ISCP TalkJuly 27, 2010
Salon: Ok Hyun Ahn (South Korea) and Juanli Carrion (Spain)
In Mirror Ball from 2007 Ok Hyun Ahn lip-syncs love songs, exploring clichés to investigate how their lyrics become symbolic, and how our emotions evolve. “What if a hundred clichés burst out shamelessly and simultaneously?” Would we yawn or laugh at such an outpouring of banality? As audiences watch the artist lip-sync a sorrowful love song, they know that she is not performing the song, and yet cannot help but identify her performance with the actual experience of emotion. Audiences do not know whether to laugh at the artist or to cry.
Ok Hyun Ahn is photographer and a video artist. She recently exhibited her works in Identity, Costume, Cliche: Korean Photography Today, Photographic Center Northwest, Seattle, 2009, Artist as Performer, Houston Center for Photography, Houston, 2009. Her works were previously published in European Photography, 2008. She was awarded a Ssamzie Studio in Seoul in 2007.
Juanli Carrion will present his project Kei-Seki. Kei-Seki is the combination of two Japanese words meaning scene and stone. This work began as a site-specific installation made from the remains of an unfinished bridge construction in which he used the found material to evoke the culture of entertainment as might be related to night clubs or Christmas decorations. His installation has evolved into the series of photographs and sculptures that comprise Kei-Seki. This final installation invites the spectator to consider the relationship of man and his environment and to expand their perception of nature and reality.
Juanli Carrion’s working practice begins with his interest in landscape. He raises social and political questions regarding man’s relationship to his environment as well as the human tendency to create references or associations to the environment and the effects of those ways of thinking on “reality”. His artistic practice retains a basis in photography but has developed through installation, sculpture, and video.
Juanli Carrion’s Salon is supported by the Consulate General of Spain in New York and the Spain Foreign Cultural Cooperation agency.