’s work Showcase Showcase. The workshop looked at Chung’s works shown in the exhibition Seoyoung Chung Solo Exhibition: The Speed of the Large, the Small, and the Wide (2013) held at Ilmin Museum of Art, and in Still Acts and Seoyoung Chung Solo Exhibition (2016) held respectively at Art Sonje Center and Audio Visual Pavilion. The participants also examined critical writings on Chung’s works.

A mistake easily found particularly in exhibition preface or critical review is that it attempts to write a story - about what the writer ‘wants to see or do’ rather than what the writer sees in the work - which is very inaccessible to the audience. It’s better to remain faithful to the visual analysis of the work when writing, and the writer must refrain from skipping right away from index to excessive symbols. In the discrepancy between the artist’s intention/endowment of meaning on the work and the perspective of the audience/critic, it might be interesting for the critic to present the text as a realm that can be read by the audience.

Chung’s work is infallible in the sense that it tries to explain solely what the artist herself presents. For example, her work might allure the viewer to follow the regular sequencing of objects only to let the audience realize that they’ve arrived at a point where such regulations have collapsed. Similarly, Chung’s work might also intentionally lead the viewer somewhere, and when the viewer arrives at the destination, he or she confronts a situation that’s completely banal. At this point of discovery of the moment where conventional notion is shattered, or what is expected becomes powerless, the viewer plays variations on the speed of thought. Therefore, the meaning of Chung’s work can be fully delivered to the viewer only when the light is shed on the characteristic of the matter itself rather than symbolically explaining her work.