N/A is pleased to announce its participation at Paris Internationale with a duo presentation featuring Jiyoon Chung and Muyeong Kim. Both artists employ their respective mediums to convey their individual interpretations of the ambiguous emotional interactions felt within personal experience and the broader social fabric. Each of them explores the conditions where deeply personal psychological states intersect with broader societal constructs and illustrates how the artist perceives and defines society through both personal and social experiences. They explore the process of interpreting ambiguous emotional interactions in personal and societal contexts, creating new works that reflect their engagement with these complex dynamics.

Chung examines probing performative conditions that invite subordination to and deviation from societal structures within urban relics. Through diverse artistic mediums—ranging from sculpture, installation, sound, text, and photography—she merges personal and social elements of complacency toward power structures and the desire to deviate from them, inhabiting a space between hope and lethargy. With an exaggerated minimalist approach, she adopts a seemingly paradoxical strategy that reflects nuanced obedience and coercion.
White Lie depicts a half-open rolling door resembling a guillotine. The title refers to the seemingly harmless lies people tell to maintain relationships and avoid minor conflicts. These white lies are commonplace, often justified as well-intentioned gestures. She connects domestic, everyday, and violent elements, raising complex questions about both security and protection while simultaneously showcasing violence and brutality: “Do I dare to step through the narrow gap under the guillotine’s blade?”
Accompanying White Lie, Everything is Personal to Me consists of head restraints from crashed cars, stripped of their outer casing and exposed to omnivorous worms. Despite the vehicle’s severe damage, the restraints remain intact, while their identifying marks vanish. As the foam is digested by mealworms, their traces emphasize the form’s vulnerability. This process evokes both a shudder of excitement and disgust, as one imagines the creatures consuming the headrests where a stranger’s most fragile body part once rested in a moment of a potentially deadly collison.

Kim looks into the affinities of contradictory human desires through the range of mediums including staging, camera, and wall installations. Kim’s visual practice is particularly interested in the workings and makings of a stage, most recently allowing further exploration into aestheticized victimhood.

The photographic series “Marquee” captures the monotony of adolescence, using an empty theater marquee in the artist’s living room to project pornographic images. Meanwhile, derived from the word for arched entrances in ancient Roman architecture, “Vomitoria (passageways),” emerging from video or photographic roots, reveals a unique materiality by reflecting leather’s texture through the transparency of a glass paperweight. “Box Elizabethan” is a series of structures resembling a box or a partition, constructed using the repeated form of cigarette carton dust flaps. This assemblage is then covered with unborn calf hide in wet blue (moist chrome-tanned). Kim has found a visual similarity between paper templates of a cigarette box and the historic diagram of the Elizabethan theaters, as well as a resemblance between the several aspect ratios of cinema thus far, and those of the carton assembly. In the process of exploring unfamiliar subjects, and most recently, transforming them into sculptural forms, he embraces overlapping and transforming elements, hence positions himself as both an internal participant and external voyeur.

Both artists delve into internalising emotions of awe and disappointment, transforming them into aesthetic productions. Awe and disappointment—and the discomfort one feels—may be proportional to its aesthetic beauty. When the focus of a piece is purely on its aesthetic elements, addressing social issues often falls by the wayside. Or perhaps the artists revel in the sense of danger that results from adding both of these elements in equal parts and merely watching what comes from it.

Jiyoon Chung (b. 1990, Seoul, South Korea) lives and works in Frankfurt am Main and Seoul. Chung earned her BFA from Chung Ang University and will receive her degree from Hochschule für Bildende Künste — Städelschule in 2024. Selected solo exhibitions include Feel at Home, Temple, Offenbach am Main (upcoming); White Lies, N/A Gallery, Seoul; Condition Reserved, Kornhäuschen, Aschaffenburg. Recent group shows include Currents 11, Marres House for Contemporary Culture, Maastricht (2024); Rocking Meadows, Wiesen Kunstverein (2023); and Abyss, Hall1, Seoul (2022).

Muyeong Kim (b. 1995, Busan, South Korea) is based in Seoul. He received his BFA from Korea National University of Arts in 2020 and attended Städelschule, Frankfurt. Selected solo exhibitions include Servant School, No.9 Cork Street Frieze, London (upcoming); Servant School, Amado Art Space, Seoul (2024); and House on Glabella, Museumhead, Seoul (2021). Recent group shows include Dream Screen: Art Spectrum 2024, Leeum Art Museum, Seoul (2024); and Staircase Wit, Shower, Seoul (2023).