Consternation Life Style

Focus Art Fair New York 2023

Chelsea Industrial

New York, US

2023

In order to express the chronic anxiety built inside the body and emotions of me who was born and survived in the city, I produced semi-abstract installations and paintings referring to the huge buildings and structures in the city until 2019.

After that,I was also unable to escape the pandemic that hit the world in 2020, and the only thing I could do during the more than a year-long lockdonw was the indulgence of online space.

My experience of incompetently observing the artificial space and characters that flash in-depth on the single-layer screens of OTT(Over-the-top media)services, social media and advertising footage led me to use the various "persons" and "products" that existed in them as a source of expanded inspiration in the "architecture" that was used as the main material of art work before the pandemic.

In this process, the structures that I has used as visual resources, transforming from the original concrete and realistic appearance into geometry that is not easily found in daily routine, embodying me more sharply advanced psychological state during the pandemic.

The bas-relief, which constitutes the background, is an installation that embodies the visual inspiration of urban space that I have been working on before, and acts as a device to connect the above-mentioned imagery to exhibition space.

My exploration of everyday space and incorporating this geometry into the images of people and objects I collected ends with an autobiographical record of beings in a society that flares away in 2023, after visualizing the personal insecurities that dominated my life.

-Artist Joonhong Min

People in artist Joonhong Min’s bas-relieves have various architectural facades as their heads are constructed in different ways. The facades are dramatically distorted and fragmented with multiple vanishing points, while their bodies have a stable vanishing point. Since a prerequisite of the vanishing point is the existence of the beholder, numerous vanishing points seem to portray today’s problematic condition; images of one object are (voluntarily or involuntarily) identified differently by diverse media’s specific points of view, and, eventually, they are exhibited on flat screens.

However, the vanishing point shifts and disappears as the spectator moves. What if perspectival images, constantly transformed by the position of observers were installed with Min’s work and initiated spatial dialog? The contours of architectural images are distorted and cropped in order to create a perfect geometry at specific locations. Architectural references are retranslated and reconstructed with diverse vanishing points to provoke different spatial experiences.

-Architect Seungbum Ma