Place, Site, Space

Foreword

A residency is always a nomadic place. One briefly learns a new landscape, meets new people, interprets and records the place and space through one’s work, and then leaves. The space of an artists’ village is not only a space that generates actual work; it is also a space that generates creative consciousness—a warehouse of latent strategies. Moreover, a residency space makes new artistic connections possible. Depending on the place and space one occupies, the work becomes newly connected and expanded. For the artist, the creative space is the only place that enables an extraordinary immersion or allows the exercise of extrasensory capacities.

White Block Cheonan Artists’ Village, which has built upon its origins in the Heyri Art Village, has established itself as a place that, drawing on the layered field experience and records of artists accumulated over the years, endows artistic creation with more intimate and delicate meanings. In this way, it continually strives to provide a high-quality environment that triggers artists’ “spatial yearning,” allowing them to devote themselves solely to their original creative capacities. The conversations filled with singularity that are shared with the artists about their work lead again into exhibitions, and these exhibitions, like exits guiding the way to the artists’ other works, appear as the results of an artistic space that does not refuse transformation and metamorphosis—thus elevating the placeness of the artists’ village. In this manner, the creative space transcends the private and experimental space of the individual artist to become a space of discourse that extrasensorily re-presents social issues. It is also a space of involuntary fission in which cracks are made in the solid walls and boundaries of the center, and explosive sensations chain into expansion. Artistic fission, after all, always expands and becomes possible in that space of singularity.

According to the poststructuralist Deleuze, voluntary capacity is “the capacity to extract from things only what we have put into them”; what is discovered then is only what one intended to discover, and since it is already known, there is nothing new in it. In contrast, involuntary capacity is the extrasensory capacity possessed by one who, like a person who can neither see nor perceive nor remember anything, takes a casually thrown sign as the sole clue and throws one’s whole body into deciphering it—the capacity of the spy, the madman, the lover consumed by jealousy. This exhibition seeks to present the results from the space of potentiality / the residency that always makes this involuntary thought possible.