Dawn Breaks, a project by Jewyo Rhii (b. 1971, Seoul/New York) with Jihyun Jung (b. 1986, Seoul), consists of multiple installations as well as parade performances, occupies both inside and outside spaces around the Gwangju Biennale building. Inside is a place for various images and objects that form parade floats. Rhii’s devices Lecture Machine and Story Bus function as story producers when people hang images and other items onto them. Jung’s objects – including Night Walker, Fallen After Flight, Elephant and Show Case, Where Concrete Stones Count, and A Melody – carry narratives within their movements, through making sounds and blinking lights and through their composition. All are regularly paraded through the park behind the Biennale building and plaza, a gathering space for young and old alike every weekend.
Outside and behind the building Ball and Dance drops ping pong balls from the first floor down the cascading staircases and ramps. The balls bounce off of a giant table and jump down to the whole park, shifting the air and replacing the mundane silence with a moment of color and sound. The giant table becomes a performance stage at other times too, when Rhii and Jung’s floats go out for parade.
In her practice, Rhii creates conflicted works in moments of decision-making. She renders materials, from household items to industrial waste, into something considerably foreign through their shapes and placement, and forms structures that allow the audience to imagine and personalize the life of the work. Jung shares a similar sensibility with materials, and brings out narratives often woven into the rawness and roughness of industrial materials that form a crucial part of our understanding of urban reality. To encounter and engage with Rhii and Jung’s work is to be simultaneously let in and pushed out of an intimate space that the artists have collaged together from their imaginary and lived experiences. MW
self-presentation:
Dear Jihyun, February 2015
Thank you for helping me fix the Lecture Machine. The improvement helped shorten the duration of my lecture. When I had to give a lecture to the audience at my solo show, I could not find words delicate enough to describe the artwork. I made the Lecture Machine and dragged it to my artist talk to mend this problem – syncopation.
When I found your Night Walker writing in the night sky, I immediately thought of my Typewriters typing on the wall. I came to understand why you were looking at my Lecture Machine with such a piercing look. What if your imaginary machines appeared in front of my primitive, fat machine?
I can’t help but think of telling the unspoken stories physically with the machines. Could you possibly make a device that could generate stories next to my Lecture Machine?
