Exhibit makes room for new relationship to space

A pair of shoes hanging by their shoelaces on a telephone line catch your eye. For the past five years you have seen it but never paid much attention to it. One day the shoes are gone. The same telephone line is still there but suddenly the entire place feels unfamiliar. Feeling lost and displaced, you continue to your destination.

Space is always changing in this way. The candy store that used to be across the street from the department store is no longer there. Instead, it has become a convenience store. A couple of years later it changes to something else.

A new exhibit by Interalia Art Company, entitled “Unfamiliar Time, Familiar Space,” examines our relationship to space with a collection of more than 100 works by 11 artists.

“This is a story about space,” said exhibition curator Kim Mi Ryoung. “There are specific things that we don’t realize because of our busy lives. With new things and places being created every day, we don’t have the time to stop and think about why certain things exist and before you know it, they are gone.”

The pieces in the exhibition, which continues through Oct. 21, range from sculptures made of stainless steel, grout and wood to digital art, like photography, C-prints - full-color photographic prints made using chromogenic materials - and video displayed on digital LED monitors.

Through the exhibition, Kim is hoping to show how space impacts people’s lives. She hopes people will see places from a different perspective after they see the exhibition, by acknowledging the current time period or interpreting the flow of time, according to the exhibition catalogue.

Yoo Hyun-mi’s “Globe” (2007), top, and Lee Min-ho’s “Portable Landscape IV” (2010), above, are part of the “Unfamiliar Time, Familiar Space” exhibition. Provided by Interalia Art Space

The artists she selected reflect this aim.

Yoo Hyun-mi’s interpretation of space is shown through the piece “The Man Who Became a Picture.” The piece is a photograph but looks like an oil painting.

To create it, Yoo painted an ordinary room white and covered the sofa in beige using various colors of paint.

The photograph is displayed alongside a video showing the artist painting the room. Although in the beginning the room looked like a mess, when everything was completed, the ordinary room was transformed into a personal space. By painting the entire room, Yoo created something else, a different space.

Lee Min-Ho is famous for his portable landscape series. Lee’s trademark is a briefcase - it appears in many of his works. He believes that in a world where industrialization is taking over, nature should not be forgotten.

In his piece “Portable Landscape III,” the briefcase contains two different spaces: the modern city and nature. The top of the briefcase holds a photo of industrialized buildings and the bottom has green grass. Lee’s message is that space is a mixture of nature and the modern industrialized city.

“There is so much space in various places that we take for granted,” Kim said. “I want people to find their own space in their lives after visiting the exhibition.”

*The exhibition runs through Oct. 21 at Interalia Art Space, which is adjacent to the Grand InterContinental Seoul in the southern part of the city. Hours are Monday to Friday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and Saturday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call (02) 3479-0114 or visit www.interalia.co.kr.

By Junghee Lee Contributing writer [estyle@joongang.co.kr]