Walk Strangely, Stay Strangely

Sora Kim vs Kan Xuan: A Double One Woman Show

 Duration 

2018.12.15-2019.2.1

 Venue 

Guangdong Times Museum 

Times Rose Garden III, Huangbianbei Road, Baiyun Avenue, Guangzhou, China

 Opening Hours 

Tuesday – Sunday, 10am-6pm (closed on Monday except for holidays)

 Entry 

Adult ¥30, Discounted ¥15 for students/teachers or groups over 10 people

 Artists 

Kan Xuan, Sora Kim

 Curators 

Hou Hanru，Kim Sunjung

 Associate Curator 

Tan Yue

 Organiser 

Guangdong Times Museum

 Special Thanks 

Times China

Sora Kim, Three Foot Walking, 2013

performance

Installation view at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark 

courtesy of Kunsthal Charlottenborg

Walking and staying are everyday acts. But the ordinary becomes unordinary when artists intervene. They see, discern, and discover something special in the ordinary, and create from and with everyday movements and sounds. They make the seemingly banal acts of walking, staying, and breathing into elements of artworks. Selected and edited by the artists, they are no longer ordinary. In a new, different context, the banality is lost. Sora Kim and Kan Xuan, two extraordinarily singular, somehow “strange”, female figures of the art scene in Korea and China – and certainly, in the world – are invited to come together, but somehow independently, to act out a scene of “strange walk and strange stay” in the equally singular Guangdong Times Museum, this winter. Their works, largely distinct in form but echoing each in their ways to probe fundamental questions of the relationship between the artist as a quiet but pungent witness to how the turbulent world reality has impacted and modified the human body and behavior, are invited into a curatorial dialogue among the two artists, two curators and the museum team. This dialogue will generate a softly but firmly intertwined and interacting choreography that turns the museum into a discreet but open platform for carefully planned but essentially unpredictable performances mobilizing both human bodies and digital machines. That outcome of the performances is surely unsure. But once stepped into the space, we, the public, will learn how to walk strangely, stay strangely and think strangely, in order to become singular persons, face a world in which everyone is being flattened into ONE, instead of EVERY.

Sora Kim, Songs from Knee to Chin, 2016 

5-channel sound installation, 60’

Installation view at MMCA Gwacheon, Korea

Courtesy of National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

In the exhibition, Sora Kim presents her recently practice on performances and sounds. Her works are products of such long, eventful collaboration processes, which are only denoted in her work titles. There is no director who gives directions, instead, Kim spends enough time with her performers to observe and learn their everyday gestures and movements. The instructions she gives to her performers consist only of abstract words, loose sentences, or ambiguous questions. They are thus more ‘scores’ than instructions. They are meant to shake the countless attempts that have been accumulated inside the performer’s body and to raise any latent unfamiliarity that has been unknown to even the performer. It is a process through which habits, prejudices, and stereotypes are scraped off, carved out, and dug up. She refuses preexisting methods and preconceived ideas but initiates an uncommon process through which to discover the unordinary out of the ordinary, and of them creates the strangest assemblages.

Kan Xuan, V70, 2018

C-print mounted on Dibond, 45 x 32 cm

courtesy of the artist

Kan Xuan has been focusing her singular talent on making video works. Capturing brief and ephemeral actions and moments of fantasy in the everyday, they are simple, “light”, fluid and even furtive. Being highly “economic”, however, they are always pungent, mind-blowingly provocative, even political. The images pass, in the most ephemeral and even invisible manner, they create a kind of unbearable but somewhat poetic tension between the audience and what they see. Kan Xuan’s work, resorting to simple but precise usage of video, reveals a particular accurate and critical functions of the medium of the video – to penetrate into the heart of darkness of the everyday existence in the most immediate way, like a handheld weapon, and shed light – however brief and ephemeral – on the blind zone of our perception, and hence, our own way to identify ourselves. In other words, she situates her artistic pursuits on the borderline between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and intangible, and at the end, the factual and the fictive. And this kind of confrontation and negotiation on the fragile borderline that excites us by putting us in constant feelings of risk and danger. Through exploring the risky and the unknown, we can sense the real meaning of living.

Kan Xuan, Racing Gravels, 2018

video still

courtesy of the artist

For Kan Xuan, this new group of works is intended to explore “the rite of commerce, ethics of technology, policy of economy” – their roots and histories. Reflecting on these questions, her work has been brought beyond the realm of personal sensation and emotion. This kind of transcendence resonates perfectly the work of Sora Kim which captures, in a more or less eccentric manner, of those who walk and stay strangely, somewhat in desperation, in both Korea and the rest of the world…

Now the question for us is: Where to go next? Can we live normally in the normal world? Or the world is a surreal world anyway?

Walking Strangely, Staying Strangely

Can we reach the destination when the destination is nowhere to find?

About the Artists

Kan Xuan born in 1972 in Anhui, currently works and lives in Beijing and Amsterdam. She mainly works in video. Her videos highlight the trivial elements, feelings, and sensations that we experience daily but often rarely notice. Reproducing them as directly as possible, her work is striking for its imagination, relevance, and exactitude. She indulges in a honing of the techniques of the observer but transforms this passive observation into active performance in her video pieces. Her selected solo exhibitions including: Kanxuan (IKON gallery, Birmingham, England,2016), Millet Mounds (Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing, China, 2006), Kanxuan (BüroFriedrich , Berlin, Germany, 2006). She has exhibited widely including: Tales of Our Time (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA, 2016), MOBILE M+: MOVING IMAGES (Midtown POP, Hongkong, China, 2015), and also Venice Biennale (2013, 2007), Guangzhou Triennial (2012, 2005, 2002), Gwangju Biennale (2010), Istanbul Biennial (2007) and Havana Biennial (2006), etc. She was the winner of the Chinese Contemporary Art Award in 2014 and the Finalist of Prix de Rome in 2005.

Sora Kim born in 1965 in South Korea currently lives and works in Seoul. Kim is a conceptual artist engaging with video, installation and performance. Her practice has centered around the examination of existing social and cultural frameworks—reflecting upon ways in which people act in certain circumstances and environments. As an observer and director, Kim intervenes situations in subtle ways to reveal our habitual gestures and coded manners. She has had key solo exhibitions at Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2013); Art Sonje Center, Seoul (2012); Atelier Hermès, Seoul (2010); Kukje Gallery, Seoul (2007); BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art (2007); and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2004). Kim’s work has also been internationally recognized at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (2011); the 10th International Istanbul Biennale, Istanbul (2007); International Triennale of Contemporary Art, Yokohama (2005); and at the 51st Venice Biennale Korean Pavilion, Venice (2005).

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